Glasgow is
rapidly shedding its undeserved dour image for one as Scotland with Style, and
the indoor attractions can keep anyone busy for weeks, so it’s worth an
expedition even in the worst winter weather Scotland can come up with.
There’s a tempting and sizeable list of freebies such as the Burrell Collection,
out at Pollok Country Park and a tour of the jaw-droppingly lavish
marble-encrusted City Chambers. Tim Locke looks at how to gen up on science,
delve into social history, immerse yourself in Glasgow’s Mackintosh style
and win at football.
There’s a stupendous amount packed here at this futuristic titanium-clad building by the Clyde, including laser shows at the ultra-advanced ScottishPower Planetarium and 2D and 3D movies at the immense IMAX cinema. The Science Mall, with some 300 exhibits set out on three floors, lures even the non scientifically inclined in the most entertaining way conceivable – you can become surgeon for a moment, encounter some very slippery optical illusions, or try your hand at decoding messages. Live science shows and workshops might give you the chance to create your own flying machine or handle giant Madagascan cockroaches. And if outdoor visibility’s half good, hop onto a lift for a vertigo-inducing panorama from the adjoining Glasgow Tower, Scotland’s tallest free-standing structure (now open after four years of technical glitches) – uniquely rotating with the prevailing wind, all the way from the ground, 127 metres below, and pivoted on a base just 65 centimetres across.
If
there was ever a place built for avoiding the winter blues, this is it, even if
getting there means a blustery riverside walk across Glasgow Green. Built 1898,
the Winter Garden is a subtropical paradise of a conservatory, with a
café at one end. It adjoins the grandiose People’s Palace museum,
housing a compelling social history of Glasgow from 1750 to the present
covering life in the city’s East End, the days of wartime rationing, and
much more. One 16 free Glasgow Museums that also include the Museum of
Transport.
It
may have been completed as long ago as 1906, but Charles Rennie
Mackintosh’s Art Nouveau masterpiece has to be classified as one of
Britain’s greatest modern buildings. Visiting the GSA is almost like
entering Mackintosh’s brain: the mostly student-led tours encompass every
aspect of this remarkable architect-designer, who was inspired by Japanese
ornament, Scottish baronial chunkiness and the natural world – for
instance, the purple of the Scottish thistle, and tree-like pillars in the
Library, disappearing up into a forest-like canopy. Round off a visit with a
visit to the nearby Willow Tearooms, also designed by Mackintosh.
Attached
to the footie HQ at Hampden Park, this is an inspirational look at the
beautiful game north of the border, from the 1870s when Queen’s Park
seemed to win everything right up to the present days when it’s just
Celtic and Rangers. And that’s not just on the field – the Tartan
Army, table football, the media, the Tartan Army, and such relics such as the
world’s oldest match cap and match ticket (1872, Scotland v England). The
tour into the vast stadium (an extra £2.50/£1.25, where Scotland
play at home, takes you into the dressing rooms, up the players’ tunnel -
with the accompanying Hampden Roar - and into the Royal Box. In the Warm-up
Area measure the speed of your shot with the Hampden Hotshots.
Eat
Room
One
Devonshire Gardens, Glasgow, G12 0UX
Tel:
0141 341 0000
Opened
last September and serving unpretentious, 1970s retro chic food in a modern,
funky restaurant, this 120-seater is Glasgow’s new gastro wonder,
attached to One Devonshire Gardens ,one of Glasgow’s top hotels. It
unashamedly has the likes of scotch eggs, chicken nuggets, salmon pot noodle
and Black Forest gateau on the menu – but the dishes bear no resemblance
to their hackneyed namesakes. Something called prawn cocktail turns out to be
not quite what it sounds – a diced apple and avocado tower topped with
crème fraîche and an apple crisp, plus tempura of king prawns with
Marie Rose sauce, lemon mayonnaise and a confit tomato. Three-course a la carte
for around £25; the all-day menu includes great hot sandwiches for
£6.50; Room Early menu (before 7pm), two courses £15, three courses
£18; Sunday brunch (11–4), menu items £5–11.
