Glasgow is a big city with a lot to offer. On our first (and only) full day we hunted down Culture, grabbed it with both hands and gave it a big fat kiss.
Our accommodation is in the West End of Glasgow, the hip area close to the University, which was established in 1451. A short walk through streets of beautiful Victorian tenements is the Hunterian Museum. Within the museum is the former home of Charles Rennie Mackintosh – sort of. The actual house was demolished in the sixties because it was subsiding into old mine workings. So the complete interior was stripped out and put into a rather nasty looking concrete extension to the Hunterian art gallery. Admission is by a guided tour from the gallery. Our guide was enthusiastic and engaging, and told us in some detail about the three rooms which make up this reproduction house. Mackintosh was a designer, architect and artist who did his best work at the end of the 19th century. He is to Glasgow what Gaudi is to Barcelona and Frank Lloyd Wright is to Chicago, a pioneering modernist who is still very relevant today.
Half a mile down the hill is Kelvingrove Museum, a magnificent palace of Victorian Gothic and a fabulous place to visit. The building is reminiscent of the V&A and the Natural History Museum, a huge an beautiful exhibition of art, taxidermy and with bizarre sculpted heads suspended from the ceiling. There is more CRM stuff and some gorgeous paintings by Scottish Colourists, who were influenced by the French Impressionists. All that culture makes one peckish, and just as I was buying sandwiches the awesome pipe organ started playing some Handel (or possibly Bach). So we sat and munched our sarnies while being entertained by the organist who played with his feet as well as his hands, a TV screen showed his feet in action.
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Tiring of being informed and educated we walked down Sauchiehall Street towards the city centre. A worthwhile diversion was to the Tenement House which is a preserved Victorian tenement apartment, shown as it would have looked seventy years ago. It has four rooms and is mostly let by gas mantles, and there is a bed in the cupboard in the kitchen! It gives a great insight into how most Glaswegians lived until about fifty years ago.
Glasgow is set out on a grid like American cities, so it's quite easy to get around. Buchanan Street is like a pedestrianised Oxford Street, lots of upmarket shops in big sandstone buildings. Princes Square is a very pretty shopping centre with lovely art nouveau stairs.
The weather forecast is for rain for the rest of the week, so Julie bought a new waterproof coat to prepare for the worst. We paid a brief visit to a design centre called the Lighthouse, and saw yet more CRM stuff, this guy gets everywhere in Glasgow! The "viewing" platform is less interesting than the top of the multi-storey car park in Hounslow, don't go there!
Getting a bit tired of walking we took advantage of our Meercat Movies deal and went to see Dunkirk. It is thrilling, nail-biting, harrowing and uplifting. You feel like you are in the cockpit with the Spitfire pilot, and in the sea with the floundering soldiers. Dinner was at a very cheap and cheerful Yates, I recommend the Echo Falls Chardonnay at a very reasonable nine quid. It was the perfect balance to a day that was slightly culture-heavy, too much for my poor nerdy brain.
timharnesstravels 