People's Palace and Winter Gardens

The People's Palace on Glasgow Green is a social history museum dedicated to the life and culture of Glasgow's ordinary citizens from 1750 to the present. The collections cover everything from domestic life and industrial work to trade union history, street culture, and the experience of the great waves of Irish and Highland Scottish immigration that shaped the city. Billy Connolly's banana boots are here.

The museum is free and excellent, and the building — a Victorian glass-and-terracotta confection — contains a remarkable Winter Gardens greenhouse that can be visited separately. Glasgow Green, the park surrounding it, is the oldest public park in Britain, a common from which citizens could not legally be excluded, and the starting point for several significant moments in Scottish history.

things to do museum east end
A story
The People's Palace was opened in 1898 with the explicit intention of giving the working people of Glasgow's East End — who had no access to the cultural institutions of the West End — a museum and social centre of their own. The name was deliberate: this was not the Art Gallery, which was for gentlemen; this was for the people. The social history collections it built up over the following century remain the best record of Glasgow working-class life in existence.

Other places in The East End