Morningside Public Library, 184-186 Morningside Road, Morningside, Edinburgh

Morningside Public Library, located at 184-186 Morningside Road in Edinburgh, was designed by James A Williamson and built between 1904 and 1905. This six-bay Edwardian Baroque public library features a two-storey street frontage with 17th century details and a single-storey reading room at the rear. The front is made of cream Blackpastures droved ashlar, while the rear is rendered. Architectural elements include a base course, channelled angle pilasters, architraved windows, ground floor windows with segmental arches and exposed sash cases, plain aprons, first-floor windows with bracketed cills, a dentilled eaves cornice, and ashlar mullions.

The front elevation has advanced outer bays with moulded pediments that feature blank roundels and foliate carvings by Joseph Hayes. The outer right bay contains a round-arched doorway with a foliate keystone and carved city arms surrounded by banded columns and a broken pediment. It has a two-leaf panelled door and a semi-circular fanlight with radial astragals, with a bipartite window above on the first floor. The outer left bay has a dwarf secondary door topped with a flat segmental-arched cornice and a festooned bull's-eye window above, along with a bipartite window on the first floor. The four central bays have single windows on both the ground and first floors. A decorative cupola ventilator with a timber and lead dome features louvred round-arched openings with keystoned pediments on all sides.

The rear elevation consists of a two-storey main block with single windows, and the single-storey reading room has a large glazed cupola. The library has small-pane timber sash and case windows, a slate piend roof with lead flashings, an apex stack to the north, and a wallhead stack at the rear. The front features a rectangular embossed eaves gutter.

Inside, there is a rib-vaulted vestibule and hall with a dentilled cornice. The two-storey front building overlooks the reading hall through an arcade of five arches with shouldered architraves and leaded panes at the heads. The ceilings throughout are moulded and compartmental. The main reading hall boasts a large domed cupola with elaborate naturalistic plasterwork by Mackenzie of Glasgow, along with egg and dart and bead and reel cornices featuring deep dentils, marbled columns, and pilasters with Ionic capitals. The plainer rear reading room has a shallow tunnel roof with moulded transverse beams and long skylights.