On a recent trip to Dumfries & Galloway, staying in a beautiful house on the coast at Rockcliffe, I called in at two former hospitals in Dumfries – both former iterations of the Royal Infirmary. This is a hospital with a long history that has taken it to four separate sites.
The original Dumfries Infirmary was built to the west of Nith Bank, at High Dock, on land that bordered the river. The foundation stone was laid on 11 July 1777, and the infirmary received its first patients in 1778 – transferred from temporary premises. In 1807 the infirmary was granted a royal charter, and its benefactors incorporated as the Governors of the Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary.
In the later 1860s the infirmary’s governors decided to relocate eastwards, to higher ground, and build a new hospital on a pavilion plan. This was the gold-standard in hospital design at the time, based on the principles of natural, cross-ventilation to minimise cross-infection. The governors held a competition for the design of the new hospital in 1868. A sum of £10,000 was proposed for the scheme, that was to include the architect’s fee and the salary of a clerk of works. The winning architect was John Starforth, whose practice was based in Edinburgh. Three years earlier Starforth had won the competition to design Greyfriars Church in Dumfries. He also went on to design the infirmary at Berwick-upon-Tweed, built in 1872-4, and Greenock’s poorhouse and parochial asylum (later Ravenscraig Hospital) built in 1876-9.
The OS Town Plan of 1893 shows the basic layout of the new hospital. The western range comprised a central administration block flanked by ward wings. To the rear a central corridor led to two further ward pavilions. These two-storey pavilions contained wards on each floor on either side of the central spine corridor. At the farthest end of the wards, towers housed the lavatories.
The foundation stone was laid on 16 September 1869. A report in The Builder in that year claimed that Starforth had amended the design to reduce the cost, but he refuted the accusation, stating that the lowest tender had been £8,650 9s 8d. (The highest was £10,875.) An architectural drawing of the infirmary was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1870. The Builder jibbed at the skyline, which it thought unsatisfactory and commented that the design had ‘some degree of architectural pretension’.
The building contractor for the infirmary was James Halliday, mason, and the contractor for the joiner work was John Mein. Mein also paid for the ‘cathedral glass’ in the central window above the main entrance. This was designed by James Ballantine of Edinburgh, in a geometric rather than figurative scheme. It featured pale shades of amber, green and blue in the upper section bordered by deeper shades of the same colours. The other main features of the entrance front were the statues of St Luke (the good physician) and Hygeia that flank the central window. These were executed by the local mason and sculptor, John Currie. Currie’s best-known works were ‘The Covenanter’ and ‘Old Mortality and his Pony’. He also carried out the figure of Dr Henry Duncan on the façade of the Dumfries Savings Bank.
Building work was largely completed towards the end of 1872, and an official opening of the infirmary took place in May 1873. Although the building was considerably larger than the old infirmary, it had the same number of beds (100). About a year after the new infirmary opened, an ice house was built on the site of the historic Christie’s Well, to the north of the infirmary. The door surround of the icehouse with two sculptured herms supporting a banner bearing the text ‘Christys Well’ was preserved and subsequently relocated to the new infirmary at Bankend Road. (There is a photograph of the door surround on the Art Uk website. The well is named Christie’s elsewhere, but was also known as St Queran’s Well.)
The icehouse was later replaced by the Jubilee Block, built in 1897 as a sanatorium for patients with tuberculosis. Another detached block was added in 1894 for infectious diseases. Both were built to designs by James Barbour. However, in 1910 the infirmary ceased to admit infectious diseases and subsequently both blocks were converted to staff quarters. The 1894 block was substantially rebuilt as a nurses’ hostel and became known as the King Edward VII Memorial block.
During the Second World War two additional ward huts were built to the south of the main building as part of the Emergency Medical Scheme increasing its bed complement to 170. The war-time survey of hospitals conducted for the Department of Health for Scotland criticised the design of the wards, condemning them as no longer satisfying modern requirements for medical care. The hutted annexes were cramped, nearly all the specialist units were too small, and the out-patient department particularly congested. Rebuilding on a new site was recommended, the old infirmary might then be adapted for the chronic sick and infirm.
