Lerwick Audio Tour: Lerwick's Landmark Audio Walk

On your right stands a low, stone, five-sided fort, its thick walls broken by sharp-angled bastions and a formal arched gate.

Fort Charlotte looks compact now, almost folded into the town around it, but it tells a rather dangerous truth about Lerwick: trade and threat grew up together. Even in the seventeenth century, local histories say this fort gave the young town a push, and merchants gathered nearby. Protection drew commerce close. The same sea that brought business could also bring an enemy.

The first fort here went up between sixteen fifty-two and sixteen fifty-three during the First Anglo-Dutch War, though almost nothing of that version survives. What you see now is part of a story rebuilt in layers. In sixteen sixty-five, at the opening of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Charles the Second ordered Robert Mylne to raise a new fort on this site, spending twenty-eight thousand pounds, a sum worth several million pounds today. If you glance at the image in the app, you can see how tightly the fort still sits beside Lerwick’s commercial heart.

Then came the bluff. In sixteen sixty-seven, a Dutch fleet approached and decided this place looked far more heavily armed and manned than it truly was. In reality, the walls were unfinished and the guns were few. That illusion saved Lerwick. But the protection was fragile. After the war, the government chose not to keep a garrison here, and when the Dutch returned in sixteen seventy-three during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, they found the fort abandoned and burned the barrack block. The war scares were not distant rumours here; they were the reason people paid so close attention to this fort.

And that raises a delicious question: does a fort matter most for the battles it fights, or for the nerve it lends to the town sheltering behind it?

The present fort took shape in seventeen eighty-one and took Queen Charlotte’s name. Those angled corners are bastions, projecting points designed so defenders could fire along the walls beside them. From the ground you cannot quite read the full plan now; land reclaimed in front of the fort has stolen its old command of the shoreline, and only from the air does the whole design reveal itself.

Its life changed again. During the Napoleonic wars, soldiers garrisoned it. Later it became Lerwick’s jail and courthouse. Shetland Museum and Archives preserves the records of inmates, including one Customs and Excise tidewaiter imprisoned here for debt, not violence. For islanders who disliked customs men for interfering with smuggling and wreck recovery, his confinement would have carried a certain edge.

Today the fort remains unusually alive, still serving as the base of an Army Reserve unit as well as a heritage site. Soon, the watch over these waters changes form: not cannon waiting for attack, but rescuers waiting to launch. The Lifeboat Station is about six minutes away. If you plan to return inside, the fort generally opens daily from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon.

On your left is a solid harbour-side building of grey stone, broad and rectangular under a dark roof, with large waterside openings that mark its working purpose.

Here, living on the edge of sea and danger is not a romantic phrase at all. In Lerwick, the sea brings trade, fish, mail, strangers, and livelihood, but it also brings breakdowns, wrecks, groundings, and the dreadful knowledge that help may be very far away. That is why rescue here became more than a service. It became a reflex of character.

Most visitors notice the station and assume the story begins with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the R-N-L-I. Locals know it starts earlier, with James Jamieson. In eighteen ninety-five, before any lifeboat station stood here, he saved two men from the fishing boat Jessie after she sank off Oxna Island in a strong southerly gale, and the R-N-L-I awarded him a Silver Medal. That little detail matters. Lerwick did not wait for a formal institution before it learned how to answer distress.

The official station came soon after tragedy made delay intolerable. On the twentieth of March, nineteen thirty, the R-N-L-I committee agreed to establish a station here, encouraged by improved coast communications across Shetland. Only eight days later, the trawler Ben Doran was wrecked off Shetland and all nine crew were lost. The nearest lifeboat had to come from Stromness, a punishing journey that took fifty-five hours. After that, the argument was no longer abstract.

Lerwick’s station became operational on the seventeenth of July, nineteen thirty, when a fifty-one foot Barnett-class lifeboat arrived from Cowes after an eight-day passage. She was deliberately chosen as a powerful mass-rescue boat, able to carry about one hundred people aboard. That tells you something important: this was never meant for neat, local incidents. It was built for distance, for urgency, for the kind of emergency that can swallow many lives at once.

If you glance at the image on your phone, you can see the Old Tolbooth, which became the station’s new shore facility in two thousand and five. An old harbour building taking on rescue work again rather suits Lerwick. This town keeps finding new uses for courage.

