On Wednesday 20th November at 6pm, please join us for a talk by Curator Alice Strang on the unique heritage building of Fountainbridge Library.
This talk is part of Edinburgh Printmaker's Edinburgh900 project 900 Stories in Print, aimed at collecting and publishing 900 industrial stories, engaging with communities in Fountainbridge and the west of Edinburgh.
All welcome, free admission but booking encouraged as spaces are limited. The talk will take place in the Fountainbridge Library on 137 Dundee Street, EH11 1BG.
A small reception will follow the talk.
This event is now fully booked - we might be able to accept some walk ins depending on availability.
The Publisher, the Architect and the Sculptor: The Building of Fountainbridge Library, Edinburgh
Fountainbridge Library is an icon of modern Scottish architecture and opened in 1940. Funded by the publisher Thomas Nelson Jnr, designed by the architect John A. W. Grant, and with friezes on its façade by the sculptor Charles d’Orville Pilkington Jackson, Fountainbridge Library was a purpose-built, state-of-the-art library and community hall which embodied the most far-sighted concerns of architects, librarians and social policy makers of the inter-war period. External and internal photographs and press coverage recording the progress of this major civic commission show the planning, construction and successful completion of a library which opened during the blackout, and which still serves the community today.
Alice Strang
Alice Strang is an independent Curator and Art Historian and a Senior Specialist in Modern and Contemporary Art at Lyon & Turnbull auctioneers. Whilst a Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, she curated many exhibitions and wrote or edited many publications about Modern Scottish and Modern British Art including the Scottish Colourist series of F. C. B. Cadell, J. D. Fergusson and S. J. Peploe retrospectives and A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950. It was whilst researching the latter that she became aware of the significance of Fountainbridge Library, her own local library. She is a Saltire Society Outstanding Woman of Scotland and a BBC Expert Woman.
