The Great Scaffolding Craze of 2025

It would appear that Dame-Principal Sally Mapstone has decided to renovate the entire town of St Andrews this year on a whim. She seems to have greenlighted the cleaning of about half of all University buildings — and, not to be conspiratorial, but I have a sinking feeling she isn’t a stranger to the removal of the fountain on Market Street either.

Did the University suddenly discover coffers of cash, stashed away in the attic of the Bute building? Was the need for cleaning Reg’s façade that much greater than — just spitballing here — building more student accommodation, lowering its price, or even clearing out the corpses in the Main Library’s air vents, which have stunk up the place for the past two years?

Seeing the town clad in scaffolding has made me think that we might be getting our priorities muddled, both in St Andrews and at large. Since World War II, there has been such emphasis on preserving the buildings which we have inherited from the past. We spend so much money sand-blasting old stones to make them look a bit less depressing — honestly, a lost cause up here — and so little on making our world reflect who we are and what we need today.

Our cities have become museums of glories past, gigantic period sets peppered with the odd ‘80s wart-of-a-building. It's like there has been a collective admission that whatever we could build will inevitably be less valuable than what was built 500 years ago. Yet we need to be able to live in our cities and have them evolve with the times.

There once wasn’t such a widespread wish to conserve everything, and great buildings were regularly razed to make space for the new. Take Paris, for example, where two-thirds of buildings were reduced to rubble between the 1850s and 1870s to make way for a city which still impresses the world. Nowadays, we recognise that we cannot build beautiful buildings, so we keep the old ones and build our ugly concrete blobs in the empty lots around them.

What does this imply for the future? Must we resign ourselves to a world in which we can no longer build new Taj Mahals or Versailles? Will we not be able to change the façades of great buildings, like Buckingham Palace’s in 1913, simply because we must preserve the past at all costs? Must we, as an epoch, resign ourselves to camping our lives and the buildings in which they exist between heritage sites?

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m the first to love the past and the great constructions it left us, and the first to recognise the value in maintaining as many as possible. They generally are more beautiful than what we make today; they’re definitely more interesting, and there’s no doubt that given the choice between preserving or replacing them with some God-awful glass and concrete cube, we should pick the former. We must preserve the souls of our cities. But we must recognise that they aren’t static, that our needs are changing, and that our environments must change as well.

We can’t continue like this for the next thousand years — try to think about how many buildings you’ve seen that predate 1025. Probably very few. They will all disappear eventually, and to me, that’s the beauty of the past. It’s kind of the whole point.

Instead of preserving everything at all costs, let’s give our descendants something to talk about, to criticise, to admire. Let’s feel legitimate in tearing down what is old but unimportant and replacing it with something better, and ideally beautiful. Let’s try to make our cities live with us, instead of simply living within them. 

So, to the Dame-Principal, I say: spare us the scaffolding, by George give us back our fountain, and for God’s sake put funds towards cleaning the air vents in the Library. We’re suffocating in here.

Illustration by Abigail Svaasand