Two castles and a prison on RIAS best buildings list

Eleven buildings have been named as winners of the annual Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) awards. The buildings include two restored castles, a road bridge, a whisky distillery and Scotland's newest prison and young offender institution.The 11 winners will now become the "longlist" for the RIAS Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland award.The shortlist will be announced in July ahead of the winner being revealed in November.
Aldourie Castle, Loch Ness, by Ptolemy Dean Architects
The Category A-listed Aldourie Castle has been conserved and all the surrounding estate buildings restored as well as new ones added, including farm buildings, an energy centre, a boathouse and a pedestrian bridge. The judges admired how the project reconnected the disparate buildings to their romantic setting.
Caoghan na Creige, Isle of Harris, by Izat Arundell
The stone-clad building blends into the rugged Hebridean landscape, giving the home the appearance of a modern-day blackhouse. The judges described the project as a testament to what can be achieved through patience, skill and a profound respect for place.
Ellengowan Regeneration, Dundee, by Collective Architecture
Ellengowan Regeneration replaces 124 deteriorating flats with 130 affordable homes.It is a mix of housing including accessible flats, cottage flats, family terraced houses and a corner shop. The judges praised the project's inclusive approach which balances modern needs with heritage preservation.
Fairburn Tower, Muir of Ord, Highland by Simpson & Brown Architects
Built in the 16th Century and added to in the 17th, this remote Category A listed structure had fallen into a ruinous state. The judges described Fairburn Tower as an exemplar project, where restoration and reconstruction are beautifully accomplished, while also delivering characterful holiday accommodation.
Gairnshiel Jubilee Bridge, Gairnshiel, Aberdeenshire by Moxon Architects
The Gairnshiel Jubilee Bridge provides a new route over the River Gairn, eliminating the lengthy detours and delays caused by frequent structural damage to the 18th Century crossing as it was no longer suitable for modern-day traffic. The judges described the project as a fine example of how to integrate a modern vehicular bridge into a sensitive landscape.
HM Prison and Young Offender Institution Stirling by Holmes Miller Architects
The building is billed as a "fundamental rethinking of custodial environments in Scotland".It supports women in custody through spaces that are intended to promote dignity, equality and meaningful rehabilitation.The judges praised it as a model of how public buildings can be both operationally robust and deeply humane.
Kinloch Lodge, Lairg, by GRAS
Kinloch Lodge is a "light-touch" conservation project which aims to maintain the charming and idiosyncratic nature of the original mid-19th Century lodge and its outbuildings.RIAS said each has been lovingly, painstakingly and respectfully restored exactly as they were found, using traditional methods and materials.The judges said the architects' involvement is refreshingly understated and thoroughly respectful of the original buildings.
The Nucleus Building, University of Edinburgh, by Sheppard Robson
The building is described by RIAS as a new heart for the University of Edinburgh which unites teaching, learning and social spaces. The judges described the Nucleus Building as a deftly executed piece of civic architecture.
Riverside Primary School, Perth, by Architype
Riverside Primary School is the first Passivhaus-certified school in Scotland.The judges described it as an exemplary project, which will serve as an inspiring model for the design of schools in Scotland and across the UK.
Rosebank Distillery, Falkirk, by MLA
The Rosebank Distillery had been considered lost but it has been carefully restored.The jury was impressed by the design team, who navigated complex constraints including contamination, conservation, coal mining risk and listed structures. They said the retention and restoration of the chimney, lockkeeper's cottage and red-brick buildings reflect a commitment to memory and place.
Union Terrace Gardens, Aberdeen, by Stallan-Brand Architecture + Design
RIAS said this transformation of a long-neglected civic space reclaimed Union Terrace Gardens as Aberdeen's green heart. The judges praised the project as a benchmark in public-realm regeneration, demonstrating the power of sensitive, people-centred design to transform a city's sense of place.

