New sass for an old lass

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 14 years ago

New sass for an old lass

Scrubbed up ... the Glasgow Science Centre.

Scrubbed up ... the Glasgow Science Centre.Credit: Neil Setchfield/Lonely Planet

I watch the scene unfold with a growing sense of impotence. I am a tourist in Glasgow, a city I once called home, in a street that was once a busy roadway but is now a pedestrian shopping precinct by day and a binge-drinkers' battlefield by night.

The rush hour is just about to tick into gear and two neds (for that is what they are called here) are stealing the seat from a locked-up bicycle. They need it for the bike they stole earlier; the one from which some poor commuter took his seat in the vain hope that it would deter the likes of them.

In a few seconds a man whose bike has no seat will need to get in touch with a man whose seat has no bike. They should have a special section in the personal ads.

Shoppers and office workers scurry past. The skinny, sketchy, tattooed characters on the bikes operate efficiently, without fear of confrontation. The Scottish word is gallus it rhymes with palace and means that you have plenty of brass fortifying your neck.

I briefly think of marching towards them, shaking my fist and shouting "Hey, that's my bike" but what if I get there and they haven't run off? I am, after all, in what was until recently the knife-crime capital of Europe.

I think of whipping out my digital camera and saying "Gotcha!" from a safe distance but I'm dissuaded by the thought of the hours waiting at the Western General Hospital before it can be removed from my colon.

Then something magical and very Glasgow happens. A young woman a girl, really smartly dressed and walking past briskly, slows near them and says in a loud voice, "That's disgraceful, that is." The youths look at her blankly. The bicycle seat separated from its bike and attached to its new home, they take off without a word.

"You should be ashamed of yourselves," she shouts after them. Or maybe she was shouting at me and everyone else who did nothing. Because doing nothing is not the Glasgow way.

Advertisement

A few weeks after this visit, Lonely Planet announced Glasgow as one of its top 10 cities to visit this year up there with Shanghai, Lisbon, Chicago and Mexico City.

Looking at the list, you sense there is a missing sub-deck to this headline, as in: "Top 10 Places To Visit (if you've already been to the really fantastic ones like Sydney, Paris, New York and London)."

Even Edinburgh, a mere 70 kilometres away, is a more obvious choice for tourists, with its fairytale castle that floats floodlit above the city at night. But that lassie in Sauchiehall Street said more about Glasgow than ancient battlements or chancers who could be looking for a free ride anywhere from Rome to Rio. Glasgow, bruised and battle-scarred though it may be, is a city with a soul.

Once the famed "Second City" not just of Britain but the British Empire, Glasgow shrank in the immediate postwar years as its poorest were taken from its crumbling slums and cast far and wide to heartless housing estates on its fringes and soulless "new towns" like Cumbernauld and East Kilbride.

The inner city's population of more than a million has dwindled to less than 600,000, leaving gaps that it is just beginning to fill.

So where does that leave Glasgow now? Scrubbed up for the new millennium, it's a surprisingly clean, vibrant, forward-looking city with a lot of history, some beautiful streets of honeyed sandstone and, OK, a bit of an attitude problem.

Where it competes with London and beats other sprawling metropolises out of sight is that it not only has a lot to offer but what it has is mostly in one place right in the heart of the city.

Glasgow is a shopper's paradise where you can buy everything from authentic designer gear to knock-offs. It has two major pedestrianised streets: Sauchiehall and Argyle, which run almost parallel, albeit a few hundred metres apart, linked by a third car-free zone in Buchanan St.

Dotted in and around that grid are splendid new and renovated shopping malls such as the Sauchiehall Street Centre, the Buchanan Galleries, the super-stylish Princes Square, the child-friendly St Enoch Centre (the largest glass structure in Europe) and jewellery shops of the Argyle Arcade. At the weekend there's the Barras ("barrows") market, which is like our Paddy's Market.

Further to the east is the enormous Parkhead Forge shopping mall while in the West End, in the shadow of Glasgow's faux Oxbridge University building, there are smaller boutiques, antique and specialty shops, including De Courcy's Antique Craft Arcade and its excellent second-hand record shops for vinyl junkies.

