Downtown Glasgow
Today we decided to split up. Margo thought it would be a good idea for her and Sarah to chill out since we've been travelling so much the last few days. I got to go off and explore downtown. This is my report.
Glasgow. Scotland's largest city. I saw graffiti for the first time since New York. There's also more litter on the streets than I've seen in a while. Streets have more lanes, and there are more one-way streets. Downtown is almost a grid pattern - you could tell a taxi to take you to the corner of N and N, which seems rare in the UK. Buildings are taller - churches are not necessarily the tallest here - and there is more variety in building heights. Many of the towers look like apartment buildings.
I started the day dropping off a bagful of our laundry, but the laundromat didn't open until 9.30, so I killed some time in a nearby coffee shop watching BBC News and reading one of the daily papers. It seems there's a lot of disappointment with Britons towards Tony Blair for his lack of attention to the Middle East crisis. What with going to California and all.
I took the subway downtown. The Glasgow subway is two rings. Trains go in separate directions in the Outer and Inner Circles. The rings go around the west of the city and two of the stops are downtown. The trains are pretty wee! A taller person like me has to mind his head. There are also no announcements. I'm not even sure there's a driver.
My first stop was the Lighthouse museum of architecture and design, but it wasn't yet open when I arrived, so I spent some time on Hudson Street, one of the shopping streets. Here's a view looking down from one end to the other.
Then I went back to the Lighthouse. A focus of the museum is the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Tall-backed chairs. Grid patterns. Stained glass.
A highlight of the museum is the tower and its staircase, which winds around the inside of what looks like a lighthouse. Here's a view looking up from the bottom. It's a better view looking down from the top, but to be brutally honest I was too scared to put the camera over that space - maybe the vertigo creeped me out, but I was also afraid of dropping the camera onto the head of some poor chap below.
At the top there's an external balcony going all the way around, so I took a panorama of pictures. Here's one, giving you an idea what the Glasgow skyline looks like.
There was also an exhibit on the architecture of Marcel Breuer. It focused on his use of "crystalline forms" - patterns in concrete exteriors that break up the monotony and allow for interesting light play as the day progresses. A half dozen of his works were displayed; I was impressed by the Central Public Library in Atlanta, plus two churches he designed in places I wouldn't expect them: buildings you'd expect to see in a sci-fi film for Bismarck, North Dakota and Muskegon, Michigan.
Afterward, I had tea and carrot cake in the Willow Tearooms, for which Mackintosh did the interior design.
Over tea, I planned my next stop, and decided on the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, otherwise known as GoMA. This, like most museums in Scotland, was government-funded and thereby completely free.
Now, most modern art leaves me scratching my head and wondering why, for example, serious gallery real estate is devoted to a trampoline where the canvas is replaced by a sheet of glass, and given a pompous title. But I did enjoy a few nuggets.
For instance, a piece by Sarah Lucas (inspired by Damien Hirst) where she made a sculpture the size and shape of a garden gnome, entirely out of unlit cigarettes, from an installation called The Fag Show. (She's subsequently quit). But at least it took lots of painstaking effort to bend and glue all those together.
In another gallery ... you've seen architectural models of buildings? Usually made of foam core? I saw one of some housing blocks but one was in the midst of a controlled demolition, so there were these foam bubbles representing puffs of smoke and the building was just starting to crumble. Clever, I thought.
I also enjoyed an exhibit by Chad McCail, who makes drawings that look like they're from childrens' books but include decidedly adult content (weapons, other tokens of the complexity of modern life).
After that, I did lots more walking, taking in a second shopping street. I snapped this picture of the Prime Minister because ... well ... when's the last time you saw a statue of a guy in a suit?
Then I took the subway back to the West End. There I had another pint at the same place as yesterday and read a few more of the daily papers. The name of the beer is Brune-Dark, and the brewery is Leffe. I also got a picture of Ashton Lane this time:
And I was wrong, wrong, wrong about pints. I grilled the bartender about this. The glasses are actually Imperial pints; they're just shaped differently, and the beer is immensely strong so I thought I'd been drinking more. I guess there's a lot of regulation; when you say you're serving a pint, it's got to be exactly a pint. So perhaps I have yet to encounter this elusive Scottish pint, if indeed it exists outside that historical description I read in Stirling Castle, which claimed that serfs were daily given a Scottish pint of beer (claiming it was 2.5x a standard pint), a loaf of bread, and any table scraps the royals and guests left behind.
