A MATTER OF NATIONAL TRUST
contractor KEIR could no longer do a job that was a restoration job, so the next thing we had to face was getting involved at every level, with dealing with the insurance, the fire service, the investigation. There were all the contractual legalistic issues that have to be dealt with to stop a contract that has still got a year to go. We had to work solidly alongside what was the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, painstakingly looking at the archaeological salvaging of what was in the building. The fire service wanted to do a forensic examination of the building to find out how the fire started and they never actually did find the root cause, but it took them three years to painstakingly sift through the building. Every time we moved into a corridor or into a studio, you first of all had to send the engineers in and the contractors in to say, is this safe? That was finished in June 2021. More or less every working moment was to do with making sure that we could keep the building safe and constantly try and put more strength back into it, while the school was running a business case for a feasibility study to look at what was the right thing to do on the site: Is it to keep the building? Is it to restore it? Luckily that was the end decision, so doing that painstaking work was correct because if the conclusion at the end had been to demolish it, then that would have been quite a lot of wasted effort in the way that it was gone about. At the moment the school is looking to start the process of appointing a team to look at the restoration again. That will be a long haul job, which is why in the summer of last year, I figured that it was the right time to leave the project – Sarah having left already - because it will be another length of time before the restoration building MACMAG 48
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