Culture comes alive in Glasgow

With a chilly midnight wind lashing against the tall bay windows of my hotel room, I fill the antique, free-standing bathtub (sitting decadently in front of the original Victorian fireplace), slide a new Belle and Sebastian CD in the player, and ease myself into the hot bath, a heavy tumbler of smoky, 18-year-old whisky in hand. After a jam-packed day of cultural activities, I’m looking to relax my mind as much as my feet.

Pipers play at Glasgow Green during the World Pipe Band Festival

Every autumn, when the weather begins to cool at home in Barcelona, I head to England, Scotland, or Ireland for a weekend-long binge of plays, concerts, museums, galleries, and other nourishment for the left side of my brain. It’s not that Barcelona lacks artistic choice, but visiting the British Isles gives me a chance to revisit the culturally heady days when I was a theater grad student in London. This year I’ve escaped to one of Europe’s most energetic and exciting cities — Glasgow.

Scotland’s largest city (population 580,000), Glasgow was founded in AD 543 by Saint Mungo. The city grew on trade and later became a major port for American tobacco. In 1801 Glasgow’s population was approximately 77,000; by end of that century it was nearly 800,000, making it the fourth largest city in Europe at the time. It was also one of the world’s preeminent industrial cities, specializing in manufacturing trains and ships. After World War I, Glasgow slid into major recession, the shipping industry collapsed, and the city skated on hard times until a rejuvenation in the 1980s and ’90s.

These days, Glasgow is a major business hub and established cultural center, home to the Scottish Opera, Scottish Ballet, the National Theatre of Scotland, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, as well as a celebrated music scene, comedy clubs, and fabulous museums and galleries. When I travel to Madrid for the weekend, my mission is simple: survive the party scene that begins when I usually go to bed. For Glasgow, I’m not so interested in a feeding (and drinking) frenzy. Rather, I’ve come with a two-fold purpose: to see how the city’s rejuvenation has revitalized its art scene, layering new cultural attractions on the classics, and to see just how much of this cultural smorgasbord my brain can process before melting down.

My visit begins on a Friday afternoon in the West End, a neighborhood that rose up in the 19th century when the city’s wealthy were moving from the grimy industrial city center a few miles away. It’s now a blend of genteel residential streets, home to Glasgow’s university and best parks along with coffeehouses, gourmet delis, and vintage clothing shops. I amble down the main thoroughfare, Byres Road, among students with backpacks slung over their shoulders, pram-pushing mothers, and hipsters in pinstriped jackets and frayed jeans.

Diners enjoy one of Merchant City’s restaurants

Browsing the Oxfam Bookshop’s music section, I look for CDs by Belle and Sebastian, a Glasgow band that, as my friend Tod Nelson, a onetime music editor at Amazon.com, wrote, “are smarter than the Smiths, wittier than the Beach Boys, more fun than the Velvet Underground, and even more inscrutable than R.E.M.” Musically, Glasgow is hot — a few years ago Time magazine likened the city to Detroit in its Motown heyday. But there isn’t really a definable Glasgow sound — just a lot of great music coming out of the city.

Glasgow is also well known for comedy, and I hit an evening show at the Stand, a club where local funnyman-cum-world famous comedian (and actor) Billy Connolly is occasionally spotted in the audience. Standup comedy in Scotland often includes what is euphemistically referred to as “audience participation,” and I make the mistake of sitting too close to the stage. I laugh through five brash, heckling acts, though I’d probably laugh even more if the comics’ crosshairs were trained on the table of guffawing, thick-armed Irish carpenters instead of on me.

