Morgan Academy - Dundee, Scotland.
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creg-ny-baa
N 56° 28.459 W 002° 57.270
30V E 502802 N 6258872
Morgan Academy, a school in the Scottish city of Dundee, was almost completely destroyed in a fire on March 21st 2001.
Waymark Code: WM13NZ5
Location: Northern Scotland, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 01/19/2021
Views: 1
John Morgan was a Dundee man who emigrated to India at the age of 20 and went on to become a wealthy indigo farmer. He bequeathed his fortune into building a hospital in his native city and in 1862, Edinburgh architects John Dick Peddie and Charles Kinnear designed an imposing building that firstly became the Morgan Hospital when opening in 1866, before closing two years later and then becoming a school.
The building was designed in a baronial style, influenced on a French chateaux and Flemish guild halls. It occupied an elevated site, facing south-west over the city and the River Tay, with a tall clock tower its main feature.
The building became a grammar school, and then in 1972, was turned into a comprehensive school run by Dundee City Council. It was around this time that a fire broke out in the newer extension on the north side, but fortunately was contained before it could spread. However a far worse fate would occur some thirty years later.
On the evening of March 21st 2001, a fire was discovered in the building towards the western end and was quickly spreading. By around 6.30pm, firefighters had the blaze under reasonable control, but strengthening westerly winds caused the fire to spread rapidly eastwards over the rest of the building. By the time darkness had fallen, the fire was now totally out of control and by 8.00pm had engulfed the tower and the majority of the building.
By the following day the only parts of the building that were unscathed were the northern extension and the extreme east part, with the rest a burnt out shell. The school continued by moving to the old Rockwell School building a mile to the west as teams were set in place to assess whether what was left of the building could be saved.
The cause of the blaze was eventually found to be from work that was being carried out in the area that it started. A globule of melted bitumen tar had been burning for over an hour undiscovered since workmen had left at 4.00pm, and eventually spread rapidly.
Using old photographs and data, a painstaking process eventually started to rebuild the school to the exact state that it originally was, and in 2004 it was reopened. The front-facing facade was built to the exact same specifications, with the interior being upgraded and the northern extension now joined on to the main building.