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The Guardian

2 hours ago

• The Guardian

She flew hazardous fighter planes for Britain during WW2. She just turned 106

Nancy Miller Stratford sat alone behind the controls of a Spitfire fighter plane, charting an uncertain course through an impenetrable clot of dark clouds. On the horizon, the young pilot could see a promising patch of daylight, 'like the devil waving his hand to come on through'. But just as suddenly as the sky opened up, the clouds closed in again. Her visibility plummeted to zero. She had no idea which way was up and which was down. Far beneath her lay the moody Scottish coastline, where an unplanned landing would be next to impossible. Fortunately, it was life-or-death scenarios like these when Stratford was the sharpest. In that moment, she felt no fear – this was simply a problem that needed to be solved. Despite having no formal instrument training, she relied solely on the control panel in the cockpit, rather than the view outside her window, to muscle the plane through the wall of clouds and land safely at the nearest airport. The year was 1944. Stratford was 25 years old. Last week, Stratford celebrated her 106th birthday at home in California. After eight decades, she and a small group of other female pilots are finally earning more widespread recognition for the critical – and dangerous – roles they played in the second world war. A new book called Spitfires, written by the journalist and author Becky Aikman, chronicles the pilots' vivid wartime stories as the first American women to fly military aircraft. At the time, women like Stratford were banned from serving in combat roles for the US. So they joined the Air Transport Auxiliary instead: a British civilian group that ferried barely tested bombers and fighter planes to airbases, and then returned damaged wrecks for repair. Because the women often had to contend with shoddy equipment and bad weather, the job was hazardous and unpredictable; one in seven transport pilots died in crashes over the course of the war. But the role also came with an unprecedented sense of freedom and global importance for female pilots; Stratford once even delivered a Spitfire to a Polish squadron only a few days before they fought in D-Day. Today, Stratford is the last surviving pilot of the heroic transport group. Her condo in a picturesque retirement community in Carlsbad, a city on the Pacific coast near San Diego, is filled with mementoes from the war and her long flying career: miniature model airplanes (she has flown 103 different types of aircraft), black-and-photo photos of her in uniform, and even a prized leather flying helmet (used as protection against the elements and deafening engine noise in the early days of aviation). And last Thursday, that small condo was packed with dozens of other retirees and staff who had come to wish her happy birthday. At 106, and with such a formidable background, Stratford has become a quasi-celebrity within the retirement community. Friends and family brought her cupcakes and champagne, and a local pet therapy group ushered in a parade of dogs for Stratford to pet. Though she lost her hearing many decades ago from the constant roar of plane engines, visitors wrote down their birthday messages to her on a whiteboard. To mark the occasion, Stratford wore her best pair of dog-themed pyjamas. The fact that the former pilot has lived longer than most people she knew in her early life is something of a mystery, even to her. 'I'm kind of surprised,' she said, before adding: 'But then I am old.' For Stratford, the secret to longevity depends on the day. Sometimes, her answer to that question is 'not drinking too much'. But in a cheekier moment, she told a friend recently: the real key is 'chocolate and vodka tonics'. Stratford and the other female aviators she flew with during the war – a diverse group nicknamed the 'Attagirls' – now have a defined place in history books. But in the 1940s, Stratford wasn't thinking about any broader, lofty ideals about the advancement of women in aviation. 'I just wanted to fly,' she said frankly, reminiscing one sunny afternoon before her birthday. From a comfortable chair in the living room, she had the best view of her model airplanes that sat atop the TV like a crown. 'In other words,' she said, 'it wasn't exactly the thing to do then, so therefore you have to be pretty positive about what you wanted to do.' Stratford was born in Los Angeles in 1919, just after the end of the first world war. At 16 years old, she rode in a plane for the first time as a birthday present. That first flight, she wrote in a self-published memoir in 2010, was fairly boring – until the pilot struggled with the landing. Feeling the plane's sudden steep descent, Stratford let out 'a whoop of joy', while her brother froze in terror next to her. Stratford later chased that feeling as a member of the Air Transport Auxiliary. A few years after her first plane ride, she happened to read about civilian pilot training while she was in college. Her father wasn't happy about it, but he signed a release form for her to take lessons. Later, when Stratford was ready to join the transport unit, her then-fiance forbade her from going. She ended the relationship and went anyway. Though Stratford had a bit more freedom to fly in the UK, female pilots back in the US dealt not only with discrimination, but intentional sabotage that resulted in death. Male pilots would sometimes stuff rags or sugar in the gas tank of a woman's plane to make them crash, or even slash their tires, as Aikman reported in Spitfires. At least one pilot died after someone added sugar to her plane's gas tank. Even after Stratford's time serving in the war, Aikman wrote, 'the aviation industry did not open the gates for her' when she returned home. So she took one of the only jobs she could get: flying crop-dusting planes in Oregon. But eventually, Stratford broke barriers again, becoming the second woman in the United States to earn her commercial helicopter license. She got married and moved with her husband to Alaska, where they ran a helicopter business together, transporting adventurers to high peaks and construction workers to the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Between then and now, Stratford said it was remarkable to see how far women have come in aviation – although the world has been slow to accept their successes. In the US, major commercial airlines didn't start hiring female pilots until the 1970s, and women were banned from flying in combat roles until the early 1990s: roughly 50 years after Stratford played her part in the second world war. 'Women proved that they could do things, and so the men had to let them in,' Stratford said. 'I think women have proved themselves in aviation, and they're flying airlines and everything now.' Still, in 2025, women continue to face major obstacles. While the number of women earning their pilot licenses has increased dramatically in recent years, women make up only about 5% of pilots flying with airlines in the UK and the US. Stratford's advice to female aviators today is simple: 'Keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.' All told, flying has remained one of the most important parts of her life. As she wrote in her memoir: 'I loved all the flying, the freedom, doing what I liked to do. It was wild and woolly at times. I was a lucky person in my career. I smile. I have absolutely no regrets.' A decade later, her thoughts on the subject haven't changed. 'I was glad that I could help out,' she said matter-of-factly. 'I think my mother thought I should get married or something, but I didn't feel that way.'

