SCOTLAND - Am I in New York?

London has the Tube - arguably the best urban transportation system in the world. Newcastle has a certain "je ne sais quoi" and thinks itself very Parisienne and therefore has a Metro. Up here in Scotland, Glasgow thinks its New York and has obviously thought we need a Subway.

The Glasgow Subway is the third oldest underground rail system in the world after London and Budapest. It consists of one circular line but to make it seem bigger than it really is they have divided it in two - the Outer running clockwise and Inner running counter-clockwise. It's not only the network that is small, the track gauge is only 4ft (normally its 4ft 8.5 inches) and if you thought the tunnels on London's deep level tube lines were small (11ft 8.25 inches) those in Glasgow are even smaller at just 11ft.

I travelled down from Oban by train this morning through the glorious scenary that is the West Highland Line. In Glasgow, my first bit of sightseeing was to visit The Tenement House a National Trust for Scotland property in a residential part of the city centre. Tenement houses were/are multi-occupied residential buildings that are basically small blocks of flats. When we think of tenement houses many people outside Scotland would think slums but infact there were tenements for all classes. Working class ones would indeed have been very basic, often just one or two rooms with limited sanitation but those for the upper classes would be more like what we would call flats or appartments today - indeed many Scots in both Glasgow and Edinburgh still live in tenement buildings.

The Tenement House that the NTS has is the first floor of a building in Buccleuch Street and consists of a lobby, kitchen, parlour, bedroom and bathroom with additional box beds built into alcoves in the parlour and kitchen.  It was lived in until 1982 but is furnished as it was during the lifetime of the lady that lived there from 1911 to 1975. The dwellings - now flats - on the upper floors are still used as residential property. All in all a very interesting place to visit if you like social history.

It's a bank holiday weekend here in Scotland and Glasgow is a riot (quite literally) of stags and hens so what was I to do on a Saturday evening? Well I got the Tube - sorry Subway - to Hillhead and had a wander round the botanical gardens. The glasshouses were closed as it was evening time but the weather here is warm at the moment so it was a really nice way to spend my time,