Speakers: Geoffrey Stell & Anthony Stell
Thursday 24 September at 6:30 pm
Queen Margaret Hall, 53 Blackness Road, Linlithgow EH49 7JA
and Saturday 26 September at 2:30 pm
St Michael’s R.C. Church, 53 Blackness Road, Linlithgow EH49 7JA
Our guest speaker was the renowned local building historian Geoffrey Stell. From 1991 until his retirement, Geoffrey was Head of Architecture at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and was responsible for all architectural, surveying and recording work of the RCAHMS.
The talk covered the intriguing evolution of the church building 1887-1894, as well as the original St Joseph’s Primary School and other past and present features within the church precincts.
Alan Corrie of Images Above has produced some superb aerial videos of the school and Geoffrey showed them.
Geoffrey’s talk was supported by his son Anthony, who is Head of Clinical Informatics at the University of Melbourne and has done some very interesting digital modelling of the church and school based on his father’s material and using a safe version (we hope!) of AI Anthropic Claude.
Geoffrey followed up on this talk with a conducted tour of the church on Saturday 26th September 2026.