A Changing Vibe

Tron Theatre’s iconic steeple

Saturday morning I head for the city center to visit the Glasgow School of Art, masterwork of the city’s most famous architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Since it’s a working school — one of the United Kingdom’s best art colleges, home to 1,600 students and 400 staff — the only way to explore is by student-guided tour. A young woman with sea-blue eyes, low-slung black pants, and a pink-tinged blond ponytail leads a group of northern Europeans and me through finely wrought rooms that blend elements from Scottish castles with languid nouveau curves. The space is filled with natural light — ideal for art students. We stare in awe at the simple perfection of the two-tiered library as our guide explains that Mackintosh was a junior draftsman and part-time student at the art school when his design won the 1896 competition (the building was completed in 1909). Mackintosh was comprehensive in his aesthetic vision, designing the interiors and even the furniture. His distinct touches — iconic high-backed chairs, inset stylized roses, stringy fonts with raised letters — are replicated all over town, part of Glasgow’s signature style.

Tipped off to the current hot spots of the art scene by two students on my way out, I skip some of Glasgow’s better-known and more established museums — namely the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, with the world’s largest public display of Whistler paintings, and the Burrell Collection, 9,000-odd works ranging from masterpieces of ancient China to European furniture to paintings by Degas and Cézanne — and head for more contemporary works.

Eager to see how the city’s cultural vibe is changing, I stroll through the grid of downtown streets already bustling with Saturday shoppers. The solid, narrow brick buildings evoke a time when Glasgow was the self-proclaimed Second City of the British Empire. The historical heart of the city, and the focus for any cultural visit, is the 20-block section known as Merchant City. There, the 18th-century warehouses and Palladian mansions of tobacco lords have been lovingly refurbished over the past two decades and now house slick bistros, crowded cafés, and, especially on the south side near the River Clyde, a rich cluster of galleries and artists’ studios.

Food for Thought

Before hitting the galleries, though, I need nourishment, so I duck into a stylish North Indian diner called the Dhabba for lunch. London newspaper The Guardian recently named it one of the top 10 curry houses in the United Kingdom — no small honor given the more than 8,000 Indian restaurants operating here. With sleek wooden tables, contemporary oversized photographic murals, and delectable authentic regional dishes, the Dhabba, as The Guardian wrote, “could become the model for 21st-century U.K. curry houses.”

Diners at the Left Bank, one of the city’s
hottest restaurants

Energized, I begin my gallery tour, visiting a half dozen spaces within a few blocks. One of my favorites is Street Level Photoworks, with its dual exhibition of two U.K. artists. Alan Dimmick’s color photographs offer surprising visions of Turkish landscapes and urban scenes, while Steve McQueen’s short films and “snapshots” capture the urban artist’s fascination with the wild. Even more engrossing is the Glasgow Print Studio, a large printmaking shop with a commercial gallery in front. Vast and detailed etchings of plants hang beside modern gothic fairy tales and silkscreens of birds drawn with Arabic lettering.

Next door at the Transmission Gallery, an artists’ collective set up in 1983 and run by a rotating board of six members, an exhibition opening this evening is being mounted. I chat with an artist with a studio nearby who has also stopped to gawk at the activity. “London used to draw artists from Glasgow,” she says, unconsciously picking at her paint-flecked fingernails. “But not anymore. Now we can live and work here.” She nods and adds rather forcefully, “You must see Clare Stephenson’s bandaged heads at the Sorcha Dallas gallery!”

A few blocks south, near the banks of the River Clyde, I find them. The heads are made from painted wedges of plywood joined together with a material similar to surgical gauze. Simple and effective. As I ponder the artist’s written statement regarding the work (“Bandages mask bruised egos and burgundy mouths, covering decisions made and lamented”), the young gallery assistant asks, “Are you going to the opening at the Sculpture Studios tonight?” She’s referring to the Glasgow Sculpture Studios, set in the vast iron-and-glass-canopied space of the city’s old fish market. “There is also one at Transmission. And a book launch at Aye-Aye,” she adds, referring to the tiny, artsy bookshop nearby. So much to do!