Stay
Langs
2
Port Dundas Place, Glasgow, G2 3LD
Tel:
0141 333 1500 - Fax: 0141 333 5700
www.langshotels.co.uk
Right
in the middle of things for theatre, shopping and attractions, this 100-room
hotel has generously sized standard rooms furnished with modern flair and
equipped with enough extras to ensure staying in during the long evening will
be a pleasure in itself – you’ll find a Playstation, satellite TV,
CD player, body-jet power shower and more in each room. Larger duplex suites
are light, airy and very swish indeed, and there’s also a health spa and
two restaurants – contemporary Scottish dining at Las Brisas and Asian
and Far Eastern cuisine at Oshi. Mention Hotline and they’ll do you
either a standard room (for two) or a family room (for two adults and two
children) for £90 – until the end of February 2005 (subject to
availability).
Drink
Auctioneers
6
North Court, Vincent Place G1 2DP
Tel:
0141 229 5851
So called
because this was once McTears’ auction room, this city-centre pub is
suitably stashed with an amazing array of bits and pieces. Among the items are
framed football shirts and football programmes, ancient radios and TVs, statues,
golf clubs, auction posters and a stag’s head; lot numbers are jokingly
displayed as if they were for sale. The former valuation booths now make snug
areas around the main room, but the atmosphere’s more lively than cosy.
When big football matches or other sporting events are on, it gets packed as
people watch the four big-screen TVs. Inexpensive pub grub such as mixed grill,
home-made steak pie or haggis, neeps and tatties. Main courses around
£5.25-£6.95, wines £4.89–£6.89. Children’s
licence operates 12–5.
Style City
To many that
don’t know it, Glasgow still suffers preconceptions as a daunting, hard,
even grim industrial place. But, as Tim Locke finds, such views are wildly off
the mark: it’s a place of real verve and visual appeal.
‘Scotland with Style’ is the
buzz phrase for Glasgow’s 2004 relaunch, which bids to underline the essence of Glasgow-ness.
According to Eddie Friel, the chief executive for tourism in Greater Glasgow
and the Clyde Valley, ‘Glasgow is in a beauty competition with other
cities globally’ – particularly the likes of up-and-coming
European short breaks destinations. But Glasgow has its trump card: where
Barcelona has the Modernist architect Gaudí, Glasgow has its very
distinctive trend-setting Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), the
leading exponent of the Scottish art nouveau movement and seen by the tourist
board as the city’s unique selling point.
As a southerner who has visited the city
over several decades, I would
claim Glasgow is by far our greatest Victorian city. Apart from the
moorland hills that unexpectedly appear at the end of the long, straight
vistas, there’s even something of Manhattan about it – with its
brownstone-like building stone, grid-like arrangement of blocks and general
creative buzz. Not for nothing have some movie-makers used Glasgow as a
backdrop for New York settings.
Glasgow grew rich on tobacco, cotton and
sugar trading, ship-building and shipping. All that has practically come to an
end now, but the massive wealth that the industrialists brought lives on in
several forms. Architecturally the city ranges from the brilliantly innovative,
such as Gardner’s Warehouse (1856, the first commercial use of a
prefabricated structure after the Crystal Palace), to the staggering civic pomp
of the City Chambers with its marble-encrusted interior; and from the
Necropolis (by the cathedral), one of Britain’s most grandiose Victorian
burial grounds, to the wonderfully eccentric former Templeton’s Carpet
Factory of 1889, modelled on the Doge’s Palace in Venice (well, sort of).
On the west side of the centre in particular, are classical terraces that vie
with Edinburgh for elegance. In the university area of the West End, Park
Circus looks out onto the gorgeously verdant swathe of Kelvingrove Park.
There’s also the humbler side: the
People’s Palace museum presents the life of working-class people in
Glasgow’s East End (its adjacent Winter Garden is a spectacular Victorian
glasshouse that doubles as a café). Meanwhile the Tenement House is the evocative
gaslit flat of the compulsively hoarding spinster Agnes Toward, who modernised
virtually nothing up to her death in 1975.
