Glasgow has an amazing variety of family friendly museums, we found enough to to do across two days of visiting. Glasgow is Scotland's largest city, and blends its industrial heritage as a powerhouse of shipbuilding and engineering with a vibrant art and music scene making it a modern cultural hub.
I’ve taken the girls to many science centres over the years but this one would have to be the best! Spanning four levels, we easily spent a full day exploring the Glasgow Science Centre, including a 3D IMAX movie about humpback whale migration on the East Australian Current and a science presentation called Our Amazing Air. There is an endless variety of hands on, interactive experiences where we were able to learn about the human body; physics, power, electricity and energy; perception and light and some fun memory and coordination games. Some of the illusions were similar to what we saw at Camera Obscura but overall, it is up there as one of the best Science Centres we have visited. Questacon in Canberra Australia would be one of the other amazing science museums. Osaka Kids Plaza in Japan was very similar too.
Riverside Museum is Glasgow's award-winning transport and technology museum. Inside the museum, visitors can explore a vast collection of exhibits and vehicles, including cars, bicycles, motorcycles, trams, buses, and even a steam locomotive. It may be the best museum of this kind that we’ve visited! Especially because it’s completely free! The Kyoto Rail Museum would be very close in comparison and the Ipswich Rail Museum back home in Brisbane is similar but the Riverside Museum has such a wide range of trains, buses and trams that you could go inside and explore. I really loved the recreated old street complete with a horse drawn hearse, creep! Outside is a tall ship that you can explore at an additional cost (we gave this a miss as it was getting late and dark )
The Gallery of Modern Art (FREE)
The Gallery of Modern Art is located in the centre of the city and houses a wide range of contemporary artist from Scotland and around the world. We visited on a Saturday, with the intention of attended the free kids art studio on the top level. This particular morning, some wool, plastic kids sewing needles and cardboard was set up to inspire kids to make an abstract artwork with sewing techniques on cardboard. The girls loved it so much we ended buying some wool and plastic kids needle so they can continue their ideas at home. We spent some time afterwards exploring the galleries, where we found a lot of inspiring artworks. Farley is the big art lover and I think she prefers modern art to the renaissance artworks we saw in Florence and Paris. But in staying that I preferred the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art to the Tate Modern in London. It was smaller but the collections of artwork were more captivating.
Kelvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum (FREE)
The Kelvin Grove Museum is an electric mix of art and artefacts housed in a beautiful red brick Baroque Building. It’s free to enter and appeared to have kids friends activities however we didn’t make it there to explore for ourselves.
We came out to Glasgow on a third day, specifically to go to FLIP OUT an indoor trampolining and adventure park. Whilst it’s not a museum, it was so much fun and definitely deserves a mention. We were there on a weekday so it was very quiet, the huge facilities were practically empty but I’ve no doubt they would be filled with kids on the weekends. We all enjoyed doing a number of laps in the mini go karts. Hallie is a natural at driving, she loves it and she figured out how to use the pedals and brake and steering wheel as soon as she jumped in. Rooney gave it a great shot, only getting stuck a few times and Farley overcame her nerves to at least give it a try, doing a few laps before opting out.
