Places to Visit in Scotland
- Templeton Carpet Factory, Glasgow

Eh? A carpet factory as a place for tourists to visit? But, as you can see, this is a most unusual building, close to Glasgow Green, the oldest park in the city. In the late 19th century, the owners of the site wanted to build a factory there but the Victorian city council kept rejecting their design proposals.
So they recruited a top architect, William Leiper. He came up with a proposal modelled on the Doge's Palace in Venice, which was built in 1892 in polychromatic brick - orange, yellow, blue, with turrets and arched and circular windows. It is no longer a carpet factory - it has become a business centre instead.

Across the road from Templeton's is the "Peoples Palace" museum with its Winter Garden devoted to the people and culture of Glasgow (including Billy Connolly's "banana wellington boots" as illustrated here - it's that sort of place). Glasgow Green is where Rangers and Celtic football teams first faced one another and Bonnie Prince Charlie camped there with 10,000 troops in 1745 during the Jacobite Uprising.

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Where else would you like to go in Scotland?








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