Aberdeen University Students' Union, 11 Gallowgate, Aberdeen

This late 19th century building, constructed in the Aberdeen Baronial style, serves as a university students' union and occupies a prominent corner site with shops at ground level. It incorporates a fine series of murals by Robert Sivell and Alberto Morocco, painted between 1938 and 1954. Early 21st century alterations have converted parts of the building into flatted accommodation and retail storage.

The exterior is built from polished granite ashlar with finely tooled dressings. The fenestration is regular, with chamfered cill courses and a string course separating the first and second floors. The ground floor features continuous, basket-arched plate glass shop windows. The main entrance is located at the canted southeast corner, flanked by bipartite, ogee-arched windows. Canted oriel windows are present on the upper floors, and a glazed, octagonal turret with a domed copper roof rises from the attic. A stylised machicolated parapet, finished with terminal gablets, tops the building, alongside gabled ashlar wallhead dormers with exaggerated finials.

The Upperkirkgate elevation is eight bays wide, with a pierced consoled balcony at the second floor of the centre right bay. A three-bay wallhead attic storey supports a gabled viewing balcony with a finial and an ogee-roofed octagonal turret. The Gallowgate elevation is symmetrical, with eleven bays, and a canted oriel window over the central bay, flanked by dormers.

The windows are timber sash and case with plate glass. The roof is a Mansard style, covered in grey slates, with ashlar coped skews and ashlar stacks.

The interior includes Sivell’s Bar, featuring a shallow, barrel-vaulted ceiling and a proscenium arched stage with mid-20th century geometric railings. The bar contains the impressive murals by Sivell and Morocco.

The interior spaces behind the 19th-century facades on Upperkirkgate and Gallowgate were substantially redeveloped in the 1930s. The architect James B Nicol reconfigured the interior to house the University of Aberdeen Student Union, reorienting the circulation and adding a three-storey rear extension. The top floor of this addition contained a hall, later known as the Sivell Bar, where Robert Sivell was commissioned by students to paint eleven murals in oil on plaster between 1939 and 1954, work being interrupted by the Second World War. Following the relocation of student union functions to Kings College in the early 2000s, the building was sold and eventually acquired by the owners of the adjacent shopping centre. Currently, portions of the building are used for retail space, while others have been converted into apartments, and the bar is out of use as of 2024.