New developments along the Clyde promise
big things over the next decade: within yards of the museum tallship Glenlee (built 1896 and the last Clyde-built sailing vessels still afloat)
Sir Norman Foster’s ‘Armadillo’ is a shiny new titanium
convention and concert venue across the river from the similarly futuristic
Science Centre and IMAX Cinema, and more will follow.
Some Victorian magnates’ money funded
some of Britain’s richest fine and decorative art collections. The
McLellan Galleries are home until November 2005 of highlights from the vast
Kelvingrove Museum (currently closed for a major refit), including paintings by
the revolutionary group of artists known as the Glasgow Boys, who in the 19th
century broke convention and painted out of doors. You can see much of the rest
of the art stash at the Glasgow Museum Resource Centre in the outskirts at
Nitshill, where free daily guided tours take you round a hangar-like store
crammed with wonderful stuff.
Back in 1944, a wealthy shipping agent by
the name of Sir William Burrell gifted the city his priceless hand-chosen
collection of works of art from medieval Europe, the Far East and the ancient
world. In 1983, a quarter of a century after his death, the Burrell Collection
opened in the leafy Pollok Estate in the southern suburbs. Designed by Barry
Gasson, John Meunier and Brit Andreson it was the building of the decade, with
a succession of inviting spaces showing off the art to best advantage, and a
long window looking out directly on to woodland. This was also the beginning of
great things for Glasgow, as important a catalyst to a change of image as the
Guggenheim has been in Bilbao.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s influence
on design – furniture as well as buildings – was paramount. Drawing
elements from Japanese as well as Scottish styles and working closely with his
wife Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances and Herbert McNair – a
quartet known as the ‘Spook School’ – he created his own
niche in art history. The student-led guided tour around his most acclaimed
building, the Glasgow School of Art, gives a brilliant insight into the man.
Much of his pagan symbolism – the rose and the tree of life for example
– is enigmatic, but it’s clear that here he wanted to create a
dialogue with the art students. The library evokes a woodland with its pillars
of dark wood stretching up to a crisscross of timbers like a forest canopy, The
top floor has vault-like corridors that seem to belong in a basement than near
the roof, lending an air of topsy-turvydom that challenges our understanding of
how buildings work. And as a former student himself, he put in several visual
jokes where students meet authority: for instance, the supervisor’s
office has stained glass panels that look strangely like bloodshot, all-seeing
eyes.
Near the School of Art in Sauchiehall
Street are the Willow Tea Rooms, the only survivor of several tearooms he
designed (though there’s a replica branch in Buchanan Street) – its
dainty lightness was an astonishing departure from the cluttered, dark
Victorian interiors that had been the norm for so long. His Scotland Street
School just escaped the bulldozers in the 1970s and now contains a museum of
education. Mackintosh’s house at 6 Florentine Terrace was demolished but
its interiors have been painstakingly reassembled in the Hunterian Art Gallery.
Another of his designs, the former Glasgow Herald Building, contains a centre
for art and design, and features an exhibition about his life and work. A short
train trip from town to Helensburgh gets you to Hill House, Mackintosh’s
finest domestic design. Now owned by the National Trust for Scotland it’s
full of hallmark Mackintosh features.
One of the most remarkable recent
Mackintosh-inspired endeavours has been the House for an Art Lover on the south
side of the city. Here in 1996 was recreated a house that he designed for an
architectural competition 95 years earlier to create a ‘house for an art
lover’. The judges loved his entry but disqualified him as he
hadn’t submitted enough drawings. But with painstaking research and
attention to every detail, a team of designers has managed to re-create it and
give Glasgow a new Mackintosh masterpiece.
