Moat Brae is a Georgian townhouse designed by the architect Walter Newall in Dumfries, Scotland. (Newall also oversaw the conversion of an old windmill tower to form what is now the Dumfries Camera Obscura.) The Scottish playwright and novelist J.M. Barrie, who created the character Peter Pan, was a friend of Stewart Gordon, whose father owned the house.
As a child, Barrie regularly played in the house and garden while at school at the nearby Dumfries Academy. Barrie claimed that it was the adventures he had at Moat Brae that inspired his stories of the boy who never wanted to grow up. Barrie was appointed by the Gordon brothers as the “Keeper of the Logbook ” for the pirate ship-shaped playhouse in the garden.
Peter Pan first appeared briefly as a character in Barrie’s 1902 novel The Little White Bird. The author later returned to the character of Peter Pan, putting him at the center of his play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. The play was first performed in London on December 27, 1904.
After the success of the 1904 play, Barrie’s publishers extracted the chapters featuring Peter Pan from his earlier novel and published them in 1906 under the title Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, alongside illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Barrie later expanded the stage play’s storyline in the novel Peter and Wendy.
Barrie is said to have based Peter Pan on his older brother, David, who died in a skating accident just before his 14th birthday becoming, in memory, forever a boy.
Moat Brae is a medium-scale (for the time) house, two stories high above a raised basement and five bays wide. It was one of the first houses built on what would later become George Street, Dumfries, and it occupied a large plot of ground that sloped quite steeply down to the River Nith.
For many years, after the Gordon family left, the house was used as a nursing home. After plans to turn it into a hotel fell through, the building was purchased by the Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust, which converted it into a children’s literary center that opened in 2019. Unfortunately, the trust fell on hard times and closed its doors in August 2024. Currently, the house can only be seen from outside.
