An impressive long red sandstone building in the Beaux Arts style, the Scrymgeour Building provides the home for the Law School and Department of Psychology at the University of Dundee. Located on Park Place, in the heart of the University's principal campus, this was built as Dundee Training College 1912-20 by local architect Thomas Martin Cappon (1863 - 1939). The foundation stone was laid in September 1912 by Robert Haldane-Duncan, the Earl of Camperdown (1841 - 1918), and the College was officially opened on 7th October 1921 by Katharine Stewart-Murray, the Duchess of Atholl (1874 - 1960), who soon after became Scotland's first female Member of Parliament. The University of Dundee inherited the B-listed building in 1975, after the Training College (by then Dundee College of Education) moved to West Ferry, and named it after Henry Scrymgeour, a 16th-century academic lawyer who was member of a notable local family with their seat at Dudhope Castle. The building was re-opened as the Law School in 1979 by Henry Scrymgeour-Wedderburn, 11th Earl of Dundee (1902-83).
The Scrymgeour Building comprises an E-plan construction of three storeys over a raised basement. There is a central Diocletian window, that is repeated on the north and south wings. The building is connected by a bridge to the former Demonstration School to the north, which is a similarly-styled building and is now home to the University's Computing Centre.
Perhaps its most vital time came in 1939 when a team developing Radar for the Air Ministry, under Robert Watson-Watt (1892 - 1973), was relocated here from Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk which was feared to be vulnerable to German attack. The world's first airborne interception radar system for detecting aircraft and the first air-to-surface-vessel radar system were completed here. For many years after the College authorities complained about the heavy cabling and switchgear the Air Ministry scientists had left, which rather disfigured the interior of the building.
