Last Sunday I made a visit to the old St Peters College Seminary in Cardross which is just north of Glasgow.  I traveled by train from Edinburgh through Glasgow then Dumbarton and finally to Cardross.  The idea was to take some photos of my current realisations of my Vessels work.  The Seminary was part of a Catholic Teaching college it has been abandoned since the 80's and is now overgrown and destroyed.. I chose this place due to its fallen utopia aesthetics which allow me to place the Vessels in an area that is void of recognisable features.  Making the viewer formulate their own idea of placement and where there are at.


Here is a little history about the Seminary taken from hidden glasgow website 

St Peter’s College was founded in 1874 as a seminary for the Western District at Partickhill, Glasgow, it moved to sites near Cardross and is now back in Glasgow.

The massive concrete husk of St Peters Seminary can be discovered being slowly consumed by vegetation, weather and the local young teams in the woods behind Cardross Village. It is reached after a long walk up a rhododendron lined track that takes you behind the golf course, you might start to wonder if you are ever going to find it or if perhaps its been demolished and you are too late, but persevere and you will round the corner to come face to face with an A-listed architectural masterpiece.

It was commissioned by the Archbishop of Glasgow in 1958 and completed in 1966 serving time as a teaching college for the catholic church before being closed in 1980. It was designed by architects Isi Metzstein and Andy McMillan, who ran Gillespie, Kidd and Coia. It is a modular concrete structure, and is considered to be a good example of collegiate buildings from the 1960s. It was awarded the Riba architecture award in 1967 but as Historic Scotland notes: “It has been systematically vandalised and is now reduced to a ruinous skeleton.”

So far no purchaser has been found and , nor has a scheme been put forward that could give it a new use - it seems set to be slowly eaten away by the elements. One current suggestion is that it should perhaps become the first stabilised and protected 20th-century ruin. Meanwhile it is a mecca for those who love the architecture and for those who merely enjoy the spectacle of a car park like building in the middle of beautiful woodland.


Directions to get there are pretty vague but here goes:

If you arrive by train head away from the sea and walk to the main road.  Turn right and follow the path past the gold course and further until you find Carmon Road on your left.  Follow this past the care home and round the next couple of bends.  You will eventually be walking alongside the gold course again but still on the road.  On the left there is a new industrial fence about 20 metres long.  You need to walk past and then walk through the gap in the hedge.  There is an old sealed track that you can then follow through the hedge rows (pretty muddy if its been raining)  Eventually you will come to a fork in the path.  Left takes you across the gold course and right will take you over a bridge and round to the Seminary.  At the front of the seminary there is a welded fence that you cannot get through.  You could probably go right but I went left towards the river and maybe 20 metres round the fence/building there is an opening in the fence that you can climb through.  You are now in the Seminary.  Be careful as it is in a state of ruin and there is asbestos around the building so watch yourselves and enjoy..
  
 I will post photos of the work once they are done being edited.