Gardyne's Land wins multiple awards

Gardyne's Land has received awards from Dundee Civic Trust, Dundee Institute of Architects, the Royal Town Planning Institute, a Scottish Award for Quality in Planning and Regeneration and Renewal Magazine.

Most recently the Restoration and re-use of Gardyne's Land as a back-packers' hostel has been named heritage-led Project of the Year by Regeneration and Renewal Magazine, an award widely recognised as one of the "Oscars" of the planning world. It is the culmination of over ten years of intense effort much of it coming from postgraduate students studying European Urban Conservation.

Superbly atmospheric, Gardyne's Land is actually a complex of five buildings, a 16th century merchant's house two tenements, a Victorian retail outlet and a 19th century billiard hall. The site has been settled for a long time and the changes that have occurred within the complex represent a great essay in the morphology of the City. The buildings have a number of associations with people important to Dundee and Scotland as a whole. It has housed among others, booksellers, jewellers, merchants, mariners, physicians and publishers. One of the attics provided a workshop for a watchmaker, W Fergus who represented Great Britain as a gymnast at the 1908 Olympics. Even more recently, John Suchet the newsreader, while a student at the University, lodged in the Windsor Board Residence which occupied part of Gardyne's before closing around 1980.

By 1990, the buildings were mostly unoccupied and in a poor state of repair. In 1995, they came to the attention of Tayside Building Preservation Trust, a limited company with charitable status, which exists to restore and reuse buildings of architectural or historic interest at risk in Tayside. The trust has no staff but relies heavily on the efforts of the conservation students. Neil Grieve who is the EUC programme's director is also the chief executive of the Trust.

HRH The Duke of Rothesay A measured survey was undertaken by students and an initial feasibility study was completed in 1997. There then followed three years of intense negotiation during which the buildings were acquired, funds were raised and in 2000 a first phase of wind and watertight works was undertaken. Three years of even more intense activity followed, not without problems, during which a professional team was engaged, plans were drawn up and approved for conversion to hostel use and over £4 million pounds was raised. At a time when it seemed that the required level of financial support might not be forthcoming, a visit from HRH The Duke of Rothesay was organised.

Everything was in place to allow a start in January 2005 but legal conditions attached to some of the grants were becoming increasingly difficult to resolve and in April 2005 the project, with the support of the funders, was handed over in its entirety to the City Council who, with the trust acting as advisors finally let the contract in July 2005 and managed it through to a successful completion - a supreme example of Town and Gown working together.

During the Trust's ownership of the buildings every effort was made to understand their history. This work involved a great deal of physical survey and research into Dundee's written records and this information proved invaluable, old photographs for example made possible an accurate rebuilding of an important missing feature, a buffet in a panelled room. However, despite dendrochronology and paint analysis there remains a large number of unanswered questions, including a mysterious timber frame, missing stairs and unexplained blocked openings. A particularly intriguing find was the remains of a small pot, set on its side high up into the façade of the early building. It was decided that it was probably a witche's pot which would have contained particularly unsavoury items and on the basis that evil repels evil would be there to bring good luck. Later, a line of seven similar pots was found beside the second floor windows. Parts of Gardyne's are accessible to the public and a great deal of the information that has been acquired on the building including items such as the architects plans, the conservation plan and a timeline of all important dates and events are available for study which means that visitors will be able to form their own opinions on what has been found.