Tomorrow ... Liverpool!
Glasgow. Scotland's largest city. I saw graffiti for the first time since New York. There's also more litter on the streets than I've seen in a while. Streets have more lanes, and there are more one-way streets. Downtown is almost a grid pattern - you could tell a taxi to take you to the corner of N and N, which seems rare in the UK. Buildings are taller - churches are not necessarily the tallest here - and there is more variety in building heights. Many of the towers look like apartment buildings.
I started the day dropping off a bagful of our laundry, but the laundromat didn't open until 9.30, so I killed some time in a nearby coffee shop watching BBC News and reading one of the daily papers. It seems there's a lot of disappointment with Britons towards Tony Blair for his lack of attention to the Middle East crisis. What with going to California and all.
I took the subway downtown. The Glasgow subway is two rings. Trains go in separate directions in the Outer and Inner Circles. The rings go around the west of the city and two of the stops are downtown. The trains are pretty wee! A taller person like me has to mind his head. There are also no announcements. I'm not even sure there's a driver.
My first stop was the Lighthouse museum of architecture and design, but it wasn't yet open when I arrived, so I spent some time on Hudson Street, one of the shopping streets. Here's a view looking down from one end to the other.
Then I went back to the Lighthouse. A focus of the museum is the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Tall-backed chairs. Grid patterns. Stained glass.
A highlight of the museum is the tower and its staircase, which winds around the inside of what looks like a lighthouse. Here's a view looking up from the bottom. It's a better view looking down from the top, but to be brutally honest I was too scared to put the camera over that space - maybe the vertigo creeped me out, but I was also afraid of dropping the camera onto the head of some poor chap below.
At the top there's an external balcony going all the way around, so I took a panorama of pictures. Here's one, giving you an idea what the Glasgow skyline looks like.
There was also an exhibit on the architecture of Marcel Breuer. It focused on his use of "crystalline forms" - patterns in concrete exteriors that break up the monotony and allow for interesting light play as the day progresses. A half dozen of his works were displayed; I was impressed by the Central Public Library in Atlanta, plus two churches he designed in places I wouldn't expect them: buildings you'd expect to see in a sci-fi film for Bismarck, North Dakota and Muskegon, Michigan.
Afterward, I had tea and carrot cake in the Willow Tearooms, for which Mackintosh did the interior design.
Over tea, I planned my next stop, and decided on the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, otherwise known as GoMA. This, like most museums in Scotland, was government-funded and thereby completely free.
Now, most modern art leaves me scratching my head and wondering why, for example, serious gallery real estate is devoted to a trampoline where the canvas is replaced by a sheet of glass, and given a pompous title. But I did enjoy a few nuggets.
For instance, a piece by Sarah Lucas (inspired by Damien Hirst) where she made a sculpture the size and shape of a garden gnome, entirely out of unlit cigarettes, from an installation called The Fag Show. (She's subsequently quit). But at least it took lots of painstaking effort to bend and glue all those together.
In another gallery ... you've seen architectural models of buildings? Usually made of foam core? I saw one of some housing blocks but one was in the midst of a controlled demolition, so there were these foam bubbles representing puffs of smoke and the building was just starting to crumble. Clever, I thought.
I also enjoyed an exhibit by Chad McCail, who makes drawings that look like they're from childrens' books but include decidedly adult content (weapons, other tokens of the complexity of modern life).
After that, I did lots more walking, taking in a second shopping street. I snapped this picture of the Prime Minister because ... well ... when's the last time you saw a statue of a guy in a suit?
Then I took the subway back to the West End. There I had another pint at the same place as yesterday and read a few more of the daily papers. The name of the beer is Brune-Dark, and the brewery is Leffe. I also got a picture of Ashton Lane this time:
And I was wrong, wrong, wrong about pints. I grilled the bartender about this. The glasses are actually Imperial pints; they're just shaped differently, and the beer is immensely strong so I thought I'd been drinking more. I guess there's a lot of regulation; when you say you're serving a pint, it's got to be exactly a pint. So perhaps I have yet to encounter this elusive Scottish pint, if indeed it exists outside that historical description I read in Stirling Castle, which claimed that serfs were daily given a Scottish pint of beer (claiming it was 2.5x a standard pint), a loaf of bread, and any table scraps the royals and guests left behind.
Tomorrow ... Liverpool!
posted by Michael Nelson at 9:46 am
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