One of the station’s defining names is Hewitt Clark, the coxswain, meaning the lifeboat’s skipper. In nineteen ninety-seven, only four months after the all-weather lifeboat Michael and Jane Vernon came on station, Clark and his crew answered the Green Lily. The cargo ship lost power about fifteen miles out. Tugs failed to secure her. The lifeboat fought alongside repeatedly and took off five crewmen. Then helicopter winchman Bill Deacon went down onto the rolling ship and helped send the remaining ten men up in pairs. As the last two left, a wave washed Deacon overboard. He was later awarded the George Medal after his death; Clark received the R-N-L-I Gold Medal, and the lifeboat crew were honoured too. Rescue here is never only about seamanship. It is about who steps forward when the cost is plain.

On your screen, the lifeboat in harbour offers the calmer image of that calling. By the station’s ninetieth anniversary in twenty twenty, Lerwick’s volunteer crews had saved more than eight hundred lives and earned sixty-two gallantry awards.

The harbour once feared hostile sails from abroad; now the danger usually comes as failure, rock, and sea. Yet the answer is the same: somebody goes.

And after that going, how does a community hold care, grief, and continuity on land? The parish church, two minutes away, keeps part of that answer.

On your right stands St Columba’s, the Lerwick face of Lerwick and Bressay Parish Church, the largest Church of Scotland congregation in Shetland. It serves the capital and beyond, with worship shared across three places: Gulberwick, this church here in town, and Bressay across the water. That sounds orderly. In truth, it carries all the quiet strain of deciding which old vessels can still keep a community afloat.

This building rose in the late eighteen twenties, and it remains the largest church building in Shetland, a protected listed one. In eighteen seventy-one, the congregation installed an organ here, only the second Church of Scotland church to do so after church law finally relaxed in eighteen sixty-six and allowed instruments in worship again. Even praise, it seems, had to reinvent itself.

That question of what continues, and what must change, returned sharply in recent years. Parish trustees and reorganisers became the practical voice of inheritance, weighing money, buildings, and shrinking use, and deciding which sacred places could remain active. In twenty eighteen they proposed closing Bressay Church. That simple building had already lived several lives: it replaced a church from around seventeen twenty-two, which itself replaced three much older chapels. Its off-centre doors were set to dodge the worst coastal wind. Inside, memorial windows honoured people such as John Ross, a local schoolteacher, and Sir George Crookshank Hamilton. By March twenty twenty, Bressay Church had gone up for sale for twelve thousand pounds, with plans to remove memorials, before a local family stepped in hoping to keep it for community use.

Here in Lerwick, renewal took a gentler form. After renovation in two thousand eight, around three hundred worshippers gathered for a rededication in January two thousand nine. The Very Reverend Alexander MacDonald led it. Dr Ramsay Napier and Sadie Napier gave a new oak font - the basin used for baptism - crafted by Cecil Tait, with a bowl carved from local elm burr from Seafield.

A church keeps memory through prayer; next, the library keeps it through books, records, and shared knowledge. This site is generally open daily from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon.

The library on your left is a sturdy public building here on Lower Hillhead, and the image in your app shows its other unforgettable form: grey sandstone, pointed Gothic windows, and the squat crenellated tower of the former St Ringan’s Church. This is one of Lerwick’s most important promises made solid. A library can seem quieter than a fort or a lifeboat station, but the idea behind it is bold: knowledge made public. Here, that means residents and visitors alike, children, older readers, people in town, and people far out in the islands all count equally.

Shetland Library began in nineteen sixteen, before Scottish county libraries were even required by law. A pilot scheme funded by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust helped open the door early, and that matters. Shetland did not wait to be told that books, information, and learning should belong to everyone.

What makes this place so revealing is that the story is not neat at all. The library spent decades improvising. From nineteen forty-eight onward, it occupied “temporary” accommodation that dragged on for years. Then, on the twenty-ninth of June, nineteen sixty-six, the Lord Lieutenant, R. H. W. Bruce, opened a new shared library and museum building here on Lower Hillhead. It should have felt like an answer. Instead, it became only one chapter in a longer habit of adaptation.

