What's on in the area

Mackintosh Trail

Daily

Cost: £12 (available from the Tourist Information Centre, SPT Travel Centres and all Mackintosh Attractions)

Hours: Apr-Sep daily 9am-5pm; Oct-Mar Mon-Sat 11am-2pm

The Glasgow School of Art is the starting point for the Mackintosh Trail of the work of Art Nouveau architect, designer and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The tour features 12 attractions, including the elegantly baronial Hill House and manicured gardens.

The popular Mackintosh Trail gives the visitor free transport and unlimited access to the works of the late, great Glaswegian. The trail reveals attractions which are partially or substantially the work of the great man, hailed as one of the principal founders of European Art Nouveau.

Mackintosh made his mark on three types of architecture - public buildings, private houses and tea-rooms. Together with his wife Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances and Herbert McNair, he was responsible for laying the foundations of "the Glasgow Style". His buildings are notable for the elegance and clarity of their spatial concepts, the skilful exploitation of natural and artificial lighting, and detailing.

Highlights of the trail include Sauchiehall Street, home to the Glasgow School of Art, the Glasgow Style Room in the McLellan Galleries, which sets Mackintosh's work against the context of his peers in turn-of-the-century Glasgow and the Willow Tea Rooms; the exterior and interior of Hill House in Helensburgh; the Mackintosh House (a reconstruction of his family home now in the Hunterian Art Gallery); the Scotland Street School Museum, which was Mackintosh's last major commission for the city and consists of a magnificent, tiled entrance hall and impressive, glass-leaded towers and the Queens' Cross Church, the only church to be completely designed by Mackintosh and now the headquarters of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society.

The Glasgow School of Art