The Grand Gallery
Francis Fowke (1823 to 1865) · 1861 to 1866, restored 2011
Step out of the vaulted entrance hall and up the stairs and you arrive in one of the most beautiful rooms in Scotland. The Grand Gallery is a vast hall of white painted cast iron and glass, with three tiers of slender columns and balconies rising to a roof that lets daylight pour in. It was designed by Captain Francis Fowke, the army engineer who also designed the Royal Albert Hall in London, and it opened in 1866 as the centrepiece of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art. Victorians thought of it as a birdcage or a crystal palace, and the comparison still fits. Objects from every corner of the collection are gathered here in a display called the Window on the World, which climbs the full height of the east wall.
Look up and around. The Window on the World holds more than eight hundred objects, from a Buddhist shrine and a lighthouse lens to sculptures, clocks and racing cars, arranged so that they can be seen from the balconies on each floor. The hall was conceived as an open, light filled space where science, industry and the arts could be seen together, and the restoration completed in 2011 returned it to that idea after decades in which the ironwork had been painted dark and the floor cluttered. The original glazed roof survives, and so do the ornate cast iron balustrades. The Millennium Clock stands at one end, and the mechanical whale bones and totem pole draw the eye upward.
The gallery matters because it is the museum. Everything else radiates from it: the Scottish galleries in the newer building to the west, the natural world and world cultures galleries to the sides, and the science and technology floors above. Fowke did not live to see it finished; he died in 1865, a year before the opening. One memorable detail is the floor. The old museum once had ponds here with live fish, and older Edinburgh residents still remember leaning over the railings to look at them.
Did You Know? Prince Albert laid the foundation stone of the building in 1861, one of his last public duties before his death that same year.
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