Most visitors never quite grasp the twist. For years, the main library lived inside the former St Ringan’s Church, a place of worship turned into a house of public reading. In eighteen eighty-five and eighteen eighty-six, the Liverpool architect R. G. Sykes gave that church its Gothic shape in grey sandstone, with a central tower topped by battlements, those little castle-like blocks along the roofline. He designed it for a congregation. By the late twentieth century, that congregation had dwindled, and locals proposed a new use that was almost startling in its simplicity: let the church serve readers instead. The first plan failed, but the building still passed to Shetland Islands Council for one pound. After careful renovation under Historic Environment Scotland, a mezzanine floor and rolling shelves transformed it. Sacred space became civic space.

And still the story kept turning. During the pandemic, browsing stopped, but staff expanded delivery and collection services so books could keep moving even when people could not move freely. E-books and audiobooks surged. David Gange’s The Frayed Atlantic Edge, launched at the library in twenty nineteen, became the most borrowed physical non-fiction title of twenty twenty. In December twenty twenty-one, the service returned here after refurbishment, shifting more than sixty thousand books and materials into the building and using rolling shelving so rooms could change for talks, launches, and community events.

Inside, the shelves carry more than fiction and fact. The Shetland Collection gathers books about the islands, pamphlets, maps, periodicals, and newspaper microfilm reaching back into the nineteenth century. The library even publishes local history and poetry itself, and works with Shetland ForWirds to support writing in the Shetland dialect. This is preservation in everyday clothes: less ceremonial than a museum, perhaps, but every bit as crucial.

From here, continue to Lerwick Town Hall, where learning, ceremony, and public display meet in one grand civic stage, about one minute away. If you plan to return, the library is generally open from ten o’clock most days, with later opening until eight o’clock on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and it closes on Sunday.

On your left, look for the pale sandstone frontage with its five-bay shape, arched central doorway, and battlemented tower rising at one side.

Lerwick Town Hall likes to make an entrance. It was meant to. In the late nineteenth century, the herring trade swelled the town, meetings in the Parish Kirk no longer suited a place with growing confidence, and civic leaders chose this site on Hillhead for something more declarative: a hall that could speak for Lerwick before anyone inside said a word.

Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, laid the foundation stone here on the twenty-fourth of January, eighteen eighty-two. And then, by one of those exquisite coincidences history occasionally allows itself, Lerwick staged the first Up Helly Aa torchlight night that very same evening. So the town hall begins not only with ceremony, but with flame, procession, and performance. The official city of papers and seals met the theatrical city of torches and spectacle on the same day, and Shetland has been balancing those two selves ever since.

Architect Alexander Ross of Inverness gave the building its Scottish Baronial dress: a style that borrows the language of castles, with battlements and little corner turrets called bartizans. Builder John M. Aitken of Lerwick won the contract for three thousand two hundred and forty pounds, well over four hundred thousand pounds in today’s money. By July of eighteen eighty-three, George Thoms, Sheriff of Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, officially opened the hall. Inside were not just a council chamber and courtroom, but even police cells. Celebration and control lived under one roof.

Now, pause a moment and study the decorative ambition of the exterior. Ask yourself whether this building seems content merely to house government, or whether it is trying to teach you how Lerwick wished to be seen.

Because here is the twist: the completed hall was not originally as rich or symbolic as the town wanted you to believe. The first contract allowed for no stained glass, no great decorative programme, none of the visual drama that now defines the building’s reputation. A local merchant named Arthur Laurenson changed that story. He loved Shetland history and the Norse sagas, and he led a committee that raised money first from prominent islanders, then from donors far beyond Shetland, to turn the hall into a civic pageant in stone and glass.

One of those interior windows appears here. They transformed the hall into a kind of public history book. Ballantine and Son of Edinburgh, along with other makers, filled the building with scenes of royal successions, church foundations, battles, and Scandinavian links. The most famous is the Marriage Window: Princess Margaret of Denmark and King James the Third of Scotland, whose marriage in fourteen sixty-nine helped bind these islands to Scotland when her father could not redeem the pledged dowry lands. You can see that window on your phone as well.

And yet this grand stage has needed rescuing again and again. Crumbling sandstone, failing repairs, leaks through refurbished windows, decayed steps, even a waterlogged time capsule discovered with only its coins intact: this hall survives because people keep stepping in.

That matters, because the building’s power was never only festive. A registrar still works here, weddings still unfold here, but this was also the chamber of rule, the place where authority could applaud, record, judge, and confine. In a few minutes, at the County Buildings, we meet that sterner face more directly. If you want to come back inside, the town hall generally opens on weekdays from nine to five and closes at weekends.

