Aberdeen – Dundee – Stirling – Edinburgh Park – Bankhead – Princess Street – Bankhead

There aren’t any early trains out of Aberdeen on a Sunday, so I had time for a look around. The city was very quiet, almost nothing was open on Union Street barring a couple of pubs serving breakfast. It’s an OK place; not huge, but has it’s share of interesting buildings.

I found myself at Provost Skene’s House, which is rather super. Apparently there is a good museum here, but it was way too early for it to be open. At one end of the building was a quite recent memorial to one of the city’s most famous sons, footballer Denis Law.

I decided to walk down to the waterfront. Not a lot was going on, but it is clearly an important area for the support ships that look after the offshore oil platforms and wind farms.

In a side street by the harbour I spotted a very unusual sign at the roadside. as I continued, I started to spot interesting graffiti all over the place. I have an app on my phone that gives me information about graffiti sites, added when I was in Waterford, and was soon following the maps looking for more sites.

Close to the station I spotted a rather odd, corporate looking piece on the back of an otherwise anonymous office block. Almost adjacent to it was an anarchic response:

“Real graffiti writers do this illegally hanging on a rope in the dark”

Having collected my bags, I headed to the station for the first service down the coast to Dundee. As we came through Arbroath I managed to grab a shot of the famous Kerr’s Minature Railway. It is still being dismantled, having closed in October 2020, after 85 years operation.

I’ve wanted to visit Dundee for ages. I’d heard that it was an interesting place, with a strong cultural history. I asked at the station if there was anywhere I could leave my bags and was told that the V&A Museum across the road had lockers. Not quite what I was expecting to hear!

I wasn’t prepared for the building. It opened 6 years ago, but I’d never seen a photo of it. Wow, stunning!

After visiting the lockers I thought that this was a good a place as any to start. There were a couple of interesting looking exhibitions, and in particular one entitled “Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World” caught my attention. A recently created diorama of Dundee, close to the entrance was very impressive. I could have spent ages looking at the details.

The highlight of the main exhibition for me was a reworking of the iconic film “Koyaanisqatsi” using imagery from the computer game GTA4 which either replicates or reflects the original. The two films are shown side by side and the end result is incredible, now going under the title “On Exactitude in Science”. There is a clip from it and more information at artist Alan Butler’s website.

Other parts of the exhibition illustrated the ways that artists (not just photographers) had interacted with cities in recent years. I was amused by a project where lots of phones were slowly pulled down an empty street in a cart, whilst logged into Google Street Map. The end result was that the software reported a traffic jam in the area!

The centrepiece of the permanent exhibition at the V&A is the relocated/rebuilt Ingram Street tearooms, created by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The whole room had been disassembled in 1971 and stored until it was reconstructed in this site.

Having already spent 3 hours here, I took a late lunch in the V&A cafe, a lovely outdoor space overlooking the Tay then set off for an exploration of the rest of the city. I do want to come back here soon and the museum next door, focussed on The Discovery will be my first calling point.

Dundee is the home of DC Thompson, of Dandy and Beano fame, so it was no surprise to see Desperate Dan in the centre of town! It’s a very pleasant town, especially on a sunny summer afternoon.

After collecting my bags from the lockers at the V&A I made my way back to the station. I travelled first to Sterling and then onward to Edinburgh Park. I’d misjudged this one, and had a fairly long walk through a grim industrial park and housing estate to my hotel. Fortunately there were closer options both for trains and the tram into Edinburgh, which I’d use later on.

I was meeting a friend for dinner in Edinburgh, which gave me a chance to use the tram network, which I’d heard a lot about, but never used before. The warm weather persisted into the evening so I took more photos as we walked, both before and after dinner. A very enjoyable end to a super day.