George Meikle Kemp

George Meikle Kemp
Portrait of Kemp by William Bonnar c1840
Born25 May 1795
Biggar, Lanarkshire, Scotland
Died6 March 1844 (aged 48)
Edinburgh, Scotland
Burial placeEdinburgh, Scotland
Occupations
  • Carpenter
  • joiner
  • draughtsman
  • architect
Years active1813—1844
Known forThe Scott Monument, Edinburgh
SpouseElizabeth Wilson Bonnar

George Meikle Kemp (25 May 1795—6 March 1844) was a self-taught Scottish architect who designed and built the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, Scotland. The poorly educated son of a shepherd, showing talents in woodworking as a child, he was apprenticed to a joiner and millwright.

Kemp travelled and worked as a millwright for several years and, exercising a childhood fascination for Gothic architecture, took the opportunity to study many of the most important Gothic buildings in Scotland, England and France. As a result, he was said to have had a first-hand knowledge of Gothic architecture which was unrivalled in Scotland.[1]

Settling in Edinburgh, Kemp won a competition to design a monument to the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott. He supervised its erection on Princes Street in the city but at the age of 48, before the building was finished, he drowned in the city's Union Canal. On its completion the monument was acclaimed and, despite his lack of formal training and with only the one building known to be for certain to his design, Kemp came to be revered as an architect.

Disablingly shy and socially awkward, while able to memorise exact details of buildings and measure precise distances by eye, Kemp is considered to have been high on the autism spectrum.[2]

  1. ^ Kemp, George Meikle, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840, Howard Colvin, Yale University Press, 1954
  2. ^ George Meikle Kemp, Architect of the Scott Monument, Morven Leese, Lomax Press, Stirling, 2014, [ISBN 0-9560288-9-6]