19th May 2006

There was something about Aberdeen that I liked as soon as I drove into the City.

Aberdeen is a prosperous town – now. And it is all thanks to North Sea oil that provides jobs, jobs and multi-national firms. That hasn’t always been the way. The city was almost bankrupted a couple of hundred years ago when the forefathers agreed to a rather ambitious plan to ‘level’ the city. Aberdeen is built on some hills and essentially, the forefathers conceived the idea of raising the valley floor by using what amounts to as a bloody big platform. The result you see around the min street is as impressive a city as anywhere in the world. Stepping off the main street and you can descend stairs that take you down 20 and 30 meters to the old city.

Aberdeen is grey! Its city centre and buildings are all built of grey granite and one commentator in a book I read suggested that in the rain, it was as welcome as cold porridge. But when the sun shines, the mica in the granite sparkles.

It really is a city of contrasts. Wealth and poor, grand houses and high rise tenements on the outskirts, and a fantastic Maritime Museum. It is quite easy to see a great deal of self interest in the collegiate admiration between the oil people and the Aberdinians. The maritime Museum is a great example of this having been upgraded with oil money to become a world class tourist attraction. It has a ₤1M model of an oil rig that rises 3 stories through the building. The history of oil and exploration makes for an interesting backdrop to the side displays of the old fishing and boat building industry that had almost completely died off in the 1950s.