Rubislaw Quarry Heritage Centre

MEMORIA: FACSIMILE

Title: The Rubislaw Quarry Heritage Centre
Source organisation: Halliday Fraser Munro, Architects
Original URL: https://www.hfm.co.uk/projects/the-rubislaw-quarry-heritage-centre/
Listed under: hfm.co.uk/projects/retail-and-leisure/
Date captured: July 2026
Current status of original: Accessible at time of capture but intermittently unreachable; content may change or disappear without notice
Client: Rubislaw Quarry Aberdeen Ltd
Project value: £6 Million
Copyright: Copyright remains with Halliday Fraser Munro. Chronos Veritas claims no ownership of this material or the images reproduced in the screenshots below.

CONTEXT

This page is the primary public record of an architectural vision for Rubislaw Quarry that was approved but never built. It is preserved here because architecture firm project pages disappear without notice, and because the story behind this one is worth keeping accurately.

Hugh Black and Sandy Whyte bought the quarry in 2010 for around £60,000. Halliday Fraser Munro designed the heritage centre. Planning consent was eventually obtained, but Sandy Whyte died of cancer four months before the decision came through, aged 61, never seeing their shared vision approved. Hugh Black pledged to see it through.

He could not. A title condition on the southern part of the site was found by the Lands Tribunal for Scotland, after a five-day hearing in 2017, to block the development. The application to vary that condition was rejected in January 2018.

Simultaneously, Canadian developer Carttera applied to build 245 luxury flats along the northern edge of the quarry. Aberdeen City Council rejected the application twice, against their own planning officers’ recommendations, with more than 400 objections lodged. The Scottish Government overruled the council and approved the flats in 2021.

By September 2023, Black had listed the quarry for sale at £150,000 through FG Burnett. As of October 2024, the sale remained in stalemate. Scottish Government officials cataloguing 65 abandoned sites across Aberdeen categorised the quarry’s redevelopment potential as uncertain due to insufficient information.

The heritage centre exists only in planning documents, architectural renders, and this page.