Family UK Road Trip: Glasgow, Scotland
After C’s family returned to Korea following our road trip across the Scottish Highlands and Isle of Skye, we rode a train to Glasgow with my mom. Scotland’s capital city is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I loved it! It’s gritty, edgy and full of graffiti, rich history and crazy stories. Similar to my birth town, Pittsburgh, Glasgow was once a booming industrial town with massive wealth, to which its beautiful neo-Gothic turn-of-the-century architecture can attest. To understand this complex city, we did a two hour walking tour with a local guide.
Glasgow grew from a small town along the River Clyde into a wealthy trading hub in the 1700s through tobacco, sugar, and cotton. Powerful merchant families became extremely rich and the city rapidly expanded. By the 1800s, Glasgow had become one of the world’s greatest manufacturing cities, dominating coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding and other heavy industries. During our walking tour, the guide pointed out several buildings that were formerly the lavish mansions of the city’s elite, each built to be more extravagant than the neighbors’ mansions next door.
Our guide also explained the legacy of religious tension in Glasgow between Catholics and Protestants - a division tied not to theology or religious beliefs per se, but to history and identity. During the industrial boom in the late 1800s, many Irish Catholic immigrants came to Glasgow for work. Scotland at the time was strongly Protestant and competition for jobs, housing, and political power created social divides. These divides hardened into a cultural rivalry that has lasted generations. Today, this rivalry continues to be expressed through fierce allegiance to either of two football clubs: the Celtics (traditionally Catholic/Irish) or the Rangers (traditionally Protestant/British/Unionist).
Glasgow’s economy peaked in the early 1900s. After Germany’s bombardment of its shipyards, munitions factories, and industrial zone during World War II, its heavy industries economy collapsed, leading to decades of unemployment, population loss, and urban decline. Since the 1980s, Glasgow has been reinventing itself around culture, education, architecture, and the arts. It’s still a bit gritty, but I love the mosaic laying of new upon old.
As an avid quilter and seamstress, one of my mom’s wishes in Glasgow was to visit the Singer Sewing Machine Factory, which is now a museum. We hopped on a local train over to the old industrial area of Clydebank to the west. Unfortunately, the museum was closed the day we visited. We snapped a few pics outside and then went to the Kelvingrove Art Museum instead.
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Our two week family road trip in the United Kingdom wrapped up where it began. We accompanied my mom back to London, with a final day trip to Windsor before she returned home to the United States. From London, we resumed our 2024 Round the World vagabonding adventure in Turkey, where we planned to hike the Lycian Way.
