Glasgow Museums - Hotels - Modern Art Galleries - Transport Museum - Burrell Collection - Kelvingrove Art Gallery - Provand's Lordship

Glasgow Museums

The Sandyford Hotel is a convenient base from which to explore the many beautiful Galleries and Museums that Glasgow has to offer. Providing cheap bed and breakfast accommodation without compromising on quality, the Sandyford hotel is a popular choice for visitors to Glasgow's Museums, especially the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum - only a few minutes walk away!

Gallery of Modern Art

This is one of the most popular art galleries in the city. Fronted by imposing Corinthian columns and housing four distinct galleries inside, each of which is devoted to an element: fire, air, earth, and water. The earth collection is most popular, focusing on works from Scottish artists such as John Bellamy and Ken Curry. The top-floor air gallery offers some recent cutting-edge paintings and three-dimensional pieces, and the elaborately decorated café on this floor is an intriguing place to take a break.

Transport Museum

Trams, buses, ships, circus caravans, bikes and automobiles - they're all here to see in what is reputedly Britain's best transport museum. As well as various well-preserved modes of transport, the museum also contains a recreated 1950s street, a whole room full of delicate models of Glasgow-built ships, an old-fashioned underground station and a small cinema showing short historical documentaries about life in Glasgow. Admission is free.

Burrell collection

Glasgow's major attraction, the Burrell Museum, is a Collection amassed by wealthy industrialist Sir William Burrell ship owner and art collector, before it was donated to the city in 1944. After much wrangling over where the collection should be located, it was, in 1963, finally agreed that it should be housed in a purpose-designed Museum building in Pollok Country Park, 5km south of the city centre.

This idiosyncratic collection includes everything from Chinese porcelain and medieval furniture to paintings by Renoir and Cézanne. Carpeted floors maintain the silence to contemplate the beautifully displayed treasures. Carved-stone Romanesque doorways are incorporated into the Burrell Museum's structure as portals; some galleries are reconstructions of rooms from Hutton Castle, the Burrell residence.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery

One of the finest civic collections in Europe is housed within this Glasgow landmark. Here you can explore collections that include everything from fine and decorative arts to archaeology and the natural world. The number of individual items in the natural history department alone is vast. You can admire Sir Roger the Elephant or wonder at 300-million-year-old fossils of marine life from the Glasgow area.

The collection of arms and armour is one of the finest in the world, and in this country is equalled only by the Royal Armouries and by the Wallace Collection in London. Among its many treasures is the earliest near-complete field armour in the world (the famous 'Avant' armour, made in Milan circa 1440). Also in the collection is the impressive and unique armour for man and horse made for William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, circa 1550.

Provand's Lordship

At Provand's Lordship you can step back into Glasgow's past in the only house to survive from the medieval city. Now open to the public, Provand's Lordship has been extensively restored to give a real flavour of life in medieval Glasgow.

The house was built in 1471 as part of St Nicholas's Hospital by Andrew Muirhead, Bishop of Glasgow, and you can still see the bishop's coat of arms on the eastern side of the south gable. It later became the town residence of one of the canons of the cathedral chapter. This clergyman is thought to have drawn his income from the rents and taxes of Balernock, and was known as the 'Lord of the Prebend of Balernock', later corrupted to 'Lord of Provan'. The house takes its name from this title. All the other medieval buildings that once surrounded the cathedral had been demolished by the beginning of the twentieth century, and it was only through the work of the Provand's Lordship Society that the house was saved from the same fate.