Cast an eye over a list of Scotland’s A-listed buildings and you won’t be surprised to see the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Glasgow School of Art, the Scott Monument and Eilean Donan all featuring. But you might be very surprised indeed to find a football stand in that hallowed register of architectural gems, particularly one associated with a club which has rarely – make that never – troubled the game’s top flight.
Enter Netherdale, home to Gala Fairydean Rovers FC of the Lowland League and a place which draws not only football fans but students of Modernist and Brutalist architecture. Why? Because Historic Scotland, custodians of the nation’s built environment, deems the Galashiels club’s 50 year old stand “a building of outstanding architectural and national importance” and “a significant work of late modernist architecture in Scotland”.
Most of the tens of thousands of people who spend their Saturdays shivering at football matches do so seated in soulless structures which resemble over-sized bus shelters. Fans of Gala Fairydean Rovers FC watch their team in a 750-capacity edifice with “a highly distinctive design” comprising “four V-sectioned vertical fins supporting a wedge-shaped stand and a cantilevered canopy.” Not for nothing is it known as the Borders San Siro, a not entirely jokey reference to the iconic home ground of Milan’s world-famous pair, Internazionale and AC Milan, itself an architectural masterpiece.
Where the San Siro had Italian architect Armando Ronca, Netherdale had Peter Womersley. Deflected from a Cambridge University law degree by the outbreak of the Second World War, he ended up studying architecture, his first love. Graduating in the early 1950s from the Architectural Association, the UK’s oldest independent school of architecture, he spent a few years travelling in Europe before executing his first commission, Farnley Hey near Huddersfield, a private residence for his brother.
Fate then brought him to the Scottish Borders to live and it was here that he built some of his most famous works. As well as Gala Fairydean Rovers’ ground, completed in 1963 and built in collaboration with design engineer Ove Arup of Sydney Opera House fame, he built a home for himself (The Rig, near Melrose) and one for celebrated textile designer Bernat Klein (High Sunderland, near Selkirk). Other projects include a GP practice in Kelso, Roxburgh County Buildings in Newtown St Boswell (now the home of Scottish Borders Council) and Church Square, a Modernist block of flats in Galashiels.
Further afield Womersley added a building to the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, the Nuffield Transplantation Surgery Unit (which is still in use), the Monklands Leisure Centre in Coatbridge, and an extraordinary-looking boiler house at Melrose District Asylum. Sadly his design for an extension to Edinburgh College of Art was rejected.
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