Train from Auchinleck to Glasgow Central station and am very excited because I’m staying at the Grand Central Station hotel for a night.   Another drizzly day, so thought I’d do a Glasgow bus tour to see where I want to visit in more detail tomorrow. The boarding stop was 500 metres away from the hotel. And we were off….I was greatly taken with the graffiti work around the city!

The SSE Hydro building loomed ….looking like a huge martian craft had lobbed into the city. Beautiful at night …..opened in 2013 in Glasgow and plays host to national and international music mega stars as well as global entertainment and sporting events.

Jocelyn (the last hanging) Gate: They haven’t hanged people in Glasgow since 1960. But rewind the clock a century or two and there was nothing to beat a good hanging, at the entrance to Glasgow Green, in Jocelyn Square. The first executions at the spot were in 1814 and over the years 67 men and four women were hanged there.  When Dr Edward Pritchard became the last person to be hanged in 1865, it was such a sensation that the execution turned into one of the year’s greatest tourist attractions. Pritchard was a respectable doctor with a practice in Sauchiehall Street but had been convicted of poisoning his wife and mother-in-law. By all accounts thousands of people travelled to the square and filled the surrounding streets drinking and celebrating the doctor’s demise.  People who owned rooms overlooking the hanging site hired them out at three guineas a time so spectators could have a grandstand view and street vendors did a roaring trade.

A View of the Clyde by graffiti artist, Rogue-One. Celebrating some of the City’s most impressive landmarks including the Armadillo, Riverside Museum, and some lesser known ones like the giant sunken Dalek.   

Clutha Bar mural by Rogue-One. Mary Barbour (see female on right of mural) was a Scottish political activist, local Labour councillor and magistrate. She is famous especially for her role as the main organiser of the women of Govan who took part in the rent strikes of 1915, when she actively organised tenant committees and eviction resistance. From 1924-27,  Mary was appointed as one of the first woman magistrates in Glasgow.  

In 1925, she helped create the first family planning centre in Glasgow.  Until her retirement from the Council in 1931, she worked relentlessly on behalf of the working class people of her constituency, serving on numerous committees covering the provision of health and welfare services.

“The Italia”, 2.6 metres, is one of several sculptures in Glasgow’s Merchant City quarter, by Alexander Stoddart. He is Scots and since 2008, has been the “Queen’s Sculptor in Ordinary” in Scotland. He works primarily on figurative sculpture in clay within the neoclassical tradition. The “Italia’s” female form is swathed in a draped garment and carries symbols of ancient Italy: a palm branch in her right hand and an inverted cornucopia in her left. Stoddart says of his own motivation, “My great ambition is to do sculpture for Scotland”, primarily through large civic monuments to figures from the country’s past.