Dundee Travel Guide: What to See, Eat & Do | Palace Tours

Dundee sits on the north bank of the Firth of Tay, on Scotland’s east coast in the county of Angus, roughly 60 miles north of Edinburgh and about the same distance east of the Highland foothills. It is Scotland’s fourth-largest city, and one of its sunniest — a compact, hill-backed place where the streets run down to a broad tidal estuary crossed by two great bridges. The Tay Rail Bridge, rebuilt after the catastrophic collapse of its predecessor in 1879, still carries trains along the coast, and the view from a carriage window as the water opens out beneath you is one of the finest railway moments in Britain.

For most of the nineteenth century Dundee was a workshop city, famous for what locals still call the three Js: jute, jam and journalism. Jute spun in its mills clothed the world in sacking and sailcloth; Keiller’s marmalade, made here from Seville oranges, gave the city a name on breakfast tables across the Empire; and the publishing house of D.C. Thomson produced the comics and papers that shaped generations of British childhoods. Dundee was also a whaling and shipbuilding port — the polar research ship Discovery, which carried Scott and Shackleton to Antarctica, was built in its yards. Today that industrial inheritance has been reworked into something unexpected: in 2014 Dundee was named the United Kingdom’s first UNESCO City of Design, and its regenerated waterfront is now among the most striking arrival points in Scotland.

What to see in Dundee

• V&A Dundee — Kengo Kuma’s cliff-like museum of design juts into the Tay like the prow of a ship, its stacked concrete bands modelled on the sea cliffs of north-east Scotland. Inside, the Scottish Design Galleries trace everything from tartan and shipbuilding to video games, and admission to the permanent collection is free.
• RRS Discovery and Discovery Point — Berthed beside the V&A, the ship that took the 1901 British National Antarctic Expedition south has been restored to her polar fit-out. You can walk the mess deck, see the officers’ cabins and stand at the wheel, with an adjoining exhibition on the expedition itself.
• The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum — A Gothic Revival pile by George Gilbert Scott, opened as a memorial to Prince Albert, holding Scottish colourists, Victorian narrative painting, Pictish carved stones and the city’s own social history.
• Verdant Works — A surviving jute mill turned museum, with working machinery, the noise and lint of the spinning flat recreated, and unflinching accounts of the women and children who staffed the mills. It is the best place in Britain to understand the textile trade from the inside.
• Dundee Law — The plug of an extinct volcano rising 570 feet directly behind the centre, topped by a war memorial. The climb takes twenty minutes and rewards you with the whole estuary, both bridges, the Sidlaw Hills and, on a clear day, the Fife coast.
• Broughty Ferry and Broughty Castle — A former fishing and whaling village four miles east, now the city’s seaside suburb, with a sandy beach, good pubs and a fifteenth-century tower house on the water guarding the mouth of the Tay.
• HM Frigate Unicorn — Launched in 1824 and one of the oldest surviving warships in the world, still afloat in the city docks with her original timbers and roofed-over deck largely untouched.
• Dundee Contemporary Arts — Two galleries, a print studio and an independent cinema on the Nethergate, and the social centre of the city’s design and student scene.

What to eat in Dundee

Start with the two things named for the city. Dundee cake is a rich, buttery fruit cake, lightly spiced, ringed with blanched almonds on top and traditionally made without cherries; Dundee marmalade is chunky, dark and bitter, the style that made Keiller’s famous. Both turn up at hotel breakfasts and afternoon teas across Angus. For something plainer, ask for a peh — the local pronunciation of pie — a hot mutton or steak pie eaten from the paper, often with beans.

The wider region eats very well. Arbroath smokies, hot-smoked haddock from the fishing town fifteen miles up the coast, carry protected geographical status and are worth seeking out on menus in their own right. Forfar bridies are horseshoe-shaped pastries of minced beef and onion from the Angus market town of the same name. Add Angus beef, Tay salmon, cullen skink (a smoked haddock, potato and onion soup), stovies, and soft fruit from the Carse of Gowrie — the raspberry country that once supplied the jam factories. To drink, the Speyside and Highland malts poured on Royal Scotsman itineraries are the natural pairing, and Dundee’s own craft brewers have added a lively local beer scene.

Shopping & crafts

The V&A shop and the DCA are the best places for contemporary Scottish design — ceramics, textiles, jewellery and prints by makers working in the city. Verdant Works sells jute and linen goods that connect directly to the mills. For tartan, tweed and knitwear, look along the Nethergate and Perth Road, where independent shops sit among the galleries; the covered Overgate and Wellgate centres cover everything more ordinary. Angus farm shops on the road out of town are the place for marmalade, shortbread and honey to carry home.

Best time to visit

May to September is the sweet spot, with long northern daylight, mild temperatures and the estuary at its best. Late spring brings the gardens of Angus and the Carse into flower; September holds the warmth without the peak-season crowds and coincides with the Dundee Flower and Food Festival. Winter is short on daylight but atmospheric, and the city’s museums are all indoors. Rain is possible in any month — Dundee is drier than most of Scotland, but the Tay makes its own weather.

Good to know

• The waterfront is genuinely walkable: V&A Dundee, Discovery Point, the station and the main hotels sit within a few hundred yards of one another.
• Dundee is about an hour and a quarter from Edinburgh by train and around an hour and a half from Glasgow, which makes it an easy addition to a wider Scottish itinerary.
• Broughty Ferry is a short local train ride or a fifteen-minute taxi from the centre — worth the trip for an evening meal by the water.
• Most of the major museums, including the V&A permanent galleries and The McManus, are free to enter; Discovery Point and Verdant Works charge, with a combined ticket available.
• Pack layers and something windproof whatever the season. The estuary is open to the North Sea and the breeze off the Tay is brisk even in July.

Dundee rewards the traveller who arrives by rail. Crossing the Tay Bridge with the city rising ahead of you, then stepping off a few minutes’ walk from a Kengo Kuma museum and a polar exploration ship, is a particular kind of Scottish pleasure — industrial history, design ambition and big estuary light in one compact place. On a Belmond Royal Scotsman journey it comes as one movement in a longer piece, between the whisky country of Speyside, the west coast lochs and the castles and gardens of the Lowlands.