Heads Up: Amid the New, Glasgow Looks to the Past

Enzo Di Cosmo

An exhibition on the Red Road apartment buildings, marked for demolition, at the People's Palace museum.

In September, the Foster and Partners-designed Hydro arena opened to much ado in Glasgow's gritty Docks area. The translucent ultramodern building — Wi-Fi-enabled for up to 12,000 users — glowed a thousand colors and beamed spotlights up and down the River Clyde. Outside, vendors hawked rainbow wigs and tartan clan mugs. Inside, live Twitter feeds scrolled across 145 oversize high-definition screens. Rod Stewart opened the space with a bang of a show that brought out plaid-clad Glaswegians and their teenage children (and grandchildren). Mr. Stewart closed with a ripping "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" but rather than a crooner's finale, it seemed more like a question the newly tarted-up city was asking itself.

Modern-day Berlin might own the phrase "poor but sexy," but Glasgow was both long before the Wall rose and fell. Yet today it's more Pritzker than poor thanks to two Norman Foster projects and the adjacent Zaha Hadid-designed Riverside Museum. The buildings are just three of 250 development projects aimed at transforming the waterfront by 2025. Although many locals are exuberant, some are critical. (The Hadid building houses a dull Transport Museum, which some call a £74 million garage, and the Hydro chose English-raised Rod Stewart over a number of Glasgow-born musicians for opening night.)

As Glasgow's skyline becomes more starchitecture-studded, a wave of nostalgia is sweeping the city. There's a boomlet of city tours emphasizing Glasgow's working-class roots, restaurants serving near-forgotten dishes and several museums showcasing its scruffy past. Glasgow's gritty yesteryear is best explored at the People's Palace, a museum of the city's social history, staging a yearlong exhibition on Red Road, eight high-rise apartment buildings now marked for demolition. Glasgow City Heritage Trust opened a new exhibition called Shops, running through December and featuring signage of Glasgow's historic shops. The City Council sponsors about 20 heritage trails that explore Glasgow's past, including one introduced in March that maps the city's tragic fires.

For years, Glasgow has seen itself as the "anti-Edinburgh," its starchy neighbor about an hour's drive away, but as the city has evolved into a gentrified metropolitan area of 2.5 million over the last decade, it's slowly turned away from its roots.

"Though the city has never been shy of inviting international talent in, it may, at times, have overlooked just how much local talent had to offer," said Neil Baxter of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. "But no worries about Glasgow becoming some sort of homogeneous city. It's big enough, blousy enough and rough enough to provide something for all tastes."

As a glossier Glasgow takes shape, old Glasgow has become more alluring. Existing buildings are resisting renovation while new ones are built to look weathered, or "lamb dressed as mutton," to reverse a popular local saying.

The West End's Ubiquitous Chip opened in 1971, and its walls remain decorated with the local artist Alasdair Gray's murals, while the kitchen turns out upgrades of old Scottish food like Lapsang souchong-smoked salmon and venison haggis with turnip cream. The Merchant City neighborhood has no shortage of these places. The Butterfly and the Pig is a vintage tearoom where you can get unadorned wheat bread sandwiches filled with egg and watercress, as well as fish cakes, on mismatched floral plates. At All That Is Coffee, a new coffeehouse and artisan showroom, the chicken-wire windows showcase an old bicycle. The deconstructed coffee joint is in warm latte-carrying distance of the Briggait, a fish market abandoned for years before reopening as artists' studios in 2003. Across the street is MacLeod Highland Supplies, a blue-fronted shop where you can peruse bagpipes, drums and obscure accessories like sporrans, spats, sgian dubhs, kilt pins and garter flashes.

The lead singer of the indie band Belle and Sebastian, Stuart Murdoch, is an avid Glasgow explorer. He produced, wrote and directed the feature film "God Help the Girl," set in Glasgow which will have its premier on the film festival circuit this winter. "I like to walk around the city and look for bits and pieces of the old city," he said from the Brel restaurant, where he is an occasional D.J. His favorite spots include Relics, a West End shop selling old biscuit tins and vintage 20th-century signs; the Forth and Clyde canal, which "runs into the heart of town from the country like an 19th-century High Line"; and Central Station.

"It may be harder to find these days," Mr. Murdoch said, "but there are still a few places where Old Glasgow exists."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the period during which the Briggait, a fish market, was abandoned before reopening as artists' studios. It was used by artists from 2003 to 2008; therefore it was not abandoned for 20 years before reopening as artists' studios in 2009. In addition, a picture caption misidentified the photographer who took the photo of the People's Palace museum. He is Enzo Di Cosmo, not Jim Dunn.

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