Appleton Tower

Part of the University of Edinburgh The building is named after Sir Edward Victor Appleton, the winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physics. His Nobel medal is on display in the concourse in a dusty, completely ignored glass cabinet.

Most of the 1st year science-type lectures (maths,Physics,Computer Sciecne etc) take place in this building.

As mentioned before it is monstrously ugly. It lookes like a large shoebox. It has tiles on the side, but these just fall off leaving ugly scars up the sides.

Rumour has it that it was built in the 60's as a temporary building and was only supposed to last ten or fifteen years. However because it has some of the largest lecture theaters in the university it is too usefull to pull down (and probably too expensive to replace)

Not a lot of people know this but, at the top of the Appleton Tower (in the aforementioned Department of Neuroscience they carry out experiments on live animals. Some of these involve lesioning parts of rats' brains to see if they behave diferently.

Also I would be wary of the student who said that she liked going up to the top floor to look out over the city, Appleton Tower is a popular choice amongst depressed students who wish to kill themselves by jumping off a high building.

The appleton tower, at first glance, is an architectural oddity. For no apparent reason, the ground floor¹ is one floor above ground level and is accessed by a flight of stairs, leading up to a large balcony (you can walk straight in to the basement...) .

Looking out from the balcony, across the NCP car park, the potterow/health center/business school is visible. Strange, it seems to do the same weird balcony thing. Some kind of failed grand plan?

What happened was back in the 70s, the university decided it would have to get rid of all these old tenements, before the costs of getting them compliant with health and safety regulations went through the roof. The plan was to knock down a lot of them, abandon/sell others, and create a new campus/complex built around george square. Tenements were knocked down, the David Hume Tower and Appleton Tower were built, and to the north the Potterow complex was constructed. All that was needed now was the administration building, which would house all the offices that had been uprooted from the tenements, and provide a nice raised walkway between the two 'balconies'.

And then they ran out of money.

And then they leased the land to NCP

Which is why the building is so inexplicably deformed, and there's a hideous looking carpark in the middle of a university campus.

1 - first floor for all you merkins...