Winter 2025

Princes Street Gardens Open Consultation
Plans presented to the AGM of Essential Edinburgh

Our vision for a people-centred Princes Street was presented to the AGM of Essential Edinburgh on 11^th November, and was referred to both directly and indirectly by councillors at a meeting of the Edinburgh City Council Planning Committee. Perhaps partially as a result, councillors voted to reject the Council’s own document and convene a workshop to consider a more radical approach, to which we are hoping to be invited. Councillor David Key, referring directly to our ideas said "I also like Richard Murphy’s vision, those six pages of A4 get me more excited than 122 pages of your strategy”. Donald Turvill writing in The Herald under the headline Why was plan for Edinburgh Princes Street rejected? gave our drawings and ideas great prominence. You can read our full report here.

D J Alexander Office Extension
Planning application lodged 

Portal and Sculpture  
Sculptures installed at Portal, Trinity College Dublin's Innovation Hub

Laidlaw Digital Library  
Planning permission achieved 

Custom House, Leith  
Planning and listed building application documents almost completed

RHSPT High School
Tents erected to allow roof repairs

An updated planning permission has been achieved and tents have been erected over the east and west rooms to allow roof repairs to take place underneath. Meanwhile the site for the new garden has been cleared.

The award-winning Creative design agency Studio LR have also recently been appointed by the Royal High School Preservation Trust for signage and wayfinding. Studio LR stated "This project is a brilliant opportunity to apply our heritage, culture, digital, brand and wayfinding expertise to something culturally significant."

Images show top, the tent from afar on a rainy day and below, inside the tent. 

Papple Steading, Haddington
Current phase nearing completion

Work on this phase of Papple Steading has now been all but completed with just the library still under construction. We have produced a new movie of the final development with all phases completed here.  In addition, a new video The Restoration of Papple Steading, featuring the owner George Mackintosh and Richard discussing the project can be viewed here and a short slideshow film Papple A History can also be viewed here. 
Images show the new staircase to a wine tasting doocot in the recently designated Demarco Gallery.

We have received an exciting enquiry about building a house on the subtropical South Atlantic island of St Helena. More details to follow in the next newsletter...

Looking through our archive we decided to show two major London projects which were never constructed but nonetheless, we thought would be of interest to our readers. The first was a sketch design for an alternative vision for the Google headquarters stretching over the railway tracks at Kings Cross.

The second project was a development of the Sir John Cass Foundation (now renamed The Portal Trust) headquarters building in Jewry Street in the City of London. You can read more about both designs on their respective webpages.

Richard is giving a talk Reinterpreting Venice: the Architecture of Carlo Scarpa at the joint invitation of the Venice in Peril Fund and the 20^th Century Society. The details are:  70, Cowcross Street, London; Tuesday 27^th January at 6.30pm . Tickets can be booked here. If you can't make it in person, there's an online version of the event too.

Richard gave two lectures to students at University College Dublin students in October and included quite a few of our Irish projects including this housing project in Westport finished 20 years ago. He told them the story of when he was showing about 30 people around as part of the Westport festival when unexpectedly a man who turned out to be an architect and owned the upper maisonette at the end of the row invited the group into his apartment but everyone had to creep around in their socks as his wife had just had a new born baby which was asleep. The apartment had a half level arrangement between kitchen and living room and Richard told the students a joke about as he left he thanked the architect profusely who replied “no problem…. thanks for the section!” The joke was that only one architect would ever thank another architect for a section! Anyhow the students enjoyed the story and then one of them put their hand up and said “I was that baby. That’s our house and I’m 20 years old!”

Our proposal for the Princes Street Gardens Open Consultation run recently by the City Council, have featured in The Herald and Edinburgh Evening News several times and the Scotsman covered the forthcoming V&A Dundee exhibition of Maggie's Centres.

GENERATION 
Exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy 
24 January – 8 March 2026

This exhibition which Richard has organised features younger architects’ practices whose principal(s) have at some stage worked in our practice.  The exhibition opens to the public on 24^th January 2026 through to 8^th March, 10.00am – 5.00pm daily and 12.00pm to 5.00pm Sundays. It includes work from 14 practices: Craig Amy; Tina Bergman; Andrew Brown; Sonia Browse; the late Oliver Chapman represented by Martin Lambie who is now a director there;  Kris Grant; Peter Guthrie; Professor Ed Hollis; Klas Hyllen; Gareth Jones with Daryl Robbins and Brian Tobin; Matt Loader; Jordi Sanahuja; Stewart Stevenson and Will Tunnell.
 
Image shown is The Hat House by Tina Bergman.

MAGGIE'S: Architecture that Cares 
Exhibition at V&A Dundee 
06 March  – 01 November 2026

We are honoured to be featuring in a major new exhibition about the Maggie's Centres at the V&A Dundee from 6th March to November 1st 2026. There are now about 30 centres in the country and beyond, but we have the distinction of designing the first one, at the Western General Hospital, completed in 1996, and later extended twice in 2001 and 2014, followed by our design for a garden pavilion completed in 2022.

THE BREAKFAST MISSION
Studio offices available

The Breakfast Mission is a historic building, (formerly a mission hall), located in the centre of the Old Town. We currently have an exciting opportunity for new tenants to join us at in the building. Current tenants include ourselves, a foreign consulate office, another architects' practice and engineers. Two spaces are available, a larger self-contained private office measuring 65sq.m and the smaller mezzanine studio office, 29 sq. m.  Both have easy access to meeting rooms, kitchens and bicycle storage areas and are easily customisable. If you'd like more information or wish to view either space, please contact Pauline (0131 220 6125)  for further details. Image shows a previous tenants customisation of the larger available office.

We wish our friends, colleagues and readers of these newsletters a very
Happy Christmas. 

We discontinued sending out Christmas cards some years ago.  Instead we send a digital card and give a donation to Maggie's Centre instead.  If you want to do the same you can do it here. 

Image shows our most recent work at the Maggie's Centre, Edinburgh, a Garden Room in 2022 transformed into a star. 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Maggie's Centres.