Where to drink
Babbity Bowster
Blackfriars Street
In an 18th-century building on the east
side of the centre towards the cathedral, this long-established, friendly,
conversationalists’ pub has a continental café feel. A cheerful,
simply furnished room lit by large windows, and warmed by a peat fire;
good-value Scottish and French dishes; Scots items for around a fiver or even
less include Cullen skink (soup made with smoked haddock), haggis and neeps,
and stovies (a hotpot with meat and potato); plus a choice of real ales, plus
draught cider and malt whiskies. £10–15 for three courses. Also has
double/twin rooms for £50, and singles at £35, room only. Open
11am–midnight (Sun 12.30–midnight). Tel 0141 552 5055
Where to eat
Quigley’s
158–166 Bath Street
A fusion of tastes awaits here in this
restaurant in the former Christie’s auction rooms: freshest ingredients
are used to create worldwide cuisine; Atkins-friendly items are flagged up on
the menu. The Manhattan clam chowder has an alluring piquancy with its topping
of bacon shavings and spring onions, while honey roast duck breast comes with
caramelized sweet potato, pak choi and shitake mushrooms. Under the same
ownership, and in the same building, are Kelly Cooper Bar and Lowdown, a nicely
mellow eatery downstairs that offers Spanish tapas with a contemporary twist.
Quigley’s open Monday–Friday 12–2.30pm, and daily
7–11.30pm; pre-theatre menu Monday–Saturday 5–7pm. Lowdown
open Monday–Thursday 11.30am–1am, Friday –Sunday 11.30am3am;
happy hour 4–7pm.
Tel 0141 331
4060 Web www.quigleysglasgow.co.uk
Where to stay
Arthouse Hotel
129 Bath Street
Great location five minutes’ walk
from the Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow Film Theatre: the former Department
of Education building of 1911 with its original lift and lots of period
features (including 700 gold leaf lions embossed on the walls around the
staircase), has been stylishly restored, and attired in modish colours and
modern art prints. Bedrooms are high-ceilinged, some with purple velvet walls,
tall stained glass windows and designer armchairs and sofas. Accomplished
restaurant in the basement. Doubles £115, suites (with sofa bed) £155;
includes breakfast Friday–Sunday; some special offers at weekends.
Tel 0141 221
6789 Web www.arthousehotel.com
Since the demise of heavy engineering,
Glasgow has re-emerged economically as a service economy. Shopping is second
only to London and focuses on the ‘Golden Z’ of Aryle, Buchanan and
Sauchiehall streets. The city now employs 55,000 in tourism – more than
shipbuilding did at its peak (38,000) and is recognized as the fastest growing
convention destination in the world. Tim Locke talks to four/five people
who’ve made their way in the city.
Hamish Millar is the Centre Manager for
Buchanan Galleries - one of Scotland’s busiest shopping centres. It is
situated in the heart of Glasgow city centre, where the daily influx of tourists
and shoppers help make the area one of the most vibrant and colourful places
north of the Border.
“Glasgow
has so much to offer, from the architecture and quality of life, to the
nightlife and arts and entertainment and, of course, the shopping. But what
makes Glasgow so special is the combination of all these elements and more
importantly the city’s people and the part they play by bringing their
unique character to these qualities.
“I think Glasgow can only continue to flourish; the thriving business
community, the eclectic range of shops and the attitude of the people will
ensure that the city can only go one way and that is up.”
Oli Norman is a
native Glaswegian. The 26 year-old former lawyer is now the Managing Director
of DADA, a specialist events and marketing company offering an innovative
approach to launch parties and events within the entertainment, retail and
leisure sectors, throughout Glasgow and central Scotland. DADA uses a
pioneering website and marketing system which is responsible for many of the
city’s leading launch parties.
“Glasgow is a
truly vibrant city and really exceeds all expectations when it comes to its
first class social scene. People going out in Glasgow are spoilt for choice as
it’s brimming with quality bars, great restaurants and first class shops,
theatres and museums – the city is alive 24/7 and there’s always
something to do.
“It’s
exciting for DADA to be creating and organising launches and events in such a
dynamic city, providing truly superb and memorable evenings out for such a
sophisticated audience”.