Glasgow: the dream destination

Ranked alongside Belem in the Brazilian rainforest (with its “colourful wading birds, caiman, and piranha”), the Caribbean paradise of Margarita Island (with its “semi- permanent flea market of food, crafts, and dry goods”) and Goa in India (home of the famed “fortune-telling cows”), Glasgow is complimented on its radiant Victorian architecture, its vibrant cultural scene and, most satisfying for residents, the fact that it knocks musty old Edinburgh into a cocked baseball cap, being altogether “more cosmopolitan and modern”, not to mention possessing a “more happening” nightlife.

What kind of holiday experience does Glasgow offer the modern traveller, once they have ceased giggling, that is? What does Glasgow contain to compete with ravenous fish, plentiful dry goods and crystal ball-consulting livestock? If you’ve been born in a city, lived at more than 20 addresses within it and never lived elsewhere, can it ever become anything more than the unchanging background radiation of your existence, so visible that it can’t be seen at all? After locating a jacket with a hood, I set out to discover.

In the interests of fair comparison, it must be remembered that the city was being evaluated in mid-January, which isn’t the most representative season for holiday-taking. By the same token, in Glasgow it’s always mid-January, even at the height of summer.

Equally, if half the world flock to the sunnier territories because sun is so rare in their own countries, the converse must be true for those who already hail from the warm bits. There must be a significant percentage of the world’s population who find lowering clouds and intermittent drizzle as refreshing and beguiling as we find pounding sunshine.If so, the nine other destinations on the Frommer’s list for 2006 don’t get a look-in.

There’s no other place to start but the tourist information office in George Square. Until around a decade ago this was located in a hut on the other side of the square and contained nothing, if memory serves, but a map of the Trossachs on the wall; no matter what question you asked, the staff just pointed at the map as though Loch Lomond was all that needed to be said about Glasgow and tourism.

These, however, are days when holidays are made of more than casual hiking and Kendal mint cake. These days they’re about inspecting the mouldering bric-a-brac of industrial history, looking at modern architecture and being thankful it’s here and not in the city where you live, searching for items made by Gucci that aren’t available at home, and sampling ethnic quirks like ethnographers from the National Geographic. In Britain particularly it’s about appreciating just how long history has been rumbling on for. And pamphlets; in Glasgow, holidays are about pamphlets.

The tourist office has rack upon rack of them, a blizzard of glossy appeals, each one a tiny tug on the sleeve of curiosity, from theatres, galleries, exhibitions, from coffee shops with galleries and galleries with coffee shops. In the new, tourist-calibrated Glasgow, a thing is not deemed to exist until it has its own pamphlet. In these pamphlets, Glasgow is depicted as a city where attractive young couples in pastel clothing lean against antique statuary, glamorously laughing, perhaps over the plenitude of wheelchair access to Glasgow’s cultural hot spots. The lady behind the tourist information counter sounds as though she’s from the former Soviet Union; maybe she came here on holiday and liked the pamphlets so much she never left. I tell her I’m on holiday and ask what she suggests I do. She points out the rainy window at the hop-on hop-off city bus tour.

This is sold as an open-top bus tour, but clearly this would be suicidal, so the bus has a canopy at the front under which to huddle from the elements. The driver and the person who sells the tickets, priced £8.50, are polite, to a degree that’s quite eerie to anyone accustomed to the city’s more usual tenor, though the bearded chap upstairs who does the commentary has the smug and uppity tone common to all who’re obsessed with historical factoids.

Which is handy because in tourist terms Glasgow is one giant historical factoid, an Encyclopaedia Britannica entry consisting of big mechanical things being made while medieval miscreants were tortured in cruel and unusual ways. This is the story of Glasgow as semi-officially told to tourists; no mention of football, despite Glasgow being the only European city to contain three 50,000-seat stadiums, nothing about gangs or the Highland diaspora or bands or pamphlet-and-cappuccino-related renaissance, just giant pistons and severed heads on spikes.

In one half-mile stretch we learn that Glasgow’s motto concerns a fish, a tree, a bell and a bird, all of which were completely useless, before the Necropolis, “our city of the dead”, manifests itself through the gloom. In terms of cheeriness, Glasgow hits the holidaymaker much like Dresden would. Otherwise, Glasgow is a Guinness Book of World Records page of firsts and largests: the biggest menswear store in the world (Slater’s); the biggest glass building in Europe (the St Enoch Centre); the tallest cinema in the world (Cineworld in Renfrew Street); the fastest-growing conference centre in Europe; the largest private coin collection in the world (the Hunterian Museum).

All of which is interesting, though few holidays go into overdrive perusing extensive collections of drainpipe trousers and ancient coins, although in the end this may be the charm of the place. Looking at Glasgow as somewhere that outsiders are prepared to consider beguiling rather than as just the place where one buys their milk and books, you appreciate the misfitting mosaic that makes the city, the various bits and pieces that hugger-mugger together, the plurality of it.

Edinburgh, by contrast, seems a one-note hymn to economic vigour and four-piece suits. In Glasgow, the walls of the world-famous Rennie Mackintosh art school are festooned with modern stickers and posters. Eras and epochs lie one on top of the other; use and ornament become indistinguishable. The world’s largest menswear store speaks of a city where births, marriages and deaths are observed decorously.

It’s a city treated by its inhabitants with a rough fondness. The city’s voltage must be compelling to some, even if the natives have ceased to notice it.

One tourist brochure, Glasgow: Scotland with Style, suggests that travellers should ask a native for directions: “Glaswegians are justly proud of their city,” it says. “They take real pleasure in giving directions and advice, so don’t be afraid to ask. They might speak quickly and the accent might be strange at first, but you’ll be drawn in by their passion for the place.” I try this with a policeman, searching for the Princes Square shopping mall. It turned out to be second on the left. He didn’t seem to take real pleasure in telling me.

What else does one do on holiday? Have luxurious breakfasts? Not so appealing when it’s the £3.50 special in the House of Fraser coffee shop. Go shopping where “global fashion houses jostle with one- off curio stores in broad streets, elegant malls and the grand 19th- century warehouses of the Merchant City area”.

A holiday in Glasgow is as much an act of imagination as it is of recreation, a process aided by the vigour with which the city wills you to submit. And if you get stuck you can always get a stack of pamphlets and ask directions to the tallest coffee shop in Europe.