City of Dundee Postcodes — Scotland (SCT)

Dundee

Fourth largest city in Scotland and the 51st most populous urban area in the United Kingdom, Dundee is an important economic and cultural center for the country. With an estimated 148,210 residents as of the middle of 2016, Dundee had the second-highest population density in Scotland, at 2,478 per square kilometer (6,420 per square mile). Northern Firth of Tay borders the eastern central Lowlands and empties into the North Sea. Local government in Scotland is divided into 32 council areas, one of which is Dundee City, which serves the city and its surrounding area.

The city, located within the historic county of Angus, expanded into a burgh in the late 12th century and became a major trading port on the east coast.

The city of Dundee grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, especially in the nineteenth century when it became the world capital of the jute trade. Dundee is known as the "jute, jam, and journalism" city because of this and its other major industries.

Currently, Dundee is promoting itself under the slogan "One City, Many Discoveries" in recognition of the city's rich scientific heritage and the RRS Discovery, Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic exploration vessel, which was constructed in Dundee and is currently docked at Discovery Point. Since the 1980s, the city has attracted businesses in the biomedical and technological sectors, and it is now home to 10% of the United Kingdom's digital entertainment industry. In addition to the University of Dundee, Abertay University is also located in the city. Dundee was named the first UNESCO City of Design in the United Kingdom in 2014 for its many contributions to fields as varied as medicine, comics, and video games. 

Dundee's two professional football teams, Dundee F.C. and Dundee United F.C., play in stadiums that are practically next to each other, making the city a unique place to watch football.

Seeing its traditional industries dwindling, the city has decided to reinvent itself as a cultural hub.

With this goal in mind, in 2001 work began on a £1 billion master plan to revitalize and reconnect the Waterfront to the city center. The centerpiece of the waterfront redevelopment is the V&A Dundee, the institution's first outpost outside of London. 

Dundee has become more well-known around the world in recent years. The Wall Street Journal placed Dundee at number five on its "Worldwide Hot Destinations" list for 2018, and GQ magazine named it the "Coolest Little City in Britain" in 2015.

Geography of Dundee

Dundee is located on Scotland's eastern, North Sea coast, on the north bank of the Firth of Tay. Distances from London are 360.6 miles (580 km) to the north-northwest. The urban core covers an area of about 60 square kilometers, with dimensions of roughly 8.3 miles (13 km) in length and 2.5 miles (4 km) in width as seen from east to west (23 sq mi). Balgay Hill (elevation: 143 m) in the west of the city, Dundee Law (elevation: 174 m) in the middle of the built-up area, and Gallow Hill (elevation: 83 m) between Baxter Park and the Eastern Cemetery form a line that cuts through the center of the town. The Dighty Water burn cuts through a valley to the north of this ridge, where the elevation drops to about 45 m. The Sidlaw Hills can be found to the north of the Dighty valley, with Craigowl Hill serving as their most notable peak (455 m). 

Branches of the River Tay called burns form the western and eastern boundaries of the city, respectively. When the Lochee burn and the Fowlis burn come together at the city's westernmost boundary, they become the Invergowrie burn, which flows into the Tay at the Invergowrie basin. From the nearby village of Strathmartine, the Dighty Water flows into Dundee and serves as a dividing line for several northern neighborhoods before merging with the Tay somewhere between Barnhill and Monifieth. Both the Scouring burn in the western part of the city and the Dens Burn in the eastern part of the city have been culverted over. Both of these burns were crucial to the city's industrial development.

Economy of Dundee

The city's economy underwent a remarkable transformation in the decades after World War II. One-fifth of the labor force was still employed in jute, but new industries were encouraged and welcomed. Dundee was chosen by NCR Corporation as its UK headquarters in late 1945 due to the city's lack of wartime destruction, its convenient transportation options, and the high productivity it enjoys thanks to its abundant sunshine. The plant wasn't formally opened until 11 June 1947, but production began the previous year. A 250,000th cash register was manufactured two weeks after the plant's 10th anniversary.

NCR, which had several plants in Dundee by the 1960s, had become the city's largest employer by that time, producing cash registers and, later, ATMs. The company pioneered magnetic strip readers for POS terminals and created the first personal computers. After acquiring Astral, a Dundee-based refrigerator and spin dryer manufacturer and retailer, Morphy Richards quickly grew to employ more than a thousand people. Michelin's tyre factory in Dundee, which opened in the wake of the jute industry's decline after the Board of Trade abolished jute control on 30 April 1969, provided much-needed relief for the city's unemployed.

Since the shipyards and carpet factories closed and the jute trade vanished in the 1980s, Dundee's employment landscape underwent a dramatic shift. In January of 1984, Dundee was designated as an Enterprise Zone in an effort to combat rising unemployment and deteriorating economic conditions. Timex began manufacturing Sinclair ZX Spectrum personal computers in Dundee in 1983. Despite a worker sit-in protesting job cuts and plans to demolish one of the factory buildings to make way for a supermarket, the company set new production records that same year. After a bitter six-month industrial dispute, Timex's Dundee plant was shut down in 1993. The 850 people who worked at the Michelin tire factory had to be let go when it shut down in June of 2020.

Culture of Dundee

Dundee applied to be the 2017 UK City of Culture, and on June 19 was one of the four finalists along with Hull, Leicester, and Swansea Bay.

After all was said and done, Hull's bid was accepted, and Dundee came in second. In a newspaper poll ranking British cities by their availability of cultural facilities, Dundee ranked fifth, ahead of other Scottish cities.

Dundee, along with Perth and Kinross, Angus, and Fife, submitted a joint bid as "Tay Cities" in August 2021 for the UK City of Culture award in 2025.

Even though Dundee, along with other British cities that had submitted bids, had intended to compete for the title of European Capital of Culture in 2023, the European Commission decided to scrap all of their applications after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in June 2016.