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Whooping it up in ?Glasgow, Scotland’s scene-stealing ?second city. Friday night on Glasgow’s lamplit Sauchiehall Street reveals an eye-popping parade of inebriated-hen parties, zigzagging between bars as if in a human pinball machine. These miniskirted scrums, clustered around tear-streaked brides-to-be in devil horns, burst into peals of dirty laughter at each passing male. It’s like being checked out and dismissed before you’ve even tried your best pick-up lines.?
Friday night on Glasgow’s lamplit Sauchiehall Street reveals an eye-popping parade of inebriated-hen parties, zigzagging between bars as if in a human pinball machine. These miniskirted scrums, clustered around tear-streaked brides-to-be in devil horns, burst into peals of dirty laughter at each passing male. It’s like being checked out and dismissed before you’ve even tried your best pick-up lines.
Not in the market for a Glaswegian kiss, I survey the entertainment from a safe distance. If Edinburgh and Glasgow were sisters, the former would be vain and over-manicured while the latter would be a good-time party girl who drinks like a docker. Scotland’s looker of a capital gets the tourists, of course, but I prefer the grittier metropolis, where you rub shoulders with the locals rather than legions of Australian backpackers.
A business magnet and workhorse city that once housed one of the world’s largest shipyards, Glasgow has reinvented itself as a cultural dynamo in recent years, redeploying its edgy character to forge one of the U.K.’s most exciting arts and music scenes. This is the unlikely birthplace of such bands as Franz Ferdinand and Belle and Sebastian, for example.
I’m soon squeezing through the narrow doorway of King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut for a taster. With a chatty subterranean bar in front, the venue’s 300-capacity upstairs room is the main lure. Gingerly joining the surging mosh pit (the venue is so small, it’s all mosh pit) I partake of an ear-assaulting sweat-fest of indie guitar warfare. It’s a great show, but also a reminder of my departed youth; within 30 minutes, I’m back in the bar sipping a soothing libation.
The next morning, I take a more sedate approach and dip into the art trail. Glasgow’s monumental, multi-columned architecture reflects a Victorian mercantile heyday, as if the U.K.’s grandest old bank buildings had all retired here, bringing their domed roofs and gargoyled façades with them. One of the finest now houses the Gallery of Modern Art in Royal Exchange Square.
Inside, I rub my chin before video installations depicting shattering bottles and giggling children. It’s the kind of challenging, is-this-really-art-or-am-I-being-duped collection that triggers involuntary head-shaking. I balance it with a more traditional approach across town at Scotland’s most-visited attraction.
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a grand, 1901-built palace teeming with dinosaurs, mummies and classical paintings. It also showcases Glasgow’s most celebrated artistic visionary, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I spend 45 minutes in a room lined with ornate, tulip-motif furniture by the Edwardian designer and architect. Achingly beautiful examples of Mackintosh’s work stud the city like beacons.
The art nouveau wunderkind’s Willow Tea Rooms and Glasgow School of Art buildings are the aesthetic opposites of my final daylight destination, though. I can rarely resist a street market and the ramshackle stalls of the rough-and-ready Barras hit the spot. In the heart of Glasgow’s working class East End, it’s a clamorous, Brueghel-esque sprawl of used-book sellers and pirate DVD vendors colonizing grubby backstreets and paint-peeled sheds.
With the sun now sinking over nearby Glasgow Green, it’s time to weave back toward the city centre for my final nightlife fix. Eschewing the skinny-jeaned hipsters this time around, I make for The Arches, an evocative venue burrowed into the brick tunnels underneath the city’s giant Central Station train terminus.
Joining a milling melee of stocky 40-somethings, I anticipate a gentle evening of polite applause and an early night. But when veteran Scottish musician Jack Bruce of Cream fame hits the stage, the Glaswegian oldies surge forward and raise the roof with the enthusiasm of a cup final football crowd. Even the fogies know how to party in Glasgow.
Mild. June can reach a heady 20 degrees Celsius with sporadic showers likely.
CitizenM is an artsy Dutch-designed concept hotel offering stylish looks and good value in the city centre. citizenm glasgow.com
Gourmet brewpub West Brewery serves house-made lagers and elevated comfort food in a handsome heritage building. westbeer.com
Riverside Museum. Opening this month, Riverside will be Scotland’s national museum of transport and travel. glasgowmuseums.com