Glasgow grew from a 6th-century monastic settlement into the Second City of the Empire on tobacco, cotton and steel. Three days trace that arc: medieval cathedral and necropolis, Merchant City counting houses, and the Clyde cranes that outlived the ships.
Scotland's only medieval mainland cathedral to survive the 1560 Reformation intact. The lower church holds the tomb of St Mungo, who founded the settlement around 550 AD. Open 09:30–17:30 April–September, 10:00–16:00 in winter, closed Sunday mornings.
A Victorian garden cemetery of 50,000 burials and 3,500 monuments on a hill above the cathedral, opened 1833. John Knox's column predates it by 8 years. Alexander 'Greek' Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh both designed tombs here.
Glasgow's oldest house, built 1471 as part of St Nicholas Hospital and the only surviving medieval townhouse in the city. Three floors of oak furniture, a 1471 timber roof and the Stirling Maxwell collection of carved panels.
A cloistered physic garden behind Provand's Lordship planted with the herbs a 15th-century hospital would have grown. Its walls carry the Tontine Heads — grotesque stone faces salvaged from the 1737 Tontine Hotel arcade on Trongate.
Glasgow's transport museum holds 3,000 objects including Clyde-built locomotives and a recreated 1930s street. Moored outside, the Glenlee is a 1896 Port Glasgow barque that rounded Cape Horn 15 times — one of five Clyde-built sailing ships still afloat.
A 175-foot cantilever crane built 1931 to load steam locomotives onto ships bound for India and South Africa. It lifted 30,000 engines before falling idle in 1990 and now stands as the surviving emblem of Clyde heavy engineering.
Opened by Queen Victoria in 1888 at a cost of £578,000, paid for outright by a city then at its imperial peak. The loggia holds more Carrara marble than any building outside Italy; free guided tours run 10:30 and 14:30 Monday to Friday.
On 31 January 1919 up to 60,000 strikers demanding a 40-hour week filled this square; the Riot Act was read and 10,000 troops with tanks were sent to Glasgow. Twelve statues ring the square, Walter Scott's column at the centre since 1837.
A 1892 four-room flat where Agnes Toward lived from 1911 to 1965, changing almost nothing. Gas lamps, a coal range, box beds and her jam jars survive exactly as left. Open daily 10:00–17:00 March–October; timed entry, 12 visitors at a time.
Virginia Street, Glassford Street and Buchanan Street are named for the merchants who controlled over half of Britain's tobacco imports by 1770. The Virginia Galleries hide the old tobacco exchange floor behind a plain shopfront.
Built 1778 as the townhouse of tobacco lord William Cunninghame, later the Royal Exchange, now GoMA. The Duke of Wellington statue outside has worn a traffic cone since the 1980s — the council abandoned removal attempts in 2013 after public revolt.
Licensed since 1792 and among Glasgow's oldest pubs, with a low-beamed snug that served Clyde ferrymen and dockers. Billy Connolly and the folk revival singers played here in the 1960s; the folk sessions still run several nights a week.