Dundee

by WBlackwell on August 13, 2024

My hotel, the Sleeperz, is the best of locations. Directly above the rail station and with a Tesco market on the first floor. Close to the major waterfront attractions and the heart of the city. I needed to stretch muscles after hauling the luggage and the relatively short train trip so a walk along the river seemed ideal.

Under the Tay Bridge

Oil rig in for maintenance

Launched in 1824 it now serves as a museum albeit without masts

A nice water park with kids, all in wetsuits because we are in Scotland, were having a blast

Look up

A not very curious or loving father sent his daughter to the get water from a local well. She never returned so he sent a second daughter. When his ninth daughter failed to return he finally decided to investigate and, to his horror, saw a dragon sleeping with all his daughters partially eaten corpses around it. He gathered his neighbors and lead by father and one daughter’s lover, Martin, they attacked the dragon which Martin killed. Hence the Dundee Dragon legend was born

info from Dundee City Council: “The statue commemorates the 1878 escape and subsequent safe recapture of a polar bear [named Bruin], one of two brought from Davis’ Straits by a local whaling ship and bought for exhibition in Commercial Street by a Mr Woods. According to contemporary reports the escapee was one of two housed in a wooden box with an iron grating which slipped off the barrow transporting them and broke open. After scaring off on lookers and barging into a High Street clothes shop the bear was tempted out by a piece of beef and safely recaptured. The iceberg element refers to the precarious future faced by polar bears while the figure is Mr Jamieson, the haberdashery shop owner.” David Annand notes that “John Gray thought it a good idea to mount them on an iceberg so that the bear is reaping revenge on humanity for destroying its habitat.”

Desperate Dan is a wild west character in the now-defunct Scottish comic magazine The Dandy. He made his appearance in the first issue which was dated 4 December 1937 and became the magazine’s mascot He is apparently the world’s strongest man, able to lift a cow with one hand. The pillow of his (reinforced) bed is filled with building rubble and his beard is so tough he shaves with a blowtorch. He’s accompanied by Dawg & Minnie the Minx

And then there’s Oor Wullie. a Scottish comic strip published in the D.C. Thomson newspaper The Sunday Post. It features a character called Wullie; Wullie is a Scots nickname for boys named William, hence a favorite of mine. His trademarks are spiky hair, dungarees and an upturned bucket, which he uses as a seat: most strips since early 1937 begin and end with a single panel of Wullie sitting on his bucket. You’ll find him all over the city with the first one in a law office

Penguins are also found around the city. This connection traces back to the RRS Discovery situated at Dundee’s waterfront. Its inaugural expedition was to the British National Antarctica – the homeland of the penguin!

I think every city in Scotland has a statue of The Poet. It is located in front of The McManus Art Gallery & Museum is a Gothic Revival style building, located in the centre of Dundee, Scotland. The building houses a museum and art gallery with a collection of fine and decorative art as well as a natural history collection. Built as a memorial to Prince Albert, the building was designed by the architect George Gilbert Scott, who was an expert for the restoration of medieval churches and advocate of the Gothic architectural style.

Herself

Dundee was at one point the largest whaling city in Britain. Not anywhere near as large s New Bedford, Massachusetts, It was still a great addition to the Jute City

I liked this painting by a former Scot in New Zealand, Ron Stenberg, donated this to the city.

The woman on the left of the picture was Janet Isles-Denny, one of Dundee’s wealthiest women who decreed in her will that her vast fortune be left in trust to promote the arts, heritage and disadvantaged in Dundee.

Furthermore, the “friend” sitting beside her was in fact her son Alexander who had learning difficulties and was a long-term resident at the  Royal Dundee Liff Hospital.

This statue was inspired by an imagined Oor Wullie comic strip, in which Oor Wullie visits the renovated McManus Gallery. Wullie was impressed with the braw collection of weird and wonderful objects from across the globe, that had somehow all ended up in Dundee. He especially liked the mba mask from Africa, which was used in okumkpa – an African dance noted for its humorous qualities. It was believed that putting on the mask transformed the performer into a spirit, so Wullie thought he’d hae a go at that.

Designed by internationally acclaimed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, V&A Dundee stands at the centre of a £1 billion transformation of Dundee’s waterfront. Inspired by the dramatic cliffs along the east coast of Scotland, the building stretches out into the River Tay, reconnecting the city with its historic and beautiful riverside – a major new cultural development for Scotland and the UK. Frankly I find the building more interesting than the exhibits