Telegraph

7 hours ago

• Telegraph

Michael Gove: ‘I stood as the Labour candidate in the school election'

School Days is a regular series by author Danny Danziger in which acclaimed British names and faces share the childhood stories that shaped them. This week, the former Secretary of State for Education talks about being adopted, his love of books, being a pain at school – and making it to Oxford My grandfather had set up a fish merchants' business, which involved going into the harbour at dawn, buying fish from the boats that had just landed, and then filleting, salting and selling them to fishmongers, or the Rosses and Finduses of this world. My dad, Ernest, left school at 15 to go into the family business. My mum, Christine, also left school at 15 and worked in a jewellers' shop in Aberdeen called Jamieson & Carry, and then latterly as a lab assistant at Aberdeen University. She met my dad while ice skating, which they were both passionate about, and they very quickly got married. But they couldn't have children. The person who gave me up for adoption was from Edinburgh, although she was studying in Aberdeen to be a catering demonstration assistant, which is where she became pregnant. I was born in August 1967 and arrived at the Gove home just before Christmas, so I was four months old when I was adopted. My mother said I was covered in eczema and bathed me in an iron bath in front of the fire. Five years later, my sister, Angela, arrived, and she was also adopted. Several months later, my parents discovered she was profoundly deaf, and so she went to the Aberdeen School for the Deaf. At my primary school every day I would walk back home for lunch – or dinner, as they call it in Scotland – mince and tatties, delicious, and I can't imagine any children doing that today. Aged 11, I went to my secondary school, Robert Gordon's College, which was then a fee-paying boys' independent day school. I started in the autumn of 1979, shortly after Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister. Right from the beginning, I was upbraided for being cheeky, which was a consistent theme of my secondary education; most of the times I got into trouble was because of being 'cheeky', 'sarcastic', or 'a pain'. Gordon's was quite trad, teachers in gowns, for instance, not quite a male version of Jean Brodie's school, but that would give you some sense of the vibe. I didn't have a scholarship at the time so my parents paid the full fees, which was fine – until it became an issue when my dad had to sell his business, essentially because of the overall decline of the fishing sector in Aberdeen. Fortunately I got a scholarship for my final two years at school; if I hadn't secured it, my parents would not have been able to continue to pay the fees. Our home wasn't a household full of books; my dad would read the newspapers, but only the sports pages, and Reader's Digest condensed books, and my mum would read Catherine Cookson and that sort of thing. I was the cuckoo in the nest: I was a voracious reader, my head was always in a book. As soon as I got my pocket money, I would go down to the local bookshop. Also, there was a magazine called All About Science that I badgered my parents to get every week. Just a few generations ago, there may have been a slightly antithetical idea to the fact that your son or daughter was attached to book learning; there's a particular phrase in Scotland, ' I knew your father,' i.e. don't get above yourself. But my mum and dad loved the fact that I had this interest in reading, they appreciated that I was bookish and that that was clearly my orientation, and they encouraged me and gave me all the support possible, even though it wasn't their thing. I enjoyed almost every subject at school. The English teacher, Mike Duncan, nurtured and encouraged my love of books and drama, and introduced me not just to the novels we were studying but also made recommendations: 'I think you'd enjoy Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music Of Time,' he said, which was a series of 12 books. I also had two great history teachers, one of whom for some reason that was