Discover Glasgow

The Second City of the Empire, remade

Glasgow grew rich on the River Clyde: tobacco and sugar money in the 1700s, then a nineteenth century spent building a quarter of the world's ships and a huge share of its locomotives and heavy engineering. That wealth built the city you walk through now, a dense grid of red and blond sandstone tenements, City of Glasgow Bank palazzos in the Merchant City, and the largest concentration of Victorian and Edwardian architecture in Britain. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born in the Townhead district in 1868, spent his career designing inside that boom: tea rooms for Kate Cranston, an art school (badly damaged by two fires and not currently open to the public), and the Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street, restored and reopened as Mackintosh at the Willow, where you can still have a pot of tea under his high-backed chairs and leaded glass.

The shipyards and heavy industry that built Glasgow mostly closed in the second half of the twentieth century, and the city spent decades reinventing itself: European Capital of Culture in 1990, UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999, and host of the 2014 Commonwealth Games and the 2026 Games this summer. What came out the other side is a city with a genuinely different temperament from Edinburgh's festival polish: warmer, blunter, and organised around the West End's café culture, the Barras and the East End's market and music history, and a food and drink scene that runs from Michelin-adjacent small-plates restaurants in Finnieston to the Saturday sprawl of the Barras Market. Around 635,000 people live in the city itself, with well over a million across Greater Glasgow, and that West End café culture, East End market history and a pace that owes more to the shipyards than the festival calendar are as much a part of the place as the sandstone.