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Scotland possesses many examples from its architectural heritage of buildings that have fallen into disuse and decay. They are in our towns and cities, and are scattered all over the countryside. They range from country mansions to inner city breweries. Social and industrial change has left us with a legacy of buildings whose prospects of survival can be regarded, depending on one’s point of view, either as a headache or a challenge.
When the Edinburgh to Carlisle railway line, better known as the “Waverley Route”, was closed as part of the Beeching cuts in 1969, a microcosm of Scotland’s nineteenth century railway heritage was transformed from being an every day part of our transport system to a relic of our history. And along with the hundred miles of track were all the viaducts, maintenance sheds, signal boxes, halts and stations. All, overnight, became redundant.
By the early 1980’s much had disappeared. Most of the track bed remained, although some, in the towns, had been absorbed into roads and car parks. Many of the tunnels and bridges had collapsed or been dismantled, the town stations at Hawick, Galashiels, and Newton St. Boswells were only memories.
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The survivor from all this wreckage, indeed the sole remaining building of significance from any of the various parts of the old Borders railway system, was the station house at Melrose. Its survival was not the result of any deliberate policy, it was just that no one had got around to finding a reason to knock it down. Left to the elements, and a little gentle vandalism, the once fine building fell rapidly into ruin. The pigeons that used to roost in the Abbey transferred their living quarters to the station (they have now gone back!), and the future looked bleak. The neglect of the building, and of its road up from the Market Square, became a running sore with the people of Meirose.
But what does one do with a building like this? It was not even as though Meirose Station was an ordinary country station, the sort one would expect of a market town boasting a population of little more than fifteen hundred. The station house at Meirose, designed by the great Scots railway engineer John Miller in 1846, and opened along with the first (Edinburgh to Hawick) stretch of the Waverley Route in 1849, was large and grand.
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Meirose was at the heart of a widely distributed community of wealthy landowners; and inspired by the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, the town had already become a focal point for the early developments in toursim. The station buildings were designed to reflect the tourist role and the style and habits of the passengers which its promoters sought to attract. The station house was designed to look like a country mansion, in the then fashionable Jacobean style, complete with Flemish gables, stone mullioned and transomed windows, shafted chimneys, ornamental finials and carved balconies. To protect its passengers from the weather the station platforms were covered with immense iron and timber canopies, of which that attached to the station house remains. The building was sited to overlook the town, its river and its medieval Abbey, and was described at its opening as “the handsomest provincial station in Scotland”
(Border Advertiser, 9th February 1849).
It was the outstanding architectural quality and importance of the building which led, early in 1981, to its being listed (category A) by the Secretary of State. This represented an acknowledgement that Meirose
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A Terminal State
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