Dundee by design
Enjoying a new boom, the Scottish city of Dundee has a rich history and offers plenty to entertain visitors, writes Steve Meacham.
It is a sunny spring afternoon in Scotland’s fourth-largest city and the High School of Dundee’s school pipes and drums band is practising in the open air and the sound wafts across Albert Square, under the watchful gaze of Robert (Rabbie) Burns – Scotland’s Shakespeare. Or at least the gaze of his statue.
The bagpipe tunes have hardly changed since Burns’ day. Mournful, stirring, becoming of kilted men about to march into a probably losing battle.
Dundee is a city easy to pass by if you are heading from Glasgow or Edinburgh to the Highlands, the Hebrides or even John O’Groats, the most northerly place on the British mainland.
Unlike, say, Perth or Pitlochry, it requires a diversion. So is it worth it?
Photographs in Verdant Works, arguably the United Kingdom’s only museum devoted to the jute industry, prove Dundee deserved its title as ‘‘the city of church spires and chimney stacks’’.
One or two of those tall chimneys came with the sticky, sweet smell of jam or marmalade. Most, however, came with a noxious stench from the jute (a plant fibre used to make rugs, ropes and more) factories.
No matter how tall the chimneys – and they were some of the tallest in Britain – the health of the people of Dundee suffered as a result of the city’s prosperity.
Barely a chimney stack survives now. Dundee, a Unesco City of Design, has now reinvented itself again as a self-declared ‘‘boom city’’ with one of the biggest and best teaching hospitals in the UK.
But is it fun? My childhood (and that of many of fellow British contemporaries) was enlivened each week by the comic book antics of the Bash Street Kids, Lord Snooty, Beryl the Peril and Roger the Dodger. Think Ginger Meggs many times multiplied.
The Beano and The Dandy came through our letterbox as regularly as homework, all produced in Dundee by the company founded by one of Britain’s oddest media entrepreneurs (and there have been a few): David Couper Thomson.
Thomson was as eccentric as any of his cartoon creations. Even in the 20th century, he refused to employ Catholics or union members. That ultraconservative bias might have been more evident in his newspapers (the Dundee Courier and Daily Argus), but was never apparent in his comics.
Burns’ statue has its back turned to what has now been rebadged as The McManus Art Gallery and Museum (one of Scotland’s finest and designed by Sir Gilbert Scott of the Houses of Parliament fame). However, it also gazes over the historic DC Thomson building, which mimics a New York skyscraper from the Flatiron period.
Burns is hardly alone when it comes to statues. Oor Wullie, Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx are all represented at various points of the city.
But let us return to the heart of Dundee, the Tay.
Flowing from the Highlands, the Tay is the longest river in Scotland (and the seventh-longest in the UK). Perth owes its prominence to its bridge over the Tay but, by the time the river arrives downstream at Dundee, it has become a firth (the Scottish name for estuary, though locals will tell you a firth has more undiluted saltwater than an estuary).
My hotel, the Malmaison Dundee (opening in 1899 as Mathers Hotel), is superbly placed to explore the riverfront and docklands. Shipbuilding used to be one of Dundee’s main industries (along with the ‘‘three Js’’: jute, jam and journalism). However the last Dundee shipyard closed in 1983.
Fortunately, the dockyard – just a harpoon away from Dundee’s Viking longboat-shaped V&A Dundee museum, Scotland’s premier design museum – harbours the most famous ship built on Tayside: Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery.
Scott was beaten to the South Pole by the Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, and Scott’s exploits have been variously recorded from heroic chancer to poor logistical leader.
Yet Discovery, built in 1901 based on the wooden-hulled whaling ships (fashioned from oak, pitched pine and an iron-like tree from Africa) that Dundee had produced for generations, is back where it belongs. Our guide asks us to note its ‘‘pointed bow’’, great for smashing through Antarctic ice.
There were 47 men onboard Discovery when it arrived on Earth’s most isolated continent. It is claimed that Discovery was the first ship specifically built for scientific research.
And a typical meal before Scott’s sledge party left for the Pole was ‘‘roast penguin and seal’s liver’’, which was fortunately not on the menu at Malmaison. – traveller.com.au