We made a weekend excursion to Dundee, which is under 2 hours from Glasgow and, as you can see, on the eastern coast of Scotland, a bit north of Edinburgh.
Why Dundee? . . . Well, why not!
Dundee is the fourth largest city in Scotland (after Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen) with a population of about 180,000. It’s set along the estuary (local speak = “firth”) where the Tay River meets the North Sea and has a rich maritime and trade history.
This was the first overnight outside of our flat since I’ve been in Scotland (apart from my trip home to the US) and I had the excitement of a kid going away to summer camp.
Some highlights:
The new V & A Museum which just opened in 2018 and focuses on Scottish design – whether of ships, fashion, furniture or communities. It has a reconstructed Charles Rennie Mackintosh tea room inside.
Next to the V & A is the RRS Discovery, a ship built in Dundee at the turn of the 1900’s which has a storied history that began with use for an expedition to Antarctica, then in trade for the Hudson Bay Company, then more expeditions and delivering cargo in WWI. Explorer Ernest Shackleton of “Endurance” fame was on the Discovery’s first voyage to Antarctica.
The Verdant Works is another treasure. Simply put, it’s a museum about the jute industry, which was absolutely huge in Dundee (one of the town’s nicknames was “Juteopolis”). I know it sounds incredibly boring, but it’s so interesting in many ways. Linen and jute made in Dundee was used on stagecoaches of pioneers of the American West, coffee and cocoa bean sacks in South America and Africa, tents used by Civil War soldiers, boat sails and ropes, among just a few things. And, interestingly, it was mostly women and children who worked in these factories, under dreadful conditions, and the women were often the family breadwinner giving Dundee a matriarchal subculture.
The McManus Galleries is the city’s museum, showing the natural world around the Dundee area and the history over time. It does a great job of telling the story of the boom and bust of its economy as one industry arrives, then falls – whether whaling, ship building, linen, jute or, more recently, computer games.
Among its exhibits were the tales of a couple of pioneer women reporters, Marie Imandt and Bessie Maxwell, who in 1894 were sponsored by their editor to take a nine-month world trip to report on life in other countries from the perspective of women. At the end, they declared that American women were the most liberated of all the countries they visited. If you want to read more about their journey, you can click here.
Dundee promotes that it’s known for the three J’s – Jute, Jam & Journalism. Jute manufacturing is gone as is the jam (the orange marmalade that it was famous for is no longer produced locally) and, as we know, local news is in decline.
To me, Dundee has done a good job of coming to terms with its industrial past – both the glory and the disgrace – and seems to have come out of it keen to adapt, survive and reinvent itself for the future.
A special bonus . . . Cats of Dundee
Cat driven crazy by seagulls 
Cat escaped teen boys by going in construction site
I’m glad you had such a great time there. Thanks for sharing the beautiful photos & fascinating info. Sad that the jam’s no longer made there. When I was in Scotland in the late 1970’s I fell in love with Dundee’s lemon jam & continued to buy it in Munich & NYC later.