This week’s travel dream: Glasgow’s quiet renaissance

It’s nice to see that at least one Scottish city knows how to make good use of its history, said Spud Hilton in the San Francisco Chronicle. Unlike Edinburgh to its east, Glasgow doesn’t do a lot of business in souvenir swords and novelty kilts. Its heritage is less visible and thus less attractive to foreign tourists. But over the last decade, Scotland’s largest city has undergone a revival, drawing on the past to create a richer urban experience for locals that happens to be great for visitors too. The new Glasgow features “captivating museums, an increasingly savvy dining scene, stylish emerging neighborhoods, and an energetic nightlife.” In the life of any city, what matters “isn’t how much history you’ve got”; it’s what the people do with it.

Consider the changing waterfront along the River Clyde. Once the source of the city’s industrial-age boom times, the area “atrophied into an eyesore” in the last century before a major renewal project brought in a river walk with various footbridges, an armadillo-shaped performance hall, and two museums. During a recent visit, I made a beeline for the innovative new Riverside Museum to see its celebration of transportation history, including a 1950s double-decker trolley, full-scale re-creations of historic streetscapes, and a four-story-tall wall of antique cars. My wife and I thought it’d be smart to spend another day wandering the very heart of town but soon discovered too much noteworthy Victorian architecture to take in and too many friendly pubs beckoning for us to slow down.

The city’s West End, home to the University of Glasgow, has seen a boom in “lively alternative joints with creative concepts.” Inside a 19th-century church that now wears a neon halo around its steeple to signal its conversion into an art and performance center, a “raging nightclub” comes to life three nights a week. We dined in one of two impressive in-house restaurants beside a spirited band playing in the basement whisky bar. “Armed with fiddles, guitars, and at least one Celtic bouzouki,” they urged us to dance and got us laughing. Didn’t I tell you Glaswegians know what to do with their history?

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At Glasgow’s CitizenM hotel (citizenm.com/glasgow), doubles start at $95.