City Centre, Dundee

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McManus Galleries houses a museum and art gallery with a collection of fine and decorative art as well as a natural history collection

Until the industrial revolution the current City Centre represented the full extent of the City of Dundee. Now roughly encircled by the Marketgait dual carriageway, the city centre is now the main shopping and commercial district. Unlike the city centre of Glasgow many of the city centre’s (especially in the southern and eastern quarters) streets are not built on a grid plan and in that way have more in common with street plan of the Old Town of Edinburgh (although most buildings in Dundee’s city centre date from the 19th Century or later). The modern city centre is still divided into the six medieval thoroughfares: the Seagait, Murraygait, Nethergait, Overgait, Wellgait and the Cowgait (“Gait” being an old Scots word for street) which all remain today, although the “Overgate” and “Wellgate” are now an enclosed shopping centres. Many of the medieval closes were demolished in the late 19th Century to make way for larger and grander Victorian streets. However the area to the north of the city centre between Meadowside, Ward Road and the Marketgait is mostly based on a grid system with wide avenues and crescents, due to much of this area being planned and designed in the Victorian era.

At the heart of the city centre is the City Square, home to two of Dundee’s principle cultural venues; the Caird Hall, the Marryat Hall along with the City Chambers and other businesses. The multi-storey Tayside House, completed in 1976 to accommodate the then new Tayside Regional Council and now the main headquarters of City of Dundee Council is located directly behind the City Square, although this is scheduled to be demolished by 2011, due partly to escalating maintenance and upgrading costs and (perhaps mostly to) being voted the “least loved” building in the City in a recent residents survey.

Dundee Parish Church, St Mary's is one of two of the city's City Churches

The offices of D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd, the McManus Galleries, the High School of Dundee, University of Abertay Dundee the Barrack Street Natural History Museum, the Episcopal St Paul’s Cathedral, Dundee Central Library, Dundee’s main railway station and the headquarters of Tayside Police are all to be found in the city centre. Many of Dundee’s public statues are scattered throughout the neighbourhood, subjects include Robert Burns, Queen Victoria, Admiral Duncan, the Strathmartine Dragon, James Carmichael, Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx, there is also a plaque to William Wallace, on the supposed site where he began his war for independence by murdering the son of the English governor, sheriff or magistrate of Dundee after he had made a constant habit of bullying him and his family, although this local folk tale may or may not be true, it is known that that St Paul’s Cathedral, where the plaque is located is the site of Dundee’s old castle, which the army of Wallace and Andrew Moray laid siege to early in the Wars of Scottish Independence.

In recent years there has been a lot of development of the city with lots of construction work going on, with the Scottish Social Services Council, The Care Commission and the Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator recently relocating to Riverside area and Communities Scotland and Her Majesties Inspector of Education moving to the Greenmarket area.

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