RENOVATION

Rather a grey but warm day; raining this evening. I had to purchase a parking permit today, requiring a visit to Aberdeen City Council Offices. They have been housed in the converted Marischal College since 2011. The building is a vast improvement on the now demolished Saint Nicholas House.
I liked the contrast looking through the modern refurbished customer access portal into the central quadrangle.
The building was commended by poet John Betjeman following a visit to Aberdeen in 1947:

"No-one can dismiss Marischal College, when looking at the work of the present century. Wedged behind a huge town hall in an expensive and attractive mid-Victorian baronial style, I saw a cluster of silver-white pinnacles. I turned down a lane towards them, the front broadened out. Oh! Bigger than any cathedral, tower on tower, forests of pinnacles, a group of palatial buildings rivaled only by the Houses of Parliament at Westminster.
"This was the famous Marischal College. Imagine the Victorian tower with a spire on top, and all that well-grouped architecture below of lesser towers, and lines of pinnacles executed in the hardest white Kemnay granite and looking out over the grey-green North Sea and you have some idea of the first impression this gigantic building creates.
"It rises on top of a simple Gothic one designed by Simpson in 1840. But all these spires and towers and pinnacles are the work of this century and were designed by Sir Alexander Marshall Mackenzie. You have to see them to believe them."