St. Peter's Seminary

We went here today to take some photos.

Here's the blurb stolen from Hidden Scotland:

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.

And here's a really good video that compares it in it's past state to it's present: Concrete Britain - St. Peter's Seminary