Robb Report’s Insider Guide to Glasgow [SLIDESHOW]

This Second City of the U.K. is second to none for inventiveness.

Trendy and friendly, Glasgow has a history of embracing the new. Once a burg of tobacco barons, the city exploded in size with the Industrial Revolution, adapting to build a base of smokestack industries on the cutting edge of fields like textiles, shipbuilding, and locomotive engineering—and becoming known as a place of grit, in regard to both its air and its residents. But cleaning up its act and its sooty buildings at the tail end of the 1900s revealed the handsome sandstone facades of the art nouveau structures erected by Glasgow’s foremost architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, along with a hodgepodge of styles that sprouted as the city grew and changed. It is a place of energy and dynamism, as it always was. It is said if you toss a stone anywhere in Glasgow, you’ll hit an artist—and that artist likely will be a humorist as well.