A city councillor has hit back at a survey which criticises Dundee’s level of culture as the lowest in Scotland.
Fraser Macpherson, the Liberal Democrat leader on Dundee City Council, feels the survey by www.ticketsource.co.uk/blog/culture-per-square-mile is flawed.
It has compiled figures which it says rates British cities, other than London, by cultural atrraction per square mile.
It uses data from TripAdvisor to look at 68 cities and 6,771 attractions to create its findings.
The figures cover Scotland’s seven cities – Stirling, Perth, Inverness, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen.
They compare factors for each city, such as the number of museums, gardens and historical sites. This is then used to calculate each location’s rating for cultural attractions per square mile.
The survey put Dundee lowest in the Scottish cities with a rating of just 2.83 per square mile.
Mr Macpherson said: “I think this is a little bit hard to believe.
“In very recent times we opened the V&A Dundee and it has been very successful. We have older attractions like RRS Discovery and Dundee Museum of Transport.
“There are a whole host of cultural attractions in the city. Dundee has a long history of cultural attractions and a bright future.”
TicketSource claims Dundee has a population of 153,990 and that it covers 25.1 miles.
The Tayside city, it says, has 33 sites and landmarks, five gardens, 11 museums, seven art galleries and four theatres.
TicketSource also says that Dundee has two architectural buildings and seven historical sites.
The best rated Scottish city was Inverness with 11.26 attractions per square mile and next was Stirling which had 9.31.
Next was Perth with 5.18 cultural sites per square mile, Aberdeen with 3.69 and Edinburgh with 3.63.
The final two Scottish cities rated were Glasgow (3.56) and finally Dundee.
It was not all bad news for Dundee as it still had a higher rating than many cities given surprisingly low ratings.
These include Cardiff, at 2.07, Swansea, at 0.42, Newcastle,at 1.82, Hull, at 1.75, and Birmingham, at 2.10.
A TicketSource spokesman said: “There’s no doubt that the cities of the UK offer up some of the most diverse landmarks and attractions.
“Our study revealed some surprising results, shining a light on the cities with some fantastic cultural attractions and highlighting the cities which could be making more of their cultural contributions to the UK.”
