BILL MCALLISTER: Did you know Inverness had a library and street that vanished over 60 years ago?
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This year is the 140th anniversary of a splendid new building opening on a narrow city centre street. That building, Inverness Burgh Library, and the rest of the street, Exchange Place, vanished 60 years ago, and only a dwindling few will recall them.
The library and street were pulled down to make way for widening Bridge Street to cope with traffic demands, including from the new Ness Bridge.
Exchange Place boasted shops, including a tobacconist and a jewellers, as well as the library/museum and burgh police station.
It took its name from The Exchange, a wide piece of pavement in front of the Town House. The Market Cross and Clachnacuddin Stone were there and, from 1880, the Forbes Fountain, part of which is now adjacent to Bellfield Park.
Public announcements, such as war starting or ending, curfews, the marriage or death of a monarch, or election results were traditionally made from the Exchange. It became an informal meeting place, where business could be done or gossip transferred. Country folk would barter butter, eggs and poultry there.
By 1903, horse-drawn taxis queued for hire at The Exchange – a shilling fare to Tomnahurich cemetery, four shillings to both Culduthel Wood or Dochgarroch.
When the old Town House was pulled down in 1878, Exchange Place was temporarily opened up. But plans for the present Town House proposed to do away with the space on which The Exchange stood.
Leading town and business figures petitioned the council in 1878, branding the plan “an act of vandalism”. The Courier editor commented:”The front of the Town Hall would no longer be the central rallying point of Invernessians on occasions of public interest; and it would cease to be, as it has been hitherto, the Forum of Inverness.”
The council backed down, finding extra land at the rear. The Exchange was saved and lasted until the early 1960s, when it was doomed by road widening and the demolition of one side of Bridge Street for development. Exchange Place, and the library, disappeared in a cloud of rubble, to be replaced by Castle Wynd.
In an era where news is rapidly circulated online, there is no need for The Exchange, but a link with our past was severed when it was pulled down.
In 1707, a library had opened in a room in Dunbar’s Hospital, Church Street, with 200 books collected, funded by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, with borrowers permitted two afternoons a week.
It is recorded in the New Statistical Account of 1834 that the burgh had “a valuable parochial library…several subscription and circulating libraries and two public reading rooms.”
The growing town needed a dedicated building – and Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, the lawyer who became the only Gaelic-speaking MP, was a key figure in a group which in 1873 launched a campaign for a library, museum and art gallery.
Public subscriptions raised more than £1000, influencing the Town Council to provide land, which had been used as a rubbish dump by the Commercial Hotel, for the project.
Sir Alexander Ross was contracted in 1879 to create the building and completed it at a cost of £3405. Fraser-Mackintosh performed the opening ceremony at the new library building on June 16, 1883. It was not until 1918 that government legislation recognised libraries as a key part of the education system.
Until then, prominent individuals in the Coats family, who grew rich through thread factories in Paisley, had donated books to rural Highland schools. They also donated bookcases, some of which may still exist, to these schools.
In 1920, Fraser-Mackintosh’s widow successfully asked the Town Council to accept six thousand volumes her husband had amasses for the library he opened.
Since 1980, the library has been in handsome premises in Farraline Park and remains an invaluable facility for the city. The building, and its service, needs to be protected from enduring the sad fate of its predecessor.