not immediately obvious was nicknamed Zoot, in reference to the saxophone player in the Muppets. They knew I was interested in political ideas and ideology, and most of all debating, which was my principal school activity, and I joined the Labour Party as a 16-year-old, and canvassed for the Aberdeen North MP, which was then a safe Labour seat, and in the 1983 general election I stood as the Labour candidate in the school election. Everyone had to play rugby in their first two years, and even though I was relatively well built I was just terrible at it. I have terrible hand-eye co-ordination, for one thing, and have never been particularly sporty. In the third year, you were allowed to pick between rugby and hockey, and I opted for hockey because my view was the best athletes would have already chosen rugby, and I became the hockey goalkeeper, being prepared to get hit by the ball, and just take the punishment rather than display any skill. It was the 1980s and the music was great: BA Robertson, the Boomtown Rats, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and the first party where I kissed a girl, to Heaven 17's Temptation. She was called Kate, although she subsequently, and very quickly thereafter, moved on to a much better prospect: taller, better-looking, way better at sport, and all the rest of it. Perhaps I was too distracted by life, but I was not a well-behaved schoolboy. In fact, I wrote a letter the other day to my French teacher, Danny Montgomery, to apologise for being such a pain in the neck, a mixture of back-chat, being a smart alec and asking absurd questions. So, for example, in the middle of a translation exercise: 'Sir, sir?' 'Yes Gove.' (Said wearily.) 'What does ' baise-toi ' mean?' 'I think you know, Gove.' 'No, I don't, sir, can you explain?' It was beyond juvenile, and on a couple of occasions, the tawse was used, which is a piece of leather, split at the end. Hand out, thwack. Very painful. However, when I was 17, I was made a prefect. Perhaps it was the classic ploy which is if you've got someone who is a little bit wayward but you think has potential then make them a prefect, and hopefully whatever it is about them that is contrary will become channelled in the right direction. In fact, I do think I became a straighter arrow. For a long time, I thought I was going to be a doctor, but while I remained fascinated by human psychology and every aspect of medicine, I realised that was not my strongest calling. Mike Duncan said, 'You should think about applying to Oxford to read English – that's your best subject, that's the one you enjoy most.' I still remember my impressions of Oxford when I went up for my interviews. Fairyland! I hadn't been to Oxford before, and immediately thought it would just be amazing to go there. I had applied to two colleges, Corpus Christi and Lady Margaret Hall (LMH). At Corpus I was interviewed by Valentine Cunningham, the professor of English language and literature, who clearly thought I was an idiot. When we sat down, his first question was: 'What is Hamlet about?' 'Well, it's about the prince's indecision following the death of his father.' 'NO! What is it about?' 'The tragic flaw of indecision?' 'NO!! (Now frothing at the mouth) What is it about?' 'Is it about politics in the Danish court?' 'No. It's about Protestantism.' 'Bloody hell,' I thought, 'I don't stand a chance here…' But the conversation at LMH was about Middlemarch and my mini dissertation was about George Eliot. And so we had a conversation about Dorothea and her sister, and what the jewels revealed about Dorothea's vanity, and why she had married the Rev Edward Casaubon, and what a mistake that was. So I was allowed to shine, and on the strength of that I was offered a place at Oxford. But huge credit to Gordon's. If I hadn't gone there I would have gone to a state secondary school, and I doubt anyone at that time would have thought of recommending any student to apply to Oxford. I was and remain very grateful. Michael Gove will be speaking at the Chalke History Festival on June 26. His talk is entitled 'Change Maker: A Life in Politics'. For tickets visit:

