I spent most of every week in Dundee final spring whereas doing archival analysis in St. Andrews, 13 miles to the south throughout the River Tay, Scotland’s longest river. Every single day I commuted to my resort — 40 minutes by bus — in a “actual” metropolis, as I had between Washington and Baltimore for 22 years.

And I got here away a fan. Greater than a fan, really. Once I left, in my breast was the defensive love felt by individuals who stumble into has-been cities and keep, as I’ve finished in Baltimore for greater than half my life.

Dundee, like Baltimore, is a metropolis whose nice days are a century gone.

It has a world-class industrial previous, and an unlimited stock of vacant industrial buildings within the current — like Baltimore. Each cities have a dominant and oppressive constructing materials — pink brick in Baltimore, and in Dundee an area sandstone that may’t make up its thoughts whether or not it’s tan or grey. As in Baltimore, a few of these buildings — fantastic ones — have been repurposed, just like the resort I stayed in, an previous linen mill.

Each cities have signature culinary merchandise — crabs in Baltimore and marmalade in Dundee. Each have numerous litter. Each are defaced or adorned with graffiti, relying in your style. Dundee has the best crime price of cities in Scotland whereas Baltimore ranks third in america.

The place does one start to find out about Dundee’s historical past and coronary heart? Fortunately, for a vacationer, there’s a place.

In Scotland, a ferry-borne exploration of the Inside Hebrides

It’s referred to as Verdant Works, a former jute mill in part of the town generally known as Blackness. (Dickens couldn’t have give you a greater identify.) As soon as the employer of 500 folks, the mill is a keyhole by which most of Dundee’s historical past may be descried. Not like many manufacturing unit museums, its story is made vivid by docents just one or two generations faraway from its inescapable clutches.

However earlier than we spend a day there, let’s go searching.

A vibrant maritime historical past

Dundee is a port on the Firth of Tay, the place the place the river widens right into a tidal estuary earlier than getting into the North Sea. It was constructed on commerce, and for a lot of centuries it was Scotland’s second most vital metropolis, behind Edinburgh. Its maritime previous is telegraphed in avenue names (Chandlers Lane, East Whale Lane), stone workshops alongside the waterfront, a compact Maritime Path the place its piers and shipyards as soon as stood, and a small assortment of historic ships.

Of the final, probably the most notable is the Discovery, a three-masted crusing vessel that additionally had a steam engine. Billed as the primary ship designed particularly for scientific analysis — there was no iron or metal inside a 30-foot radius of its “magnetic observatory” — it was in-built Dundee in 1901 and owned by the Royal Geographical Society.

The Discovery’s most well-known voyage was a four-year journey to Antarctica that includes two of Britain’s legendary explorers — Robert Falcon Scott, the captain, and Ernest Shackleton, the third officer. Guests are allowed to go nearly wherever on it. (In that regard it’s higher than Baltimore’s estimable Constellation, in-built 1854 and used to catch slave merchants, amongst different duties.)

On the pier subsequent to it’s V&A Dundee, an offspring of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Like its father or mother, it’s devoted to design, ornamental arts and efficiency. Opened in 2018, the V&A is the antithesis of Discovery — no vertical traces in view, and clad in what appears to be like like a grate from a pier. But it surely’s simply as fascinating, with a beautiful assortment that features a salvaged tea room from Glasgow that was designed by Scotland’s artwork nouveau genius, Charles Rennie Waterproof coat.

The ship and the museum are probably the most seen items of a 30-year, practically $2 billion growth venture alongside 5 miles of waterfront.

A 15-minute stroll inland is the McManus, a gallery and museum that’s a superb place to see artwork and artifact telling Dundee’s story. That features eras as Britain’s most vital whaling port; a textile and shipbuilding middle; and, within the second half of the twentieth century, the British residence to American firms, together with Timex and Nationwide Money Register.

As in Baltimore, Dundee’s shipyards and factories ultimately closed. (The town misplaced 10,000 manufacturing jobs within the Eighties.) Like Baltimore, it’s now attempting to cobble a future out of tourism, biotech and many little firms.

Scotland’s Bass Rock is a birding paradise

There’s quite a bit to see in Dundee’s environs, together with castles and archaeological websites. However in case you have time for just one cease, make it Verdant Works. The museum stands in for the greater than 100 jute mills that after operated in Dundee and employed, by the late 1800s, 40,000 of the town’s 170,000 residents.

It’s a fiber produced from the center layer of a 12-foot-high grass that grows principally in India and Bangladesh. Its closest competitor is hemp.

You make burlap from jute. From burlap (within the previous days) you made the binding of cotton bales and sacks for espresso, cocoa, sugar, potatoes and many different issues. Woven tighter, it turned material for tents and the covers for artillery items. Warfare was good enterprise for jute. In a single two-week interval throughout World Warfare I, 150 million jute sandbags have been shipped out of Dundee.

