Lorcan Byway

The train from Edinburgh takes fifty minutes and drops you in a city that doesn't do polite hellos. Glasgow greets you with rain — the kind that finds the gap between your collar and your scarf — and a Saturday market that has been doing this since the 1920s. I walked straight from Queen Street to the Gallowgate, following the smell of fried dough and the sound of somebody arguing happily about the price of a Victorian ashtray.

The Barras is not a curated food hall. It is a sprawling, slightly feral weekend carnival where antiques dealers sit next to Caribbean jerk chicken stalls and a man selling second-hand power tools has set up beside a Syrian baker. I ate churros from a paper tray standing under an awning while the rain drummed on the canvas, then a plate of jerk chicken that made the whole wet walk worthwhile. This is what Edinburgh's immaculate Georgian squares don't give you: a city that feeds you twice — once with food, once with the sheer noise of people being themselves.

After the Barras I wandered west through the Merchant City, past the Italian Centre's colonnades and the sandstone tenements that give Glasgow its particular red-and-blonde glow even in October grey. The architecture here has none of Edinburgh's careful composure. It is Victorian bravado and Art Nouveau flourish, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's sharp geometry next to a brutalist car park, and somehow it all holds together. The city feels built by people who believed in things — in industry, in art, in having a good night out.

Glasgow's art scene is as direct as its people. At the Gallery of Modern Art in Royal Exchange Square, Turner Prize winner Duncan Campbell has a new commission called A New No running until January — a layered, restless piece about refusal and the spaces between words, the kind of work that makes you stand in front of it longer than you planned. GoMA itself occupies a Neoclassical building that was originally a townhouse, then a bank, then a library, and the clash between its pillared facade and the aggressively contemporary work inside is very Glasgow.

Across the river in the West End, Kelvingrove's red sandstone bulk anchors a museum that still hangs Salvador Dalí's Christ of St John of the Cross as if daring you to find a better painting in the building (you won't). The Barbie exhibition that ran through summer has just closed, but the permanent collection — Scottish colourists, Glasgow Boys, the armoury — is the real draw. Down the road at the Hunterian, Duncan Shanks' The Unseen Journey opens at the end of the month. And at Glasgow Print Studio on Trongate, the RSA 200 exhibition marks the Royal Scottish Academy's bicentenary with prints by four Academicians, on until late November.

For photography, the Glasgow Gallery of Photography on High Street has an international open-theme exhibition running all month. And the Glasgow Gallery near Queen Street opens Coastal Visions by John Lowrie Morrison (Jolomo) tomorrow — big, generous Scottish coastal landscapes that feel like the opposite of the rain outside.

Glasgow is a generous city. Kindness Homeless Street Team Glasgow SCIO runs a pop-up soup kitchen in George Square on Monday and Wednesday evenings, and distributes food parcels three days a week from their base on London Road. They are a registered Scottish charity (OSCR SC045255) and accept donations directly through their website. If you are in town on a Monday or Wednesday and want to help, they welcome volunteers from all walks of life.