Construction work starts on Dunard Centre, Edinburgh's first purpose-built new concert hall for 100 years
First Minister John Swinney today took part in a groundbreaking ceremony to mark the start of construction of Edinburgh’s first purpose-built concert hall in 100 years.
The Dunard Centre, behind the RBS building in St Andrew Square, will be a new home for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as well as a cultural hub for all kinds of musical performance and a key venue for the Edinburgh International Festival. But it will also be a public building, open all day every day.
The ceremony began with singer-songwriter Dougie MacLean singing "Caledonia" with pupils from Broughton Primary School.
And after speeches, Mr Swinney was joined by the children, Lord Provost Robert Aldridge and Scotland Office minister Kirsty McNeill to dig the first sods.
Mr Swinney said: "I fully expect this centre to have a lasting and transformative effect on Scotland, our cultural expression and the strength of that cultural expression that we share with the world.
"At this moment in time there can frankly for me be no better investment of our time and our resources than in enabling cultural expression in a world that needs more excuses for people to come together to understand and appreciate culture from different backgrounds and experiences so that we can find common ground in a world that is so incredibly and increasingly fractured.
“That can happen here on this site when we open up a part of the city as a venue that brings together people from around the world."
The £162 million project is being funded by £25m from the City Region Deal - £10m each from the Scottish and UK governments and £5m from the city council - along with £100m raised by Impact Scotland, the charity behind the project. And in October, the Scottish Government announced a further £20m, which will be matched pound-for-pound by philanthropist and former concert pianist Dr Carol Colburn Grigor.
Jo Buckley, chief executive of the Dunard Centre said the occasion had been a long-time coming.
She said: "It is hard to build a concert hall, it is even harder to do so in a constrained city-centre spot in the middle of a World Heritage Site at a time of global unrest and economic challenge, but important things are never easy.
"And what we are building here is not just a concert hall, it is a commitment to people and to community and to the transformational power of culture."
The 1,000-seater venue has been designed by David Chipperfield Architects and will be the first venue in the UK to have acoustics by highly-acclaimed Japanese firm Nagata.
The so-called “hall for all” will host all genres of music, from orchestral and choral, to jazz, indie, pop and folk, alongside spoken word, comedy and corporate events. There will also be 21st-century facilities for rehearsal and recording as well as bars and an indoor/outdoor café.
The venue will be open to the public all day, every day. Dunard Centre chief executive Jo Buckley said: "I would talk about it as a community centre with a concert hall at its heart."
And she explained how, once the concert hall is built, the site currently hidden from public view would become a new public space with three access points - from St Andrew Square, the St James Quarter and Register Lane.
She said "This is going to be a new thoroughfare in the centre of the city. You'll cut through from the St James Quarter to Waverley and you want to pass by and there's always something going on - maybe a folk duo playing the foyer or a yoga class in one of the multi-purpose rooms - a busy building teeming with life that happens to have a concert hall at the middle of it - that's the vision."
People will be able to walk around the full perimeter of the building and there will be a small public precinct. "We'll probably have some pop-up food vans, maybe some outdoor performances in summer. We want to animate the space as much as possible.
"On the one hand, it is a quiet corner of the city, which is quite nice - off the bustle of Princes Street you can come here for a bit of quiet and calm - but I also think once people know we're here it will no longer feel quite so secret and squirrelled away."
The concert hall will have two public entrances. "Coming from Register Lane, you'll arrive at our grand stairwell; and from the St James, you'll come straight to the box office and a level access entrance, so if you need to be dropped off or you have access needs that's where you'll come. The artists' entrance will be off St Andrew Square.
It is due to take four years to build the concert hall. Ms Buckley said she was “as confident as I can be” that it would be ready to open in 2029.
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