Dundee, the City of Design

Dundee is Scotland's fourth city and one of the most surprising in the country. It faces the estuary of the River Tay, the Firth of Tay, on the east coast, and has just under 150,000 inhabitants. For centuries it was the city of the "three Js": jute, jam and journalism. Today it is the first British city to be named a UNESCO City of Design, home to an outpost of London's Victoria and Albert Museum designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and it boasts an unexpected claim to fame: some of the world's most famous video games were born here. It is also Scotland's sunniest city, at least according to its residents.

Trains from Edinburgh take about an hour and a quarter, and St Andrews, the home of golf, is less than half an hour away.

Jute, jam and journalism

For centuries Dundee was a port of fishermen, merchants and whalers: its ships hunted whales in the Arctic, and whale oil became essential to its industry. In the 19th century it was discovered that jute, a coarse fibre imported from India, could be softened with whale oil and spun by machine. Within a few decades Dundee became the world capital of jute, with dozens of great mills producing sacks, canvas and rope for the whole world. The work was done mainly by women, so much so that Dundee was called "the women's town", while the men often stayed at home, unemployed.

The second "J" is jam: according to tradition, at the end of the 18th century a Dundee shopkeeper, Janet Keiller, bought a cheap cargo of bitter Seville oranges that had arrived in the port and turned them into a peel preserve, marmalade, which her family would go on to sell worldwide. The third "J" is journalism: the publisher DC Thomson, founded in the city, has for more than a century published newspapers, magazines and above all comics famous throughout the UK, such as The Beano and The Dandy. In the centre a bronze statue honours Desperate Dan, one of their best-loved characters.

What to see in Dundee

V&A Dundee

On the waterfront, V&A Dundee is Scotland's first design museum and the only branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum outside London. Opened in 2018, it was designed by Kengo Kuma, inspired by the cliffs of the Scottish coast: two inverted volumes clad in long horizontal strips of cast stone, looking like the prow of a ship reaching out over the Tay. Inside, the Scottish Design Galleries tell three hundred years of creativity, from textiles to video games, and house a tearoom designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, rebuilt piece by piece. Entry to the permanent galleries is free.

RRS Discovery

Next to the museum lies the RRS Discovery, the ship built in Dundee in 1901 for Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to Antarctica. The city's yards were chosen for their experience with whalers able to withstand the ice. You can go aboard, see the crew's cabins and visit the Discovery Point visitor centre, which tells the story of life among the ice.

The McManus and Verdant Works

The McManus, in a Gothic Revival Victorian building in the heart of the city, is the free civic museum and art gallery, with collections of local history, Scottish painting and the skeleton of the Tay Whale, a humpback that strayed into the estuary in 1883. To understand the jute era, visit Verdant Works, an old mill turned into a museum, with working machinery and the stories of the workers.

The Law and the view over the Tay

Dundee Law is an extinct volcano about 170 metres high in the middle of the city, with a war memorial on top. From the summit you can see the whole estuary, with the two long Tay bridges, the coast of Fife and, on clear days, the Highland mountains. On another hill, in Balgay Park, stands the Mills Observatory, the first purpose-built public observatory in Britain, opened in 1935.

Broughty Ferry

East of the centre, Broughty Ferry is the elegant seaside district, once a fishing village and then home to the wealthy jute barons. It has a 15th-century castle on the beach, now a museum, a long sandy beach, historic pubs and seafood restaurants. It is the perfect place for a sunset stroll.

The Tay bridges

The Tay estuary is crossed by two bridges more than two kilometres long. The first rail bridge, opened in 1878, collapsed on the night of 28 December 1879 in a violent storm while a train was crossing: everyone on board died, one of the worst railway disasters in British history. The tragedy was also told in a poem by William McGonagall, affectionately considered the worst poet in the English language, whose clumsy verses have become a cult. Beside the broken piers, still visible in the water, the present bridge was built, opening in 1887. The road bridge, from 1966, links Dundee with Fife.

Video games, football and Frankenstein

In the 1980s and 1990s a group of young Dundee programmers, DMA Design, created two titles that made video game history: Lemmings in 1991 and the first Grand Theft Auto in 1997. Since then the city has been a hub of the games industry, with dozens of studios and Abertay University, one of the first in the world to offer degrees in game development.

Dundee has two football clubs, Dundee FC and Dundee United, whose grounds are on the same street, less than two hundred metres apart: the two closest professional grounds in the UK. A literary curiosity: as a teenager Mary Shelley spent almost two years in Dundee, and later wrote that it was here, by the estuary, that her imagination took flight, years before she wrote Frankenstein.

Around Dundee

• St Andrews, about twenty kilometres away across the Tay bridge: the home of golf, with Scotland's oldest university and the ruins of its cathedral by the sea.
• Glamis Castle, about twenty kilometres north: the castle where Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother grew up, linked by tradition to Shakespeare's Macbeth.
• Carnoustie and the Angus coast, with championship golf courses and long beaches.

Living in Dundee

Dundee went through difficult decades after the mills closed, but in recent years it has been profoundly renewed by the waterfront regeneration project, the V&A, its two universities and the creative and digital industries. Housing is among the cheapest of any Scottish city, and Edinburgh, St Andrews and the Highlands are all close by. There are still areas of low income and social problems.

Getting there

• By train: from Edinburgh about an hour and a quarter, from Glasgow about an hour and a half, from Aberdeen just over an hour. The station is on the waterfront next to the V&A.
• By air: Edinburgh Airport is about an hour and a quarter away by car or bus; Dundee has a small airport with a few domestic flights.
• In the city: the centre and waterfront are walkable; city buses serve Broughty Ferry and the Law.

See also Scotland, the history of Scotland and British cities.

Tips for your visit

• How long: a day for the V&A, the Discovery and the centre; half a day for Broughty Ferry and the Law; a day for St Andrews.
• What to eat: marmalade and Dundee cake, a rich fruit cake topped with almonds.
• A tip: climb the Law at sunset to see the bridges lit up over the Tay.

Dundee on the map

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