The Italian Quarter in the thriving Merchant City old sandstone warehouses and markets converted into designer shops, restaurants and boutique hotels shows Glasgow's surprisingly sophisticated face.

The nightlife is also legendary at least half a dozen clubs spill onto Sauchiehall Street alone with pubs galore and the best Indian restaurants outside of Bradford to help soak up the abundantly consumed alcohol.

Glasgow also has a proud musical history from Lulu to Franz Ferdinand and these days King Tut's Wah Wah Lounge is reckoned to be one of the top 10 live music club venues in the world. But the jewel in the entertainment crown is The Arches, cavernous vaults underneath Glasgow's elevated Central Station, which were originally run as art spaces and held dance parties to support them.

Then the dance parties became more popular than the art and now the whole thing is one massive live music, theatre, gallery, club and restaurant hub that people travel to from all over Europe to check out.

This "art begets life begets art" notion is very Glasgow and art here often takes on a practical bent. The Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery must be one of the few places in the world where you can see a Spitfire fighter-plane engine and a Salvador Dali masterpiece under the same roof.

Probably Scotland's most famous architect and designer is Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose deco buildings and interiors are dotted around the city, from the Glasgow School of Art to the thriving replicas of Miss Cranston's Tearooms, fitted out with his famous "ladder" chairs and "Glasgow Rose" motifs.

Down by the River Clyde, where the QE2 luxury liner was built, the shipyards have been replaced by designer homes and public buildings such as the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, which looks like the offspring of a metal armadillo and our own Opera House.

The stainless steel blobs that are the Glasgow Science Museum, stunningly juxtaposed with BBC Scotland's stylish rectangular glass HQ, are joined to the northside of the river by a pedestrian bridge that opens to allow boats and floatplanes through.

To fully appreciate Glasgow dining, you have to understand the cosmopolitan nature of the city. Italians have been feeding the local populace for generations, as have Pakistanis and Northern Indians.

Then there has been the more recent realisation that the basic fodder of Highland life fish and oats are considered health foods anywhere else. Even the "great chieftain o' the puddin' race", the haggis, is a high-protein, low-GI feast if done properly. So while dozens of restaurants, such as the long-established Ashoka in the West End and the more recent Wee Curry Shop, keep the curry flag flying, and the likes of Fratelli Sarti and Paperino's feed the need for pizza and pasta, the ironically named Ubiquitous Chip and, especially, Cafe Gandolfi put a modern twist on traditional Scottish fare.

Dining out is a big deal in Glasgow these days, as is the appreciation that there's more to Scotland than tartan and bagpipes. For this returning expat, seeing fistfuls of restaurants proudly proclaiming that they serve Scottish cuisine is a curiosity verging on culture shock.

There's a spirit about Glasgow; an icing on the rich cake of its many attractions. When they built a new bridge to cross the Clyde, it was set at an unusual angle. The city desperately tried to conjure up a suitable official name for it but the locals beat them to it. The Squinty Bridge was how it was quickly dubbed and still remains. Gallus!

TRIP NOTES


Emirates flies Sydney to Glasgow daily with a brief stopover in Dubai. British Airways, British Midlands, easyJet and Ryanair, plus international carriers like Lufthansa and United, have frequent flights between London and Glasgow. Trains between London and Glasgow leave every half hour or so and fares range from about £40 ($80) to more than £100 (depending when you book). The journey takes at least 4½hours. See nationalrail.co.uk.


Hotel du Vin & Bistro, 1 Devonshire Gardens, Glasgow, rooms from £150, phone +44 141 339 2001, see hotelduvin.com. Marks Hotel, 110 Bath Street, Glasgow, rooms from £69, phone + 44 141 353 0800, see markshotels.com. Park Inn, 2 Port Dundas Place, Glasgow, rooms from £65, phone +44 141 333 1500, see glasgow.parkinn.co.uk. Cameron House Hotel, Loch Lomond, Dunbartonshire, rooms from £159, devere-hotels.com, phone +44 138 975 5565.


See seeglasgow.com.

Sign up for the Traveller Deals newsletter

Get exclusive travel deals delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up now.

Most viewed on Traveller

Loading