A band rocks out at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut

But it’s 5:30 and I have tickets for a 6 o’clock concert. As much as I want to stay modern, it’s impossible not to immerse myself in one of the more classic art forms that established Glasgow as a cultural mecca. I hustle across Merchant City and up Buchanan Street — the pedestrian artery of the city’s commercial heart, where half of Glasgow seems to be strolling — to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

The state-of-the-art 2,475-seat auditorium hosts 400 concerts a year. I’m here to see the hall’s resident Royal Scottish National Orchestra perform a Classic Bites concert, highlighting 10 mouthwatering nibbles from the upcoming season. Conductor and musical director Stéphane Denève, a funny, charming Frenchman, tosses his mop of frizzled hair back out of his eyes and speaks between each of the pieces, which range from the grandiose “Montagues and Capulets” theme from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet to the sweet, soothing finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

When the lights go up I don’t want to move. I’m tired, already flagging, but I have tickets for a play that begins in an hour.

Crossing the center, I stop for an espresso at a popular gastro-pub called Babbity Bowster. When the guy on the stool next to me hears my accent, he shouts, “You must have the cullen skink!” Seeing the look on my face, he laughs and explains that it’s a traditional Scottish soup made from smoked haddock, potatoes, onion, and milk. “Sounds great,” I say, looking at my watch. “But I gotta run.”

From a distance I can see Tron Theatre’s iconic 16th-century church steeple. The building began life as a church 500 years ago and was a place of worship for centuries before serving as a police station, a town hall used for hearings and hangings, a market, and, finally, for the past 25 years, one of the city’s most innovative and exciting theaters.

When I take my seat I realize that almost everyone in the audience has a drink. “Is that a Glasgow tradition?” I ask of the young couple next to me sipping pints of ale. They look at me blankly and the man replies, “It’s part of the enjoyment of the play.”

The Glasgow Print Studio

Outside in the brisk evening air, hungry and alert, I hail a taxi back to the West End to the Hotel du Vin at One Devonshire Gardens. The discreet and sophisticated hotel was elegantly crafted from five Victorian townhouses, and the large rooms retain their original ornate corniced ceilings, bay windows, stained glass, and wood paneling.

The hotel’s award-winning bistro is packed, so I have my dinner served in one of the quiet drawing rooms beside a blazing fire. The smoked salmon is lush, the brown bread is fresh and warm, and  the local Deuchars India Pale Ale is full-flavored and slightly tangy — a perfect meal.

After checking the bar for stars (George Clooney is just one of the many who have been spotted here), I slip into the Whisky Snug. Oak-paneled, warmly lit, and filled with comfy leather chairs, the room is lined on one side with an illuminated glass cabinet holding 365 different whiskies — a whopping 300 of those single-malts. Which to order? Prices range from about $7 to $130 for a 35-milliliter dram (just over one fluid ounce).

It's a quiet scene as patrons partake of a meal
at Babbity Bowster.

In the end I go local, choosing a Scotch from Auchentoshan, a distillery just outside Glasgow. The color of wet straw, it has a soft maltiness with hints of chocolate and cacao and a thin haze of peat fire smoke. Nice. When the barman returns I order another Scotch, an 18-year-old that has, he promises, “subtle hints of old saddle leather and linseed.” I sip. Very nice. For all the changes in Scottish culture, some traditions are best left untouched.

It’s late and I’m knackered. Splashing a bit of water into the heavy tumbler to open up the flavor of the whisky, I head back to my room for a bath.

I still have to look through the listings and decide about tomorrow. I want to see an exhibition at the Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City, and catch a matinee at the art deco Glasgow Film Theatre.

For now, though, I’m content to sit, soak, and listen to Belle and Sebastian’s sophisticated melodies and poetic lyrics while the day’s details unspool in my mind — the exhibitions and concert, lines from the play, a few cracking-good jokes (unrepeatable here), and the humor and pride of the people I’ve met. Indeed, Glasgow’s verve and swagger beat loudly, even through the newest layers of the city’s vibrant arts scene.

Getting There: Continental offers daily nonstop service to Glasgow from its hub in New York/Newark.

 

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Photographs: Chris Close