Glasgow Doors Open Day 2015 Update
Kirstin McEwan
We’ve come to the end of another fantastic Glasgow Doors Open Day and what an event it’s been! This year we had our biggest ever event with more than 100 buildings taking part throughout the week, more than 50 walks and tours and dozens of talks on Glasgow, its history and its future.
This year’s festival ran alongside the European Year of Industrial and Technical Heritage 2015 and had some special events to help our visitors find out more about the Industrial Heritage of Glasgow. With tours such as the Govan Waterfront Walk, talks on Glasgow’s Vanished Industry and drop in venues such as the Trades Hall of Glasgow there was plenty to give visitors an exciting insight into Glasgow’s industrial past.
2015 is also Glasgow’s year of Green; celebrating Glasgow’s aspiration to be one of the most sustainable cities around, so to celebrate we also had four green spaces involved in our programme including G3 Growers and Greyfriars Garden.
We also had a number of firsts this year including a central venue acting as our Glasgow Doors Open Day Hub. Our team opened up the Former Linnen Back on High Street as a go-to venue for all those Doors Open Day questions and to give some help and suggestions to for organising visits. It also doubled up as our talk space and provided a rather quirky atmosphere for our lectures.
A big addition to our event was, of course, our first ever Children’s Programme. We had a whole range of dedicated children’s events from archaeology to arts and crafts, storytelling to curling. With a total of 45 different buildings and events delivering activities there was plenty to keep our younger visitors busy.
With so much on this year there has been a huge team involved from start to finish so we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our Glasgow Doors Open Day team, our venues, guest speakers, tour leaders and volunteers for making this year’s event a big success.
Here in the office there’s still plenty to do and we’re busy collecting and collating your surveys so if there was any events or venues that really stood out or if you have any suggestions for our future Doors Open Days make sure you send in your feedback.
We’ve also just revealed our Glasgow Doors Open Day & Mackintosh Festival Photography Competition 2015 winners. We had around 200 entries to this year’s competition and it was a tough choice but you can see the winning images here or on our facebook page.
Once again we’d like to thank everyone who was involved in Glasgow Doors Open Day 2015 and to all those who came along to any of our events. Our next Doors Open Day is scheduled to take place from September 12th-18th 2016 and we’ll be organising our programme very soon so if you have any suggestion for what you’d like to see included next year just get in touch!
