Fraserburgh West Parish Church and Victoria Street

Victoria Street looking towards the West Parish Church and the Hexagon.The junction with Cross Street (A90) is beyond the line of parked cars on the left, these are parked outside the Bellslea football ground.

Fraserburgh West Parish Church was built 1876, at  a cost of £4,000, and stands on a traffic  island, known locally as The Hexagon, formed by  the junction of several of the principal Victorian streets of  the town. The  kirk's main entrance looks  down Victoria Street towards the sea.

The church was built  during the Victorian expansion of the town and was intended to serve those parishioners of the original Old Parish Church  who had moved out to the new, fashionable and prosperous, expanding district on what was then the edge of the town.  During its construction the church was described as 'among the green fields high on a slope on the edge of the town, a handsome Gothic structure'.

Designed by architects MacGibbon and Ross, and mainly constructed of dark sandstone, the church's  elegant steeple forms  a prominent landmark on the Fraserburgh skyline and is clearly seen from several points as  The  Line approaches  the town.

The Town Council began planning   Victoria Street  in 1857, when the monarch for whom it was named had been on the throne for twenty years. The street  had been laid out  by 1869 when it  appears on the 25" Ordnance  Survey map of Fraserburgh.  However, at this time there were no buildings between Seaforth Street and Cross Street and very few beyond the Cross Street junction. The street was destined to have an imposing church building at each end  and to  become part of a development in which, as  a report of 1875 states, 'numerous improvements have been made in recent times; elegant and comfortable houses have been erected and new streets laid out on  asymmetrical plan.' 

The South Church, built as  a United Free Church a quarter of a century after the West Church,  now occupies the site of the old parish school on Seaforth Street, slightly off set from  the bottom of Victoria Street.