Botanic Gardens, City Tour Bus to Glasgow School of Art

With a full day at our leisure we set off on foot quite early – in warm sunshine - for the Botanic Garden where we looked around the Kibble Palace and then the glasshouses, where we saw a remarkably large collection of orchids, amongst many other fascinating plants – and fish!

Then we got onto a city tour bus, the tickets for which cover 2 full days so this was our mode of transport for the rest of our holiday. We had not previously experienced this type of tour bus in the height of the season, when they run every 15 minutes making them an extremely convenient way of getting about. We sat on the open top deck for the 1hr 45min tour with commentary by Neil Oliver and then went part way round again.

Our first stop was at The Tenement Building (NTS) which we found fascinating although it only comprises 5 rooms – hall, living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. It had been lived in from 1911 to 1965 by Miss Agnes Toward, a shorthand typist, and was more or less as she had left it. Even more amazing was that the two separate floors (known as ‘houses’) immediately above are both lived in by families, and in one of them the parents of the two small girls still use the double bed in the cupboard which forms part of the kitchen. The NTS guides told us that most of these ‘houses’ have now been adapted so that the hall and living room are combined and incorporate the kitchen, with the original kitchen turned into a second bedroom. The term ‘tenement’ tends to conjure up poverty in the English mind but practically all living space in Glasgow is in the form of tenement buildings – the West End where we were staying was also made up of tenement buildings. Most of them are very attractive, architecturally.
Next we joined a tour at the Glasgow School of Art, which contained some beautiful original furniture and lighting but the exterior was of greatest interest. We failed to find the Willow Tea Room (not realising it was on the lst floor of a building, not at ground level), and ended up walking around the vast shopping area, much of it pedestrianized and very lively. The tour bus took us back to West End.
In the evening we ate in another good restaurant, just off Byres Road, the Stravaigin2 (whose website was almost certainly designed by the same person who did that of The Ubiquitous Chip!). Again we thought the food was excellent and the customer service in both restaurants was well above the average standard.