In front of you is a neatly cut stone building with an uneven, castle-like front, a row of stepped gables, and a doorway set beneath a carved hood with a date stone.

County Buildings looks stern, almost composed for judgment. David Rhind gave Lerwick this Scottish baronial design in eighteen seventy-five, and that style means exactly what it suggests here: a civic building dressed with the manners of a small castle. Contractor D. Outerson and local labour raised it in stone on King Erik Street, and inside they packed together the sheriff court, prison, police station, and the sheriff clerk’s offices. It was practical, certainly, but it also made a statement. Authority in Lerwick would no longer hide in cramped, failing rooms.

And failing they had been. Before this, justice lived in the old tolbooth on Commercial Street - the town’s courthouse and jail. Local records give that lost building an uncomfortably human face. One name survives with particular force: Benjamin Fountain. He worked as a customs and excise tidewaiter, and in the eighteen twenties he landed in prison for debt, not violence. He stayed there for months. In a small port where customs men were often disliked for interfering with smuggling and the gathering of wreck wood, that confinement must have felt especially raw. His case tells you something most visitors miss: the old jail held civil prisoners too. Poverty could lock the door just as firmly as crime.

By eighteen thirty-seven, the old tolbooth had become too disgraceful to ignore, and court and prison functions shifted to Fort Charlotte - the same fort we met earlier, raised for one kind of threat and pressed into service for another. Justice here kept changing its shell in order to keep going.

On your screen, you can see how carefully this front presents itself. Those stepped gables and the slight forward push of the centre make the place look almost ceremonial, but the life inside was never tidy. Even in recent years, inspectors noted that prisoners were led from the cells through a public area and into the single courtroom, handcuffed and exposed to view.

Later, this complex became the headquarters of Zetland County Council, which held its first meeting here on the twenty-second of May, eighteen ninety. Then it shifted back toward legal work again. So this building has never been one thing for long. It has kept absorbing pressure, changing role, and carrying on.

Now let the tension ease a little. Ahead, the next stop turns the old world of garrison order toward performance, music, and an audience. Make your way to Garrison Theatre.

Stand here for a moment and look at the Garrison Theatre. It holds one of Lerwick’s most telling reversals. When it opened in nineteen oh three, nobody came here expecting curtain calls. This was a military drill hall and gymnasium, later the headquarters of the seventh Volunteer Battalion, Gordon Highlanders. Before actors learned their lines here, soldiers learned formation, fitness, and obedience. The building began with the hard business of readiness.

Then, in nineteen forty-two, came the pivot that gives this place its soul. E-N-S-A, the Entertainments National Service Association, turned the hall into a theatre for troops during the Second World War. That is keeping spirits alive in hard times in its clearest form. Sometimes a community protects people with walls and weapons; sometimes it keeps them going with songs, jokes, and the simple relief of sitting in the dark while someone on a stage reminds you that life is larger than fear.

And people came. In nineteen forty-three, George Formby and Gracie Fields both appeared here, bringing this far northern theatre into the same wartime morale circuit as some of Britain’s most beloved entertainers. Imagine that shift: a room once shaped by marching boots now ringing with laughter, music, and the warm crackle of recognition.

Inside, the scale is intimate rather than grand: two hundred and eighty seats, nineteen rows named A to S, and a sprung proscenium stage - that means a picture-frame stage, with a little give underfoot to help dancers and performers - measuring twenty-three feet and five inches wide by eighteen feet and two inches deep. Four lighting bars hang above the stage, with more in the auditorium. It is a small house, but it has welcomed big names: Elvis Costello in nineteen eighty-eight, Billy Connolly in nineteen ninety-four, and Dylan Moran in two thousand and eight.

Yet the Garrison’s real distinction is not celebrity. It is usefulness. The Isleburgh Drama Group has long kept it alive with local productions, and before Mareel opened in two thousand and twelve, this theatre even helped Shetland improvise cinema. Early Screenplay Film Festival screenings unfolded here, alongside village halls, a livestock market, and even a bus shelter in Unst. Art, in Shetland, rarely waits for perfect conditions.

Locals have defended this place with characteristic honesty. A survey in twenty sixteen found overwhelming support, along with blunt complaints about uncomfortable seats and shallow sightlines. In other words, people cared enough to argue for it properly. The Friends of the Garrison formed the next year to help secure its future.

