Wandering Glasgow
Day 2: Glasgow
Our tour package included a 2-day ticket for the City Sightseeing double-decker bus in Glasgow. To start the day, we walked to George Square, and hopped on the bus. We traveled the first half of the circuit to the Tall Ship at Riverside. From there, we jumped back on the bus and completed the Glasgow West End walk from the Rick Steves book: including the Botanic Gardens, University of Glasgow, Hunterian Museum and Gallery, and the Kelvingrove Museum.
We then took the bus back to the cathedral district to see the Cathedral, Necropolis and St. Mungo's Museum. To end the day we completed a full circuit on the hop on- hop off bus.
George Square and Thereabouts
Getting to the Tall Ship
The Tall Ship at Riverside
Berthed alongside the Riverside Museum is the Tall Ship, a square-rigger called Glenlee. A 245-ft long, three-masted barque launched on the river in 1896, she circumnavigated the globe four times before being put to use as a sail training vessel -- it's now one of the only five large sailing vessels built on Clydeside that are still afloat.
~ The Rough Guide to Scotland
Walking the West End
The Botanic Gardens
When the sun shines, the Botanics (as they're known to locals) quickly fill up with people enjoying the extensive lawns, beautiful flower displays, and herb garden. At the heart of the gardens is the spectacular greenhouse, the Kibble Palace, a favorite haunt of Glaswegian families. Originally built in 1873, it was the conservatory of a Victorian eccentric named John Kibble. Its domed, interlinked greenhouses contain tree ferns, palm trees, and the Tropicarium, where you can experience the lushness of a rain forest and briefly forget the weather outside. Another greenhouse holds a world-famous collection of orchids.
~ Fodor's Travels: Scotland
The Flowers of the Botanic Garden
Stained Glass at the Kibble Palace
Heading Back towards the River
Murals
Every direction you turned, there was a mural in Glasgow.
Mackintosh House & Hunterian Art Gallery
A sightseeing twofer: an art gallery offering a good look at some Scottish artists relatively unknown outside their homeland, and the chance to take a guided tour through the reconstructed home of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, decorated exactly the way he liked it. For Charles Rennie Mack fans -- or anyone fascinated by the worlds artists create for themselves to live in -- it's definitely worth a visit.
~ Rick Steves: Scotland
Hunterian Museum
The oldest public museum in Scotland was founded by William Hunter (1718-1783), a medical researcher. Today his natural science collection is housed in a huge and gorgeous space inside the university's showcase building. Everything is well presented and well explained. You'll see a perceptive exhibit on the Antonine Wall (the lesser-known cousin of Hadrian's Wall), built in A.D. 142 to seal off the Picts from the Roman Empire. The eclectic collection also includes musical instruments, a display on the Glasgow-build Lusitania, and a fine collection of fossils, including the aquatic dinosaur called plesiosaur (possibly a distant ancestor of the Loch Ness monster).
~ Rick Steves: Scotland
Glasgow University
Dominating the West End skyline, the gloomy turreted tower of Glasgow University, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the mid-nineteenth century, overlooks the glades edging the River Kelvin; the university itself was founded in 1451, which ranks it as the fourth oldest in the English-speaking world, and was originally located near the cathedral on High Street.
~ Rough Guide to Scotland
Take a good look at the gate, which is decorated with the names of illustrious alums. Pick out the great Scots you're familiar with: James Watt, King James II Adam Smith, Lord Kelvin, William Hunter, and Donald Dewar, a driving force behind devolution who became Scotland's first "First Minister" in 1999.
~ Rick Steves: Scotland
The Scientists
Kelvingrove Park is another of Glaswegians favorite parks, and originated in the Victorian period, when there was a renewed focus on trying to get people out into green spaces. One of the first things you'll come to is a big status of Lord Kelvin (1824-1907). Born William Thomson, he chose to take the name of the River Kelvin, which runs through Glasgow. One of the most respected scientists of his time, Kelvin was a pioneer in the field of thermodynamics, and gave his name (or, actually the river's) to a new, absolute unit of temperature measurement designed to replace Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Just past Kelvin, bear left at the statue of Joseph Lister (1827-1912, of "Listerine" fame -- he pioneered the use of antiseptics to remove infection-causing germs from the surgical environment), and take the bridge across the River Kelvin.
~Rick Steves: Scotland
The Statues on Kelvin Way Bridge
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
The "Scottish Smithsonian" displays everything from a stuffed elephant to fine artwork by the great masters. The well-described contents are impressively displayed in a grand, 100-year-old, Spanish Baroque-style building. The Kelvingrove claims to be one of the most-visited museums in Britain -- presumably because of all the field-trip groups you'll see here.
~ Rick Steves: Scotland
Kelvingrove
Founded on donations from the city's Victorian industrialists and opened at an international fair held in 1901, the huge, red sandstone fantasy castle of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a brash statement of Glasgow's nineteenth-century self-confidence. Intricate and ambitious both in its riotous outside detailing and within, where a superb galleried main hall running the length of the building gives way to attractive upper balconies and small, interlinked display galleries, Kelvingrove offers an impressive and inviting setting for the engaging display of art and artifacts within. There are recitals on the giant ornate organ in the Centre Hall at 1pm.
The displays are organized under two principal headings: Life, in the western half of the building, encompassing archeology, local history, and stuffed animals; and Expression, in the eastern half, which houses much of the superb art collection.
~ Rough Guide to Scotland
The Mackintosh Section
Visiting the Cathedral District
Glasgow Cathedral
Built in 1136, destroyed in 1192 and partially rebuilt soon after, stumpy-spired Glasgow Cathedral was not completed until the late fifteenth century, with the final reconstruction of the chapterhouse and the aisle designed by Robert Blacader, the city's first archbishop. Thanks to the intervention of the city guilds, it is the only Scottish mainland cathedral to have escaped the hands of religious reformers in the sixteenth century. The cathedral is dedicated to the city's patron saint and reputed founder, St Mungo, otherwise known as St Kentigern.
~Rough Guide to Scotland
The Necropolis
Rising up behind the cathedral, the atmospheric Necropolis is a grassy mound covered in a fantastic assortment of crumbling and tumbling gravestones, ornate urns, gloomy catacombs and Neoclassical temples. Inspired by the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, this garden of death was established in 1832.
~Rough Guide to Scotland
St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art
The St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, housed in a rather bland late twentieth-century pastiche of a Scots medieval townhouse, is not nearly as bland as its title might suggest. Focusing on objects, beliefs and art from Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism, the most enlightening of the museum's three galleries is the Gallery of Religious Art, whose stand-out objects are a rare Kalabari Screen - an ancestral funerary screen from Nigeria comprising three wood-carved figures - and a fabulous bronze sculpture of a dancing Shiva, the Hindu God.
~Rough Guide to Scotland
Glasgow Green
Glasgow Green's most conspicuous building is the People's Palace, which houses a wonderfully haphazard evocation of the city's history. This squat, red-sandstone Victorian building, with a vast semicircular glasshouse tacked on the back, was purpose-built as a museum back in 1898.
Directly in front of the palace stands the ornate terracotta Doulton Fountain -- originally designed for the 1888 Glasgow Exhibition in Kelvingrove Park -- which rises like a wedding cake to a pinnacle where Queen Victoria oversees here Empire.
~Rough Guide to Scotland
The Final Circuit
To end the day, we rode the city sightseeing bus one more time.