National Galleries of Scotland: National

Not at all what I expected. Used to the very formal, almost library like, settings that art galleries can be like I was blown away by the National Galleries of Scotland. I had read about the upgrades to the building and improvements but wasn't expecting what I found.

The exhibition was beautiful, completely accessible and staff were extremely helpful. Paired with the accessibility of the nearby trams, it gave us an uplifting and completely stress-free day, amazing!

I visited on the second day of opening under COVID restrictions : I won’t go into all the details here, they are on the NGS website, but all people are required to wear masks, you must book ahead, you get an hour for your visit, and you are only visiting the ground floor rooms. I had no trouble with access, there were many helpful staff, the ramp was well designed, the gallery was largely empty, so I was able to see many more paintings than usual, and look at the smaller works for as long as I wanted. It is really a good opportunity to see these rooms, which do include some very famous renaissance and Scottish artists, without the usual crowds. Tickets are free. My only problem was with using the disabled loo, ordinarily I would have used the modern one on the lower ground floor, but this is closed off from access from the gallery. I visited with my scooter, which is very small, 52cm wide and 1m long. The door and corridor to the loo was really only wide enough for this, and while the scooter did fit inside the loo there was no room to turn around. The doors were very hard to open, but here the staff were very willing to help. My only negative was that not only was the emergency cord tied up, it had clearly been cut so it couldn’t drop to the floor. There is probably not much NGS can do about the size of the loo, but I did point the cord problem out to the staff (who very concerned and promised to fix it).