That matters. By now, perhaps you can feel the pattern: this town survives by teaching its buildings new tricks. Here, defence became delight, and morale became part of endurance. Carry that thought with you as you walk on to Montfield Hospital, about six minutes from here. In island life, mending the spirit and mending the body often belong to the same story.

On your left is a long, pale roughcast building with a low horizontal shape and broad veranda fronts running along its face.

Montfield tells a very island lesson in improvised healthcare: services here kept adapting, room by room and role by role, as need pressed in from every side. When P. Thompson opened this place in November nineteen twenty-eight as the Zetland County Sanatorium, he gave its twenty-four beds verandas so patients could be wheeled outside for open-air treatment, a remarkably bold idea for a hospital this far from bigger centres.

The National Health Service took it in during nineteen forty-eight, and in nineteen sixty-two it became Montfield Hospital. That same year, a quiet change in authority unfolded as well: Matron Mary C. Johnson became the last matron here, and after her the work passed into a new management pattern, with ward sisters carrying more of the daily burden.

If you glance at the image in the app, that long frontage still seems to hold the memory of those wheeled beds and careful routines. Later, Montfield turned toward older patients. Harry, admitted after a stroke in September two thousand and seven, insisted he wanted to go home; staff remembered him as one patient who did manage to get home again after a stroke. But hope sat beside strain. By two thousand and nine, thirty-seven people were waiting for care-home places, some for as long as forty-three weeks. The interim unit closed in November two thousand and eleven, and by twenty thirteen N-H-S Shetland had moved its headquarters upstairs.

What does a community owe its most vulnerable people when every mile of distance makes care more fragile? Gilbert Bain, our final stop, gathers that question into fuller view. Weekday hours here are generally nine till five, with weekends closed.

On your left is a long, pale-rendered hospital block with flat rooflines, broad rectangular windows, and a simple projecting entrance that gives the building its unmistakably practical face.

Gilbert Bain Hospital does not pretend to grandeur. Its power lies in something more intimate: the determination of a small town to keep remaking care whenever need changes shape.

That story began even before the hospital took Gilbert Bain’s name. In eighteen eighty-nine, this site answered a brutal local demand for fever beds through the Lerwick Combination Hospital. Then came Bain himself, a Shetland businessman who spent his working life far from home, in India and Singapore, and sent back the gift that opened a cottage hospital on King Harald Street in nineteen oh one. If you glance at your screen, his portrait carries the kind of steady confidence that often changes a town without fuss. And if you look at the older hospital image, you can see how modestly the whole thing began.

When the N-H-S, the National Health Service, took shape in nineteen forty-eight, Gilbert Bain joined it, and older local arrangements folded into that new public system. Then, in April nineteen fifty-nine, a foundation stone marked a larger ambition. Architect William Arthur Baird Laing drew the new hospital, and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother opened it in August nineteen sixty-one on the site of a former infectious diseases hospital. Even that fresh start needed improvisation almost at once: in June nineteen sixty-two, staff opened a maternity annexe in part of the old isolation block beside the main building, because island families needed somewhere for births, and needed it quickly.

That habit of adapting never stopped. The hospital now runs fifty-six staffed beds and two operating theatres. It welcomes around one hundred and forty births each year, earned full baby-friendly accreditation in two thousand and three, and in two thousand and twenty-two planned a dedicated bereavement suite for parents facing baby loss, with support from local charities. Joy and sorrow, here, share the same corridor.

You can feel the wider islands gathered into this place. B-B-C One’s Island Medics showed helicopters, fishing-vessel rescues, and the R-N-L-I, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, all feeding into care here. What rescue crews begin at sea, this hospital must finish on land.

And yet the story remains unfinished. A C-T scanner arrived in two thousand and seven, wards were refurbished in two thousand and eight, but by two thousand and nineteen the building was judged not fit for purpose: well maintained, yes, yet cramped, costly, and hard to expand. Plans for replacement and repair have carried on into the present.

If one image from this walk stays with you, let it be this: in Lerwick, buses, boats, archives, courts, churches, theatres, and hospitals all serve the same quiet instinct - when life grows difficult, the town alters its institutions rather than surrendering them. Fittingly, this place never truly closes: it remains open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week.