So how did a metropolis on the North Sea come to course of fiber grown in South Asia?

Within the 1700s, Dundee developed a linen business, importing flax from the Baltic states and different high-latitude international locations the place it grew. By 1840, the town had overtaken Leeds, in England, within the manufacturing of coarse linen. The Crimean Warfare (1853-1856), nevertheless, interrupted the flax commerce.

Dundee’s industrialists realized they’d the data and labor to course of, spin and weave different fibers. Imperial Britain had entry to a flax different rising in its colony, India. Add somewhat time and Dundee turned the jute capital of the world.

A small factor that made a giant distinction was Dundee’s whaling fleet. Sooner or later the mill managers found that washing the uncooked fiber in a mix of 90 p.c water and 10 p.c whale oil made uncooked jute much less prone to snag in fast-moving equipment. This 10 p.c resolution was sufficient to maintain Dundee’s whaling business alive 50 years longer than in nearly wherever else on the earth.

The primary docent I encountered at Verdant Works was Ian Findlay, a 73-year-old retired civil servant. His mom’s mom was a jute weaver. His father’s mom was a jute spinner. His father’s father was a upkeep engineer in a jute mill.

“It was the one present on the town, to be trustworthy,” he mentioned.

On the manufacturing unit flooring I met one other man, Iain Sword, additionally 73, whose jute pedigree wasn’t as lengthy. His father left faculty at 14 and was a jute salesman, principally to the carpet business, his entire life.

Sword had been a banker round the UK earlier than retiring to Dundee, his hometown. He was a jute Wikipedia, and no apologist for the mill homeowners. He advised me that when Britain lastly required public training, Dundee mill homeowners efficiently petitioned to be an exception. They obtained permission to make use of “half-timers” — kids who’d work 30 hours every week within the mill for minuscule pay and go to highschool for half days solely. They have been so good at crawling underneath equipment and pulling out mud and fibers!

The truth is, 70 p.c of mill staff in Dundee have been girls and youngsters, who have been paid lower than males. The town was generally known as “She City” and was the primary place in Scotland the place jailed “suffragettes” went on starvation strike. It was additionally filled with males elevating kids and ingesting an excessive amount of.

Partly as a consequence of those circumstances, 63 p.c of Dundee’s eligible males fought in World Warfare I, the place they have been slaughtered in droves. A battalion generally known as “Dundee’s Personal” despatched 423 males and 20 officers into battle at Loos, France, in September 1915. All however one of many officers have been killed, as have been 230 enlisted males. The McManus has a spectacular portray of two dozen Dundonians — that’s what the town’s residents are referred to as — standing within the ruined panorama after one other battle, Neuve Chapelle. The painter, Joseph Grey (1890-1962), had been a newspaper artist in Dundee; everybody within the portray is recognized.

“Working circumstances have been simply very, very arduous. It’s very tough to think about what life was like,” Sword mentioned, between explanations of how varied items of equipment operated.

A glimpse of that life, nevertheless, comes by in a exceptional piece of public well being analysis printed by the Royal Society of London in 1886. The authors have been three males — Dundee’s well being officer; a chemist at College School in London; and a second scientist from that establishment, J.S. Haldane, who would develop into crucial respiratory physiologist of his era.

The workforce took air samples from tenements occupied by mill households — 29 one-bedroom and 13 two-bedroom dwellings — and from 18 dwellings of 4 or extra bedrooms occupied by middle- and upper-class households. They measured temperature, carbon dioxide (a product of respiration and a measure of crowding), in addition to “natural matter” (principally mud), and micro organism and mildew.

“The samples have been taken throughout the evening, between 12.30 A.M. and 4.30 A.M.,” the scientists wrote. “The homes have been visited with out warning of any variety to the inhabitants, in order to keep away from the chance of getting rooms specifically ventilated in preparation for our go to. In each case however one we have been most civilly acquired.”

The common variety of sleepers per room within the one-room flats was 6.6; within the two-room ones, 6.8; and within the homes of 4 or extra rooms, 1.3.

At 52 pages, it’s an extended and complex examine that highlights the dramatic results of crowding. In contrast with four-room homes, one-room ones had air with twice as a lot carbon dioxide, 4 occasions as a lot mud and 7 occasions as many microorganisms.

A very powerful information, nevertheless, was supplied by Dundee’s well being officer.

The loss of life price of youngsters was 4 occasions greater in one-room tenements than in four-room homes. Residents residing in a single room “have the possibility at delivery of residing solely one-half so long as these in better-class homes, or they die practically 20 years sooner, on the common, than these of the higher class.” At this the scientists couldn’t restrain themselves: “This is a gigantic distinction.”

