George Meikle Kemp

George Meikle Kemp (26 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.

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.

Childhood and education George Meikle Kemp was the second of six children of James Kemp, a shepherd, and his wife Jean Mowbray. He was born on 25 May 1795 at Hillriggs Farm above the town of Biggar in Lanarkshire. When Kemp was a child his father moved from farm to farm, wherever he could find work. The building awakened in Kemp an almost fanatical appreciation of Gothic architecture. He started work as a millwright in Galashiels. His job entailed not just the upkeep of mills but also the repair of the various wooden agricultural and industrial machines being invented at this time. but the move failed to improve his prospects. While he had produced detailed, but uncommissioned, designs for the theoretical reconstructions of Glasgow Cathedral, Rosslyn Chapel, Trinity College Kirk and Melrose Abbey, he had never designed a new building.

Kemp recognised his opportunity and after working at great speed for five days submitted an entry, using the pseudonym John Morvo, one spelling of the name of the French master mason who had worked on the building of Melrose Abbey and Rosslyn Chapel. some furniture, and the model of Glasgow Cathedral, which proved unsaleable. Reliably attributed to Kemp was a south wing added to the 1700s New Woodhouselee House in Glencorse, Midlothian in 1843

Memorials In 1932 a memorial to Kemp, designed by James Grieve, was unveiled at Moy Hall, Redscarhead where Kemp served his apprenticeship. It is a single-storey Gothic gable added to the L-plan former workshop of Andrew Noble, joiner and millwright, who was Kemp's apprentice master.

Another Kemp memorial was installed by the Biggar Museum Trust on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1995. It is of rough-hewn stone, bearing a bronze plaque, and stands just across the valley from where the Kemp cottage stood in 1795.

Kemp likenesses Kemp's brother-in-law, William Bonnar, painted at least two portraits of him. One, with the half-built Monument seen behind Kemp, is in the possession of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The second portrait by Bonnar is owned by the City of Edinburgh Council. A portrait by an unknown artist of Kemp holding a model of the Scott Monument also belongs to the City of Edinburgh Council. Two photographic portraits of Kemp, posed on the Scott Monument's building site, were made by Robert Adamson (1821-48) in 1843. Salted paper prints from paper negative images are preserved by the City of Edinburgh Council.

Personal life While being a man with many friends, and towards the end of his life very popular with the public, Kemp has been described as disablingly shy, socially awkward and cantankerous. His latest biographer, Morven Leese, writes that Kemp demonstrated “a huge level of self-belief and drive, combined with a very unusual personality”. She suggests that his social disabilities were perhaps engendered by his humble background and exacerbated by him being “high on the autistic spectrum”.

Despite the impressive attendance at the funeral, the large number of dignitaries who attended, and the obvious high esteem in which the architect was held, the Kemps were not wealthy. A journalist observed that “The poor deceased, though he had risen, after a long struggle, into celebrity, had not risen into affluence.” He also commented on the humble appearance of the Kemp's house in Morningside from which the funeral procession left.