Glasgow audiotours

Glasgow made its fortune from tobacco, cotton, and iron, and lost a large part of it when the world stopped buying British ships. The shipyards on the Clyde that once built the Lusitania and the Queen Mary are largely gone, but the city they shaped, dense and red-sandstone and architecturally spectacular in places nobody expects, is very much still here. It is the largest city in Scotland and the one that feels most like itself, without adjustment for visitors.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh left his mark across the city in a way that no other architect has marked a British city since.

The Glasgow School of Art, the Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street, and the Hill House in Helensburgh are among the most refined examples of Art Nouveau design in Europe. The Kelvingrove Art Gallery, a Spanish Baroque pile in the West End, contains what is arguably the finest civic art collection in Britain, including Salvador Dali's Christ of Saint John of the Cross, hung at an angle that makes the viewer feel they are looking down from above.