Different analysis discovered that teenage boy mill staff have been 4½ inches shorter and “a stone lighter” — that’s 14 kilos — than rural youngsters in Scotland.

Haldane’s extra well-known son, mathematician and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, later mentioned of his father: “His expertise of the Dundee slums might not have made him a radical, however it saved him one.”

What Dundee wants is its model of New York’s Tenement Museum, and even Baltimore’s modest Irish Railroad Employees Museum, to convey these circumstances to life.

Jute mill homeowners ultimately discovered a approach to make much more cash: They moved the enterprise to India, nearer to the fiber’s supply. Dundee misplaced a complete business, a lot of its tradition and untold hundreds of individuals. Earlier than, it had been a spot the place a boy with mechanical aptitude might advance — even when he left faculty at 14. “The lack of the textile business just about led to the lack of all that,” Iain Sword advised me.

However remnants of the jute commerce are nonetheless seen in Dundee, in the event you maintain an eye fixed out. Passing a trash-strewn manufacturing unit yard early in my go to, I noticed on the far finish an indication over a door: “Drivers mustn’t stand underneath slings whereas bales are being hoisted.” Jute bales — compressed rock-hard to save lots of area on cargo from India — weigh 400 kilos.

The town can be filled with live performance halls, parks, swimming pools and different public facilities which may not exist however for the barons. They gave generously whereas mercilessly exploiting their staff — like Andrew Carnegie, a Scot whose wealth paid for greater than 1,500 libraries in america.

Verdant Works exhibits this story and doesn’t simply inform it. The displays are intelligent and shifting. Bodily objects butt up towards pictures of individuals doing work with those self same objects. You’re feeling as in the event you’re in a diorama or onstage in a play. Mural-size pictures make faces bigger than life. You’ll be able to’t assist pondering the individuality of the folks observing you.

It’s a spot to really feel the beating coronary heart, and the stony coronary heart, of a metropolis.

Brown is a author primarily based in Baltimore. His web site is aweewalk.com.

Decrease Dens Mill, Constable St., Dundee

ihg.com/hotelindigo/inns/us/en/dundee/dndid/hoteldetail

This upscale resort is in a five-story repurposed textile mill with a bell tower and is inside strolling distance of Dundee’s downtown sights. The inside retains hints of its industrial previous. A great restaurant, Daisy Tasker, is on-site and makes use of Scottish substances. Rooms from about $100 per evening.

West Henderson’s Wynd, Dundee

This refurbished jute mill is a must-see attraction. Its docents are wonderful and its displays detailed and unsparing concerning the work as soon as finished by tens of hundreds of Dundonians at dozens of mills. Open Monday by Saturday 10 a.m. to six p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to six p.m. from April 1 to Oct. 31. Open Wednesday by Saturday 10 a.m. to five p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to five p.m., and closed Monday and Tuesday, from Nov. 1 to March 31. Final admission one hour earlier than closing. Tickets can be utilized anytime inside 12 months of buy. Tickets about $14 per grownup, about $8 per little one and free for five and youthful; household tickets for 2 adults and two kids about $37.

Discovery Level, Riverside Drive, Dundee

This fantastically restored four-mast vessel was in-built Dundee in 1901. Its most well-known voyage was to Antarctica, with Robert Falcon Scott (who later died in an effort to get to the South Pole first), on the helm. Excursions of the ship are self-guided; there’s a museum on the pier. Open Monday by Saturday 10 a.m. to six p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to six p.m. April 1 by Oct. 31. Open Monday by Saturday 10 a.m. to five p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to five p.m. Nov. 1 by March 31. Final admission one hour earlier than closing. Tickets legitimate inside 12 months of buy. Tickets about $14 per individual for adults and about $6.50 per little one ages 5 to 12. Ages 5 and underneath free. Ticket for each RRS Discovery and Verdant Works about $22 per grownup and about $11 per little one ages 5 to 12. Household worth about $37.

Albert Sq., Meadowside, Dundee

This artwork gallery and museum tells Dundee’s story and has quite a few particular exhibitions. Open Monday by Saturday 10 a.m. to five p.m. and Sunday 12:30 to 4:30 p.m.; final entry quarter-hour earlier than gallery closing time. Free admission.

1 Riverside Esplanade, Dundee

A department of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, “Scotland’s design museum” boasts each everlasting and momentary displays. Open Wednesday by Monday 10 a.m. to five p.m.; closed Tuesday. Free admission; some particular displays require fee.

Potential vacationers ought to take native and nationwide public well being directives relating to the pandemic into consideration earlier than planning any journeys. Journey well being discover info may be discovered on the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention’s interactive map displaying journey suggestions by vacation spot and the CDC’s journey well being discover webpage.