‘Very moving, very beautiful… What I love about this, all of it, is it is proper art. I mean the colour and Andrew’s design is real art but at the same time it is popular art – proper and popular art at the same time. Everyone can understand it. Everyone can relate to it.
Andrew Marr
Absolutely stunning. Mad but Stunning.
You can stand in the middle and swivel round and find out what was going on ten years ago or in the 1760s’
Exactly two years ago, the much respected political reporter, author, art-lover and longtime BBC, LBC and Classic FM broadcaster and presenter Andrew Marr, visited The Great Tapestry of Scotland in the company of historian and co-creator Alistair Moffat. Andrew, who started his career as a cub reporter on The Scotsman newspaper, demonstrated his own thorough knowledge of Scotland’s history as the two looked at the panels, section by section.
You can watch a video of his visit here.
Andrew Marr is one of the most familiar reporters, journalists, presenters and interviewers in the United Kingdom. Until December 2021 he was the host of weekly BBC programme The Andrew Marr Show, and Radio 4’s Start the Week.
Andrew has edited a national newspaper, led the BBC’s political coverage and presented documentaries about political, economic and cultural history. He is also a prolific author, writing books to accompany his TV documentaries, delving into painting and drawing, and penning political thrillers. In 2020 he presented a series, The Great Paintings of the World, for Channel 5.
What did he think?
- ‘[This is] a very, very handsome building… fantastic seeing this honeycomb ceiling, somewhere between a honeycomb and the Pantheon in Rome, this room with the light coming down through the middle’
- ‘These [panels] are absolutely stunning. I love the richness… beautifully done, beautifully made… like a visual version of sonnets for Scotland’
- ‘I’m really struck by the vivid, vivid colours’
- ‘This is slightly bonkers, the scale of it, the ambition, it’s a bit mad. I can’t imagine this being done anywhere else in Britain’
- ‘You have the Lowland clearances alongside the Highland clearances which i’m delighted about. This is something which we know about now, but it was forgotten for a long time’
- ‘Andrew [Crummy] picks up a bit of Pre-Raphaelite painting richness with emphasis on detail… very clever’
On the Scotsman panel:
‘The original scotsman building, where I started as a young reporter, was designed so that ‘the concept’ was right at the top of the building, and ‘the product’ came out the bottom. In fact on the roof there was still a pigeon loft for carrier pigeons. But the board of directors were on the very top floor, they had the concept and it was passed down to the editors on the floor below to make flesh… then they passed the thoughts to the news desks and the reporters, the printers and linotype machine [operators], the printing presses themselves in the same building. Then bundled, and the bundles dropped out from the bowels of the building into the railway carriages from Waverley station and from there they were transported all over Scotland. Very, very sophisticated and yet [there was an] enlightenment simplicity about it: from concept to railway carriages in one building.’