Welcome to the (Concrete) Jungle
One of the first things you will learn as a student is that real life is unpredictable. Still, at least you know what you’re getting from the locals in your new home in one of Scotland’s fine university cities, right? Do you see where we’re going?
EDINBURGH
It's a posh, crusty living museum whose inhabitants find it impossible to get anything done without blowing their budget and destroying small areas of the city. When they aren’t complaining about badly-planned engineering projects or humblebragging about bloody pandas, the people of Edinburgh have a number of key hobbies.
They can be found repairing cobbles on their heritage-tastic streets, complaining about their rubbish collections, constantly referring to their city as ‘The Capital’ in case someone steals the title away from them in the night, complaining about the roads, and complaining about the trams some more. The city comes to life in August and December, primarily to give residents something seasonal to whinge about, as well as providing some art and music not to watch. The people of The Capital are a bit, well... fuddy-duddy.
Fortunately, while many of the people of Edinburgh are completely full of shit, you won’t have to deal with them. You will be hanging loose with the massive student contingent, who come from all over the world, make up about 20% of the city’s population, and have no great emotional attachment to The Little Tram Line That Could, But Hasn’t So Far.
Edinburgh students break down into nice neat tropes – the failed Oxbridge applicants in their tight chinos and oversize Gap shirts, the provincial Scottish moshers who eventually grow out of it because they’re in a real city now and don’t need to impress anyone, the Mediterranean hippy punks with their crap beards and drum circles on the Meadows, and so on – all of student life’s rich tapestry is here, on display in a living shortbread tin.
The student numbers mean that ‘the kids’ live and play across a vast expanse of the city from Morningside to Leith, but the whole place is so white and middle-class you’ll barely notice the difference until you fancy a curry and realise you’re completely surrounded by cafes and charity shops filled with blue-rinsed grannies. Don’t worry, they won’t bite – just prepare a brief tirade about the particulars of tram project management and you’ll fit right in.
GLASGOW
Now here’s a different kettle of fish altogether. Industrial, gritty, like a Shane Meadows film but with even more shellsuits. It’s full of knife-wielding maniacs, antagonistic football fans and pasty white people kitted out like extras from an NWA video. Glasgow, essentially, is Edinburgh’s hipper urban cousin.
Well, it’s urban in a peculiarly Scottish sense; it’s one of the few locations in Scotland that doesn’t resemble the setting of a Disney cartoon about hobgoblins. The city is undoubtedly cooler than The Capital, with gig venues and clubs all over the place, and sights to see that aren’t hundreds of years old. If you want to see a touring band in Scotland, they will be in Glasgow. You don’t really have to check, just head west. The nightlife has a much more anarchic and authentic feel, and as an added bonus Glasgow is genuinely broken up into distinct areas. Turns out driving that motorway through the middle of the city was a good idea after all, Glasgow, sorry we doubted you!
The City Centre is reserved for jakeys, with the great and good commuting in to do their shopping, gigging, and boozing before fleeing down Sauchiehall Street at 11:53 for the train station in fear of being stuck in town. The West End is home to many of your fellow students, as well as many of the things that students like (‘kooky’ bars, short-as-possible journeys to classes). The East End is where you go to get your iPhone unlocked and then sit on Glasgow Green for hours, and the South Side is where you head is you can’t afford to stay in the West End.
While they have their differences, one thing binds all of the parts of the city together – the Glasgow banter. That’s not rudeness, or needless aggression, it’s just banter. That mental guy with the chib, just full of banter. Glaswegians like to behave, talk and dress as though they live in New York. They don’t – they live in Glasgow – but it doesn’t hurt to play along, especially because things aren’t going to get any more urban any time soon.
DUNDEE
The city is famous for three things – producing cloth in the 1800s, housing a ship that went on Antarctic expeditions in the 1900s, and reigning as Scotland’s teenage pregnancy capital in the 2000s. Other than that, there isn’t a whole lot going on in Scotland’s fourth city. While Edinburgh and Glasgow would live on without the annual influx of spoilt teenagers eager to ‘learn,’ Dundee might very well float away into the North Sea if the students all left at once. It is a barren cultural wasteland, and not a patch on either of its rivals.
Except... nah. Dundee is actually a perfectly passable student city, with a number of things going for it. For one, there’s the ‘big fish, small pond’ effect to consider. Go to Edinburgh and you won't be noticed or appreciated, but go to Dundee and the locals will welcome you like a conquering hero. 'Cords AND a hat,' they'll say, 'that guy is cool. Let's make him our new god.' That, or they’ll throw suspicious looks in your direction as you stalk one of their 40 branches of Tesco.
The size of the place is another bonus – Dundee is pretty titchy, and everything you’ll ever need is handily lined up along one street that leads directly into the City Centre. No dealing with the riff-raff! This does lead to Dundee students being slightly dismissive of moving anywhere out of sight of the Perth Road in case their friends forget about them and they end up starving to death, but it’s good to have a sense of community.
The big one for Dundee is that it is actually on the verge of being cool and interesting. The Scottish outpost of the V&A is set to open on the waterfront in a couple of years’ time and the city is in the running to be UK City of Culture in 2017. Dundee could soon be the epicentre of the Scottish cultural landscape (discounting Glasgow, of course), but with a subplot of polar exploration. Dundee could be the cultural equivalent of the episode of the Mighty Boosh set in the Arctic tundra where Noel Fielding dances with a lonely polar bear, and what student wouldn’t want to be involved in that?