Glasgow: Scotland's Citiest City

Glasgow is Scotland’s biggest city, with a population of more than 475,000 people. It was also recently voted the ‘coolest city in the UK’. A few years ago, it was ‘UK City of Architecture and Design’, and before that, European City of Culture. Glasgow is larger than life - big, bold and dynamic. It was once one of Britain’s most powerful industrial cities and has now transformed itself into the hub of a stylish service economy - home to big name financial companies and the retail capital of Scotland, rated the UK’s best place to shop outside London.

With its tall buildings, grid-planned streets and fabulous sweeping cityscapes, it’s a booming commercial centre, its prosperity based on a wide range of modern businesses and high tech industries. It’s also well known as a big-time party and cultural city, and for having more pubs, clubs, rock venues and gigs than you could ever reasonably be expected to go to.

Along with all the nightlife, designer shops, cinemas, bars and restaurants in the city centre and the West End, it also has some superb museums and galleries; theatre, opera and dance; outstanding Victorian and Art Nouveau architecture; the new Science Centre, festivals, parks and open spaces, as well as over 20,000 students, a reasonable cost of living and famously humorous and friendly people.

Fashionable, vibrant and arguably Scotland’s ‘citiest city’, Glasgow is devoted to sport - football especially - and as well as being part of a broad urban landscape that includes towns like Paisley, its surprisingly close neighbours are the hills, forests, lochs and walking country of the Clyde valley and the south-western approaches to the Highlands. The city and the country, as in so much of Scotland, are right next door to each other. So Glasgow can comfortably give you the best of both worlds.

Glasgow is home to Glasgow School of English, James Watt College and Langside College.