Times

2 days ago

• Times

Léon Krier obituary: architect who designed Poundbury

Léon Krier once described himself as 'an architect, because I don't build'. As a minority voice in his profession who deplored the modernism that had dominated postwar architecture, Krier said he had made himself redundant. He assumed that he would remain a 'utopianist' for the rest of his life. Then he met Prince Charles (now the King). By the mid-Eighties the Prince of Wales was the British architecture profession's public enemy No 1 after a speech in 1984 in which he described a proposed extension of the National Gallery as a 'monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend'. Charles and the London-based architectural theorist and academic Krier were destined to meet. They did so at an exhibition in 1986 to present Krier's masterplan to restore a Georgian quarter of London's Spitalfields that was under threat from modern development. Krier's elegant drawings acted like catnip on the royal visitor. 'He [Charles] said, 'Let's talk',' recalled the Luxembourg-born Krier, who wore slightly dandified Edwardian-style outfits topped off by his trademark silk scarves and had the air of a central European intellectual. 'And then he [Charles] said 'Would you like to be my consultant on architecture and particularly on urbanism?' and I said, 'Wow, my God. How could I refuse.' And then we'd meet at strange times and places. Like 3am with some Russian princess in Chelsea.' He remembered feeling touched by the 'desperate, even tragic ring' to Charles's voice when lamenting architecture. Charles had continued to blame architects for ruining postwar Britain, but in 1988 seized his chance to develop his own urban Arcadia on 400 acres of land, near the Dorset town of Dorchester, owned by his Duchy of Cornwall. The development would be planned in rigorous accordance with Krier's 'New Urbanist' principles of human scale. No building could be more than five storeys and would be configured in traditional street patterns. Houses and businesses would exist cheek by jowl. 'Timeless' materials of stone, brick and wood would be used. No one could be more than 15 minutes away from all the amenities they might need and even their place of work. Car use would be minimal. To reduce the urban sprawl he so deplored, he proposed reintroducing terraced housing that had become anathema to the modernists. It was a social experiment to disprove so much of the postwar urban redevelopment that replaced traditional street patterns and market squares with dual carriageways through town and city centres surrounded by residential tower blocks and the zoning of residential and commercial uses that created car-dependent suburban sprawl. 'Modernism is a totalitarian ideology which, like all dogmatism, is based on unprovable assumptions,' Krier said. About a year after starting on the project, Krier presented his masterplan for Poundbury, replete with Italianate piazzas linked by tree-lined streets. The plan was strong on details, from elaborate lampposts to wrought-iron fencing. Alarmed staff at the Duchy of Cornwall warned Charles that Krier's plans would be far too expensive. Krier countered that the rise in values would justify the cost in the long run. According to Clive Aslet's recent book King Charles III: 40 years of Architecture, the duchy appointed the surveyors Drivers Jonas to 'rein Krier in'. Krier had walked away from many other projects for less. 'He was gentle but uncompromising in everything he did, preferring to withdraw than be drawn into political skirmishes, inhuman bureaucracy or pollute his designs,' said his wife Irene. Matters came to a head at the prince's home, Highgrove, in Gloucestershire, when Krier, Christopher Jonas and Charles looked at the plans laid out on the large dining table. Jonas said: 'Sir, we will of course take on board what Mr Krier says.' The prince banged his fist on the table and replied: 'Christopher, you are not going to take on board what Leo says, you are going to do what he tells you.'Krier recalled: 'From then on it was open war. He called me from everywhere saying, 'You can't do this.' And I'd say, 'You have to do it. The prince wants it and he is The Boss.'' In June 1989 a marquee was erected at Poundbury Farm and the public were invited to view Krier's masterplan. It was an exercise in community architecture run by Charles's friend, the architect John Thompson. Sometimes the prince himself would arrive by helicopter and drop in on meetings unannounced. The marquee was packed and local people were mostly won round, although many thought that the buildings were too classical. An unabashed classicist by personal taste, Krier revised his plans with vernacular architecture more in keeping with the surrounding area. Planning permission for phase one was achieved in 1991. Britain was in the midst of a