Cairnhill: John Baird in Jacobean mode
Probably with input from Alexander Thomson
Cairnhill (above), on the outskirts of Airdrie, originally dated to 1762, when George Nisbett, a Glasgow builder and former Deacon Convener of Glasgow's Trades House, commissioned it from Glasgow merchant and architect John Craig, who also designed the surviving ‘Tobacco Merchant’s House’ in Miller Street in Glasgow. Nisbett was the husband of Margaret More, who had inherited the house from her brother John More of Cairnhill after he died in 1758 after a fall from his horse1.
Thirty years later, as in so many estates, Nisbett began exploiting the minerals under his estate rather than focusing on its agricultural produce., leasing ironstone and coal deposits to William Dixon.
Dixon (c.1753-1822) was a Northumberland-born coal miner who, around 1770, had moved to Scotland with fellow miners in search of work. At first, he found employment in a pit in Govan, but by 1797, he could lease the lands of Cairnhill, Gartness and Kipbyre. Given his later business set-ups, it is possible that no - or very little - money changed hands and that the arrangement with Nisbett involved Dixon digging out the ironstone and coal and sharing the resulting profits.
Whether the leases took that form or were purchased, four years later, in 1801, in partnership with James Creelman, who operated a pottery and tile works on the Coats estate near Coatbridge, and David Mushet, Dixon took over the Calder Iron Works, established only four years before by a group of Glasgow stocking weavers, paying a third of what the works had cost to build. Mushet became manager and developed the works, including installing steel furnaces. When that partnership ended in 1819, the business was sold for £19,000, almost five times its original cost.
To that extent, the exploitation of Cairnhill’s mineral lands can be seen as central to the industrialisation of Monklands and Dixon’s career as an ironmaster, culminating in Dixon’s son, William Dixon Junior, playing an important role in the development and use of James Beaumont Neilson’s hot blast process some 25 years later, and the creation of what came to be known as ‘Dixon’s Blazes’ at the Govan Iron Works in Hutchesontown, Glasgow2.
Later, the pollution from the Govan Iron Works would be a major factor in the economic and environmental impacts on Glasgow south of the river, including on Thomson’s several Gorbals tenements.
George More Nisbett
The mineral deposits on the Cairnhill estate would again come into play in 1828, when George More Nisbett, George Nisbett’s grandson and now owner of the estate, gave a forty-year lease on the ironstone deposits to the Bairds of Gartsherrie, a farming family who would become the dominant force in the Scottish iron industry in the later 1800s. George More Nisbett had broader commercial interests as a director of the Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock and Ayr Railway Company, the Clyde Steam Navigation Company, and the Airdrie Gaslight Company.
Nisbett had been elected Provost of Airdrie in 1839; in 1841, he commissioned John Baird I to update John Craig’s classical house:
Abounding with stepped gables, elaborate finials, ornate strap-work and chimneys, miniature bartizans and mullioned windows, the house, which also had a classical porch set at an angle in the stepped three-bay entrance, had a distinctly Jacobean feeling3.
Given the date, Alexander Thomson was likely also involved in the building as John Baird’s assistant.
Baird designed in many different styles, but Jacobean only features in two buildings, as far as is known: Cairnhill and his initial plans for the new Glasgow College on Woodlands Hill. Described as ‘Baird’s largest single project in Glasgow, and one which would have become the city’s finest landmark building’, the story of Baird’s involvement can be found here. The reason why Baird chose Jacobean is unclear: he may have sought to, or been advised by the College authorities, to reflect and build on the College’s existing High Street frontage (below).
Equally, the extent to which Baird drew on earlier work on Cairnhill and Stonebyres in Lesmahagow, together with Playfair’s larger Donaldson’s Hospital and Heriot’s Hospital, is unknown. Alexander Thomson is known to have been involved in the Glasgow College plans. Still, his precise role concerning those earlier buildings, including whether or how he contributed to any design aspect, is also unknown. Nevertheless, he would have seen the plans in development. He may even have drafted them, building his knowledge and understanding of different architectural styles, even if they were not to become part of his design language.
The end of Cairnhill
George More Nisbett had little time to appreciate Baird’s work; he died in 1843. Five years later, his eldest son, John More Nisbett (1826-1904), married Lady Agnes Dalrymple, daughter of the 9th Earl of Stair. Three years later, he became a director of the Western Bank; when it collapsed in 1857, as the largest individual shareholder among the bank’s directors, he was obliged to pay more than £36,000. Whether he was able to do so from his own resources or whether his father-in-law contributed, five years after that, he was able to purchase the Drum estate with its adjacent colliery at Gilmerton, outside Edinburgh, to which the family then moved, with Cairnhill being leased.
In 1938, the Joint Blind Welfare Committee for the South West of Scotland took a 15-year lease of the house with 37 acres of grounds from the Cairnhill and Drum estates (the two estates had earlier been combined). The lease cost may have been nominal, but the house itself proved problematic for its elderly residents, with various internal flights of stairs and outside conveniences(!). Closing in the 1960s, it became the Cairnhill House Hotel until 1983, after which it remained empty and subject to vandalism.
Cairnhill’s stables were successfully restored as residences in 1984, and a planning application to convert the mansion into flats was granted in 1985. By then, however, the house had seriously deteriorated (see below from Canmore):
No action followed, and the house was demolished in 1991, leaving the stable block and dovecot standing.
The image above, and much of the background to Cairnhill, come from Dan Sweeney, Lost Mansions and Houses of Lanarkshire, Glasgow 2017
For more on the Dixon family’s histroy and role, see https://www.culturenlmuseums.co.uk/story/dixons-blazes-a-family-of-ironmasters/
ibid.