Victoria Park Fountain

Project Description

The Friends of Victoria & Westburn Parks is a very active volunteer group with members drawn from the local community. They meet every Saturday morning to work in the parks on projects such as refurbishing areas of the parks, maintaining areas already improved, litter picks, planting bulbs and other new plants.

Over the past year, community members of all ages put in over 1,600 hours of work to improve the parks.

They hold regular virtual meetings with representatives of the Council’s Environmental Services staff and local Councillors to discuss ongoing issues and agree on what projects the Friends of Victoria & Westburn Parks will progress. Facebook: www.facebook.com/fovwp

In recent times the group’s proudest achievement has been to refurbish the park’s fountain.

The 142-year-old fountain had not worked for almost 20 years, but thanks to the fundraising efforts of the Friends, the fountain has been restored and turned back on.

The conservation-led work on the category-A-listed historic fountain in Victoria Park started in 2021 and it was completed at the end of 2022.

The £137,000 of work included delicate cleaning and repairing of the carved stonework and decorative copper elements using bristle brushes and steam rather than corrosive chemicals; the aged and failed filtration system was stripped out and replaced with a modern, energy-efficient system; the modern cement pointing was removed and the stonework repointed using a traditional lime-based mortar; and local granite boulders were sourced and cut to replace the three missing and one vandalised bowls, in keeping with the spirit of the original stonework. A regular maintenance regime for the fountain’s future care was also established and the steps and walking areas surrounding the fountain have been redone.

Friends of Victoria and Westburn Parks secured funding to undertake the full repair and restoration of the historic fountain and the works were overseen by Aberdeen City Council with technical input from a specialist conservation Architect. The main contractor for the project was Lost Art.

The fountain was designed in 1878 by eminent local architect John Bridgeford Pirie and was constructed in 1880 as the centrepiece of Victoria Park using 14 different types of local granite, reflecting the variety of stone being quarried in the Aberdeen area at the time. Gifted to the city by the Master Masons’ Association of Aberdeen, it bears the monograms of the stonemasons who created it.

Victoria Park is located on land which formed part of the 14th-century Forest of Stocket, the royal hunting domain which Robert the Bruce gifted to the Burgh of Aberdeen as part of the Freedom Lands in 1319.

They developed into fields and, in 1871, the Aberdeen Council approved a plan to transform the middle portion of these feuing grounds for use as a public park for the people of Aberdeen. The Victorians added walls and railings to define the boundaries of the park, and in February 1873, the park opened and was formally named Victoria Park, after the then-Queen.