While sight tends to dominate in the world of architecture, our non-visual senses – touch, taste, hearing, and smell – have a profound effect on our lived experience of cities and buildings. This year, Glasgow Doors Open Days Festival invites you to explore the story of the city through the senses. 

What does your city feel like? The surfaces and textures we encounter each day influence us more than we realise. Mostly they go unnoticed. Cold, polished marble in the City Chambers; soft, mossy gravestones in the Southern Necropolis? Timber, stone, concrete, metal, and glass all create different sensations and influence our feelings and perceptions of a place. They can evoke a range of emotions: the degraded carved stone of the Govan Stones inspires intrigue and mystery and the rough sandstone of tenement buildings provide comfort and familiarity. 

How does Glasgow sound? Do the chants of football fans in your favourite stadium make you feel at home? Is it the bells of the Tolbooth at Glasgow Cross that whisk you back in time? Do you listen for the rumble and splash of the River Clyde on your walk in Glasgow Green? And when you’re away on holiday, does an unlikely call from across the pool of “bolt ya rocket!” make you smile, or gie ye the boke? How have city sounds evolved through the ages?

Which whiff takes you to the Toon? Have you experienced the aromas of the Clydeside Distillery, and allowed your mind to drift through the floral and tropical notes of their single malt? What about the smells you endure for the sake of a good night out – a sweaty Barrowland Ballroom on a Saturday night – or the warm mustiness that accompanies a rummage through Starry Starry Night or Voltaire & Rousseau bookshop? Can you imagine the smells of times gone by? The Briggait, a former fish market, a portal to the sea, or the hot metal, smoke, and oil of industrial Dalmarnock.

What’s Glasgow like on the tongue? How many sweethearts have looked longingly at each other over a knickerbocker glory at University Cafe or Cafe D’Jaconelli? Or are you an east-end lover, wooing your beaux with a clappy doo at the Barras or a faithful fish supper from the Val D’Oro chippy. Or maybe the taste you look forward to is a daal after prayer at the Gurdwara, enjoyed with friends and family around you. 

And now that you’ve got Glasgow in your ears, mouth, nose, and hands, open your eyes and soak up the skyline! Take in the rusting but vital Finnieston Crane, faithful companion to the river, the gothic and enchanting Gilbert Scott building at the University of Glasgow, and the seemingly just landed, smooth shell of the Hydro, a new but bonafide Glaswegian fixture. Look for the statues and their seagulls in George Square, and the coats of arms that adorn so many of the city’s buildings. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, Glasgow opens another door, to the dizzy heights of Mackintosh’s Lighthouse or the bow of the Tall Ship, the tunnels of Central Station, or the vaults of the Museum’s Resource Centre.

In 2023, take a moment to consider how Glasgow’s heritage impacts your experience of the city today…

…and do as the poet says, and listen!

Touch! Taste! Look! Smell!

Tree, fish, bird, bell.