Glasgow

A Victorian city of the dead on a hill behind the cathedral, 3,500 monuments to Glasgow’s merchant class crowded up a green ridge, presided over by a towering column of John Knox glaring down at everyone. Grand, sooty and half wild, with the best view in the city from the top. Free, and endlessly wanderable.

Best shot The tomb-crowded ridge and the Knox column against a low sky, crossing the Bridge of Sighs.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The only medieval cathedral on the Scottish mainland to survive the Reformation intact, low and dark and blackened, built over the tomb of St Mungo. Go down into the lower church, a forest of stone pillars around the saint’s shrine, the eeriest space in the city. Free.

Best shot The vaulted lower church around St Mungo’s tomb, or the blackened east front from the Necropolis path.

The oldest house in Glasgow, a small medieval manse of 1471 across from the cathedral, low ceilings and worn boards and a knot of dark period furniture. Free, quick, and quietly grim in the best way.

• Quiet

A Victorian cemetery across the river in the Gorbals, home to the White Lady statue and, in 1954, to one of the strangest nights in the city’s history: hundreds of local children stormed the graves with knives and stakes to hunt the Gorbals Vampire, a seven-foot iron-toothed monster they were sure had eaten two boys. It had not. They came back for three nights running anyway.

Best shot The White Lady monument among the leaning stones, best under bare winter trees.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A dim gallery in the Trongate where hundreds of carved figures and scavenged machine parts, built over decades by a Russian sculptor, clank and turn and dance to music and light in timed performances: a mechanical danse macabre of skeletons, saints and grinning peasants. Unlike anything else in Britain. Book the show, not just the walk-through.

• Adults only
• Quiet

The oldest surviving music hall in the world, hidden above a shop on the Trongate and left to decay after decades sealed up: peeling balconies, a ghost of a stage where a teenage Stan Laurel first performed, a freak show and wax-anatomy museum once running below. Kept alive now by volunteers, open odd hours. Barely restored, and all the better for it.

Best shot The rotting balconies and bare stage under work lights.

• Adults only

Scotland’s oldest public museum, in the neo-gothic heart of the university, built on the collection of the 18th-century anatomist William Hunter: fossils, coins, pickled oddities and medical specimens under a soaring hammerbeam roof. Free, and gothic to the rafters, the building as much as the contents.

Best shot The hammerbeam gallery inside, or the university’s gothic cloisters just below.

• Quiet

A Scots baronial gothic pile right beside the cathedral and the Necropolis gates, turrets and crow-steps and all, built in the 1890s and long rumoured to be haunted by children. A handful of simple rooms over a bar, and the most fitting address in the city. Walk out of the door and into the graveyard.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A five-star hotel in a former private club on Glasgow’s grandest Georgian square, all dark marble, low light and Harris tweed, with a hushed basement spa. Expensive, moody and central.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A vast Victorian railway hotel built into Central Station, marble staircases and a grand tearoom under the departure boards. Faded grandeur with the trains rumbling below.

• Quiet

A bar, restaurant and theatre inside a beautiful disused Victorian church in the West End, stained glass and painted ceilings and a huge beer garden in the old churchyard. Drink under the rose window. One of the loveliest rooms in the city.

Best shot The stained glass and painted timber ceiling of the old church interior.

• Adults only

A proper old Glasgow whisky bar, family-run, with hundreds of bottles on the gantry and pies under glass on the counter. Dark wood, no nonsense, and someone behind the bar who actually knows the list.

• Solo-friendly
• Adults only

The oldest bar and restaurant in Glasgow, up a lane off Argyle Street since 1797, all mahogany, mirrors and a jaw-dropping ballroom upstairs. Touristy on the ground floor, but climb to the ballroom.

• Adults only
• Touristy

A cluttered basement bar full of mismatched vintage furniture, teapots and low lamps, doing cocktails and comfort food with a wink. Cosy, kitsch and a good hideout from the Bath Street crowds.

• Adults only

A legendary secondhand bookshop in a West End lane, books stacked in unstable towers to the ceiling and spilling off every surface, resident cats asleep among them. Chaotic, dusty and perfect. Give yourself an hour and low hopes of finding anything by title.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

Glasgow’s best-known vintage shop, tucked in a courtyard off the Merchant City, tightly packed with decades of coats, dresses and denim. Dig, and dig again.

• Solo-friendly

Three floors of dealers in the old Barras market, everything from taxidermy and church candlesticks to costume jewellery and dead men’s watches. A proper rummage, best at the weekend when it is all open.

• Solo-friendly