Go Dundee!

This blog is getting less and less anonymous and I blame the Crusdade, but I'm so proud of my City today I'm outing myself as a honorary Dundonian.

I am quite an honest person and when asked where I'm from or where I grew up I'll tell you, even though its not the nicest village in the west of Scotland. It's not technically deprived, but there are a lot of people on lower incomes and the portion of my classmates eligible for free uniforms and school meals was quite high. It has a reasonably high rate of teen pregnancies, and almost all of the girls I was friends with at school have kids. A small portion of us went on to Uni and as far as I am aware I'm the only one daft enough to still be a student. Anyway, I moved to Dundee when I was 17 and have lived here ever since. On my few returns to my hometown where I met up with old friends or mentioned where I'd moved to my new home was greeted with a fair amount of disdain. Dundee has had a bad rep for a while, its considered perochial and run down. Dundoinians are all scroungers and the city is ugly.

I've always liked Dundee, but in recent years its been doing a lot to try and change this outdated perception of it. It's now more known for its cutting edge research in Life Sciences, the best Engineering school in the country and its burgeoning Gaming technology industray than the old 'Jute, Jam and Journalism'. The University of Dundee is 5th in the whole of the UK in the Times Higher Education annual survey of students and its in the top 200 Universities in the world. An advertising campaign has just been launched in Glasgow and Edinburgh to showcase Dundee and change the negative perception of the city. The image below was taken outside Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art and its so delightfully cheeky.



The rest of the adds are brilliant, but my other favourite was this one about castles which turned up in Edinburgh along with a Denis the Menace cardboard cutout (image below). I love the cheekyness of this add campaign and the targeting of the two big Scottish cities. I fell in love with Dundee when I came here as a student and, despide growing up within the shadows of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Dundee feels more like my city than anywhere else in Scotland. I knwo that I'll have to move away from dundee, and probably quite soon but for now I wouldn't live anywhere else.