Dundee Audio Tours

Dundee is Scotland's fourth-largest city and has been characterised in the past by the three Js: jute, jam, and journalism. The jute mills that made the city a Victorian industrial powerhouse are mostly gone, but their legacy shaped Dundee's character as a working-class city of considerable resilience. The RRS Discovery, the ship that carried Robert Falcon Scott to Antarctica on his 1901 expedition, was built in Dundee and is now moored at Discovery Point as the centrepiece of a museum that does justice to one of the great stories of polar exploration. Standing on the deck of this wooden ship and imagining it locked in Antarctic ice is a genuinely stirring experience.

Dundee has reinvented itself more decisively than almost any other British post-industrial city.

The V&A Dundee, which opened in 2018 as the first Victoria and Albert Museum outside London, was designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma in a dramatically angular building that juts out over the River Tay waterfront. It has become a genuine cultural destination. The city is also the birthplace of DC Comics UK publisher, and the comic characters Desperate Dan and Oor Wullie have been part of Dundee's popular culture since the 1930s, with bronze statues of both characters on the High Street. The Tay Rail Bridge, rebuilt after the catastrophic 1879 collapse in which a train was lost to the river in a storm, still carries trains across one of Scotland's widest estuaries.