In 1948 the infirmary transferred to the NHS, coming under the Western Regional Hospital Board based in Glasgow. With limited funds, no action was taken in the early years of the NHS to rebuild the infirmary on a new site. Instead, some modernisation was carried out in the 1960s, including the addition of a day room for patients. Nevertheless, rebuilding was the long-term goal, enshrined in the Hospital Plan for Scotland published by the Department of Health for Scotland in 1962.
In the Hospital Plan, ten new district general hospitals were proposed at Inverness, Dumfries, Ayr, Kilmarnock, Coatbridge, Motherwell, Greenock, Paisley and Kirkcaldy, and in West Lothian. All but three of these were in the Western Region, and the new hospital for Dumfries was the first of those to be completed in 1974. In the late 1960s it was planned to adapt the former infirmary into a geriatric unit. The site for the new hospital was further out of Dumfries, fronting Bankend Road at the northern tip of the Crichton Royal Hospital site.
The foundation stone was laid on 16 September 1970 by the Chairman of the Board of Management for Dumfries and Galloway Hospitals, J. Wyllie Irving. The architects were the Glasgow-based Boswell, Mitchell and Johnson, and this was their first large-scale, health-care project. That said, it was the smallest of the new District Generals, with 424 in-patient beds. Frank Campbell, one of the partners in the firm, explained that the architects had aimed to design a building that was on a human scale, ‘integrated into the site and surroundings in a natural and unobtrusive manner’. They felt that a ‘massive multi-storey building’ would be oppressive. ‘It is an emotional experience going into a hospital. We attempted to create a less intimidating and more friendly atmosphere’. [quoted in Irving, Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary…, p.97.]
The hospital was designed on a linear plan, as then advocated by the Scottish Home and Health Department, taking the form of a four-storey, offset cross-shaped block. At the lower ground level were service areas, including staff dining and changing rooms, kitchen, stores and plant rooms. On the ground floor were the outpatients unit and the main diagnostic departments and treatment areas along with administrative offices. On the upper three floors were the ward units, comprising single and four-bedded rooms with views over the landscaped grounds, those on the west looking towards the Galloway hills. The landscaping of the site with trees, shrubs and flowers aimed to increase the sense of peace and spaciousness. Now the mature trees set off the east side of the infirmary, though some of the planting must have been lost to later additions.
The building contractors for the new infirmary were Melville, Dundas and Whitson of Glasgow. As with many of the large-scale NHS building projects of this period works were impacted by the economic crisis and industrial action, but nevertheless were not seriously delayed. The contractors handed over the new hospital in 1974. A period of ‘commissioning’ ensued, during which time the hospital was equipped and made ready for opening, including recruiting additional staff. Additional staff accommodation was provided in the form of eleven terraced houses for married staff, one for the matron, and flats for 126 other nursing staff. These are located to the south west of the main building. The official opening by Queen Elizabeth took place in 1975.
Various additions were made to the site, including the Cresswell Maternity Unit, a PFI scheme, built around 2002; a cancer care centre added in 2003, and a dental centre in 2008 (Davis Duncan, architects – now NORR). With the opening of the new Royal Infirmary, the 1970s hospital was refurbished as a day treatment centre (Ryder Architecture for NHS Dumfries and Galloway, Balfour Beatty Construction). The transfer of patients to the new Royal Infirmary at Cargenbridge from Bankend Road began in December 2017. Since then NHS Dumfries & Galloway has moved its headquarters and main admin offices to Mountainhall, following the closure and sale of Crichton Hall.
Sources: The Builder, 10 Jan. 1865, p.416; 14 Nov. 1868, p.839; 3 July 1869, p.521; 5 March 1870: Gordon Irving, Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary – the first two hundred years, Dumfries, 1975, passim.: Dumfries & Galloway Standard, 3 Jan. 1872, p.7; 7 Feb 1872, p.7; 31 July 1872, p.5; 25 Dec 1872, p.5: Daily Record, 7 Dec. 2017, online: The Scotsman, 16 Oct 2019, online: For the new DGRI see the report on the BBC website here (retrieved Dec. 2025).
Obituary of John Starforth: Building News, 27 May 1898, p.741: Information on the local sculptor, John Currie, from William McDowall, History of the Burgh of Dumfries, Edinburgh 1867, p.864
