Time for world to discover Dundee’s glamour

THE three-week Sydney Arts Festival continues in New South Wales, while the annual surfing contest was taking it up a notch at Half Moon Bay, California. Meanwhile in Dundee, Marwick’s on Union Street has become the town’s first vegan café. Dundee isn’t very big on epicureanism, in much the same way as Wolverhampton isn’t big on origami.

I once dined at a restaurant there called The Playwright, because of its location next door to Dundee Rep, where the walls were covered with moody headshots of modern Scottish thespians, including an entire floor-to-ceiling devoted to local boy Brian Cox. My companion complained it was like having dinner in the early chapters of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Dundee’s reputation was built on the three Js of jute, jam and journalism, until they dwindled and the three Cs took over in the 1960s and 70s – Corrupt City Councillors. Yet people who compared it to Coventry, grotty, soulless and time-warped, underestimated its combative spirit.

AFTER all, Dundee was also home to William McGonagall, who did to poetry what the council did to the Nethergate and Overgate, yet the locals turned this into a badge of honour. Ditto the Tay Rail Bridge disaster of 1879, as commemorated in McGonagall’s deathless poem.

This speaks of a particularly sanguine and bullish attitude to disaster and dark portents.

In a similar way, when the Alan Bennett film An Englishman Abroad alighted on Dundee, the filmmakers decided that the Caird Hall, Tayside’s most enduring architectural landmark, deserved to be on the big screen – as The Kremlin. Rather than being offended, Dundonians were thrilled.

In recent years, to sharpen its tourist skills, the city imported Scott’s Antarctic ship into the main harbour and proclaimed itself Dundee – City of Discovery, as opposed to the Dundee of my teenage years when it was City of Discover There’s Nothing To Do After 6pm.

Since then, Dundee has pulled up its socks and put itself on the map as a place to drive to, rather than through, with a swish arts centre, significant research centres, a vastly improved Riverside view across the Tay and of course the V&A opening later this year.

Will Dundee’s makeover from Scotland’s least attractive city to hot destination date change the place for good? Well, why not? Movie-style glamour might be the final touch needed.

California has Hollywood, Dundee has the Hilltown. They have Beverly Hills, but Dundee has Broughty Ferry. The beautiful people may dine on California rolls, but wait till they try Wallace, Land O’ Cakes (and pies).

Many days, you can hardly see Los Angeles for smog. In Dundee there are magnificent views of the Tay as you pass Wilson’s dog food factory. They have glamorous premieres – Dundee have a Premier League football team.

So with talk of a remake of Hello Dolly on the way, why not have a skiffy at the script, relocate its waterside songs to the Tay, put Lorraine Kelly in a bonnet as the lead, and hey presto – Haw Neebor!