Things to do in Glasgow

Glasgow made its money on tobacco, then cotton, then ships. The Clyde yards were among the busiest anywhere, and the profit went into sandstone. What is left is a Victorian grid on hills.

The Victorian city

The centre is a grid, unusual for Britain, and it climbs. Buchanan Street runs up the middle. The Merchant City sits east of it, in the warehouses of the tobacco trade.

• Glasgow Cathedral — the only medieval one on the Scottish mainland to come through the Reformation whole.
• The Necropolis — fifty thousand burials on the hill behind it, laid out from 1833.
• Kelvingrove — a red sandstone pile of 1901 with Dali, armour and an organ, free to enter.
• The Burrell Collection — one man's nine thousand objects in Pollok Park, reopened in 2022.
• Riverside Museum — Zaha Hadid's transport hall on the Clyde, a tall ship moored outside.

Mackintosh, and what is left of him

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is the name the city sells, and the story is not a happy one. His art school on Renfrew Street burned twice, in 2014 and again in 2018. It has not been rebuilt.

• The Mackintosh tearooms — his Sauchiehall Street rooms of 1903, restored and serving.
• House for an Art Lover — a design of 1901 built in Bellahouston Park ninety years later.
• The Hunterian — the Mackintosh House, his own interiors rebuilt inside the university museum.
• The Hill House — out at Helensburgh, standing inside a steel mesh box that keeps the rain off.

The rest is music and food. Glasgow has been a UNESCO City of Music since 2008, and small venues carry that. The self-guided games sold here use the centre and the lanes off it.

Practical

• Rain. Around 1,100 millimetres a year, spread over most days rather than dumped. Summer highs reach 19C.
• The subway. One circle of fifteen stations, opened in 1896, and round in about twenty-four minutes.
• Museums. Kelvingrove, the Burrell, the Riverside and the Gallery of Modern Art all charge nothing.
• Edinburgh. Fifty minutes by train from Queen Street, four an hour for most of the day.
• Evenings. Finnieston and the West End for food, the Barrowland and King Tut's for bands.
• Booking ahead. Gigs and football, both of which take the hotel stock with them.