St Cecilia's Hall was originally commissioned by the Edinburgh Musical Society and designed by the Scottish architect Robert Mylne, who also designed Blackfriars Bridge in London. The EMS was founded in 1728, and for its first 35 years its members met in the upper hall of St Mary’s Chapel, a small church that formerly stood to the north of the present hall. In December 1763, after completion of Mylne's new hall, the EMS held an inaugural concert in honour of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians. St Cecilia's was the first purpose-built concert hall in Scotland when it was completed in 1763, not far behind the first in Europe, the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, built in 1748. Mylne designed the building with an oval concert hall on the first floor level with a rehearsal room on the ground floor. Originally, the main entrance opened out to a small courtyard off Niddry’s Wynd, and a portico was added to the entrance around 1787. In 1785 the City of Edinburgh commenced a major civil engineering project — the construction of South Bridge, a road bridge above the Cowgate to link the Old Town to the University in the south of the city, which was completed in 1787. The new bridge resulted in the loss of several ancient closes, including Niddry’s Wynd; St Cecilia's Hall lost its original entrance courtyard. With South Bridge and its high tenement buildings looming over St Cecilia’s, the Cowgate became a dark and undesirable location for Edinburgh's concert-goers, who by now were flocking to the newly built Assembly Rooms in the more fashionable New Town on the other side of the city. Audiences at St Cecilia’s Hall dwindled and eventually the EMS discontinued performances; the last EMS concert was held in 1798. By 1801, the EMS had quietly disbanded and sold the hall to a Baptist congregation. The building was later used as a Freemasons' lodge, a warehouse, a school, and as Magdalene Cairns's Excelsior Ballroom. It was purchased by the University of Edinburgh in 1959.
Architecture
The exterior is in plain Neoclassical style, with ashlar facing. On the upper floor is the Sypert Concert Room, an elliptical room with a moulded plaster cornice, and a domed ceiling topped with a central elliptical cupola. William Adam visited the hall and wrote to his brother John Adam that he had found it "ugly and squat". In 1966, the University commissioned the architect Ian Lindsay to reconstruct the interior of the concert hall. He built a new eastern elevation and made a new entrance to the hall. In 2016, St Cecilia's Hall underwent a £6.5m restoration and renovation in order to improve the concert hall and museum facilities. The project was partly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, as part of its work to support historical buildings of cultural importance. It re-opened to the public in 2017.