property crash, which many smugly predicted would scupper Poundbury — especially as Krier had ignored the advice of property experts and sited affordable housing alongside the more expensive private properties. As the buildings started to rise up in 1993, the profession went to war on Poundbury. It was sneeringly described as a 'Toy Town' pastiche of neoclassicism with its portentous porticos and public squares. A critic in this newspaper once said: 'If Hallmark were to film a Christmas movie in Britain, Poundbury would be an ideal setting.' Yet over the years the community has continued to thrive. There are now some 4,500 people living there, with 185 businesses sustaining 2,300 jobs. Poundbury has been visited by architects, planners and developers from all over the world. The estate agent Savills reported that Poundbury homes are on average worth 25 per cent more than other homes on the local market. Krier himself lived for many years in a townhouse in Belsize Park, north London, full of 19th-century Biedermeier furniture. To his critics in the profession Krier said: 'Look at where architects live. They live in old traditional houses just as I do. Why do they impose these inhuman structures on others?' For much of Krier's professional life this view was countercultural, but when the tide turned he came to be known as the 'godfather of New Urbanism'. Léon Ernest Krier was born in Luxembourg in 1946 to Jean Pierre Jacques Krier, a tailor who specialised in ecclesiastical robes and supplied most of the bishops in the country. His mother was Emma Marguerite (née Lanser). He grew up in a small, handsome town that he later described as a 'perfect embodiment of New Urbanism' and attended the Lycée Classique in the baroque monastery of L'Abbaye d'Echternach. He wanted to be a pianist, but decided to study architecture to follow in the footsteps of his elder brother Robert, whom he hero-worshipped. As a teenager he was a confirmed modernist and dreamt of 'blasting the cities I saw around me and building skyscrapers'. Then he realised that he was 'in love with the cities of Italy'. 'I tried hard to reconcile them with the theories of Le Corbusier. It was impossible.' He won a place to study architecture at the University of Stuttgart, but found his tutors impossible to talk to. The situation worsened when he researched the work of Albert Speer, the architect of the Third Reich, and his teachers described Krier's scholarship as 'fascist'. He left without graduating and moved to London, where he worked in the office of the modernist architect James Stirling. Four years working for 'big Jim' cured him of any remaining proclivities towards modernism. After leaving Stirling's office he developed masterplans for Kingston upon Hull, Rome, Luxembourg, West Berlin, Bremen, Stockholm, Munich and Washington, none of which were taken forward. He made his living teaching at the Architectural Association and the Royal College of Art, where he made his reputation as a lone architectural theorist crying in the wilderness. While working on Poundbury in the Nineties, he also masterplanned the Cité Judiciaire in his native Luxembourg. In recent years he worked on projects in Guatemala City and a new town near San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. In 2017 it emerged that he was working on a waterside masterplan to redevelop Fawley power station on the Solent, near Southampton, into 1,500 homes on a 300-acre site. The £2.3 billion project became known in the press as 'Venice in Britain', but, without the royal protection he had enjoyed at Poundbury, the scheme was largely cancelled last year after the developers said it was no longer viable. Krier was divorced from his first wife Rita Wolf, a painter. He is survived by his second wife Irene. Defending his New Urbanist approach to placemaking, Krier said: 'Traditional architecture and urbanism is not an ideology, religion, or transcendental system. It cannot save lost souls or give meaning to empty lives. It is a body of knowledge and know-how allowing us to build practically, aesthetically, socially and economically satisfying cities and structures. Such structures do not ensure happiness but they certainly facilitate the pursuit of happiness for a large majority of people.' Poundbury is due to be completed in 2028, 35 years after it broke ground, at which point there will be homes for 6,000 people. When he started work on the project Krier was a 43-year-old with what a profile in The Guardian described as 'a mad scientist mop of black hair'. By the time of his death the hair was snowy white but in the same unruly mop and he was proud to be the only member of the original team still involved in the project, along with the King. Léon Krier CVO, architectural theorist and urban planner, was born on April 7, 1946. He died of colon cancer on June 17, 2025, aged 79