More eagle-eyed Courier readers may have spotted news of a new museum opening, along the road at Dundee.
The hugely impressive V&A on the city’s waterfront launched with much fanfare this weekend, welcoming the first wave of what is expected to be around 500,000 visitors over the next 12 months.
The potential transformative benefits for the home of Jam, Jute and Journalism are all too evident.
And as more and more visitors flock to Dundee, there will spin-off gains for the surrounding area.
You might well wonder how Perth, the one-time City of Culture contender, could possibly hope to compete with its Tayside neighbour.
But it really doesn’t have to.
Instead, the Fair City needs to make sure it has enough attractions to entice some of that new tourist traffic.
The recently revived Perth Theatre could prove a big draw. And then there is the new water taxi service on the River Tay, which was specially extended beyond the summer months to monopolise on the V&A opening.
And of course, Perth and Kinross has plenty of traditional and natural tourist traps, boasting some of the best scenery, walking and cycling routes in the country.
But there is more on the horizon, such as the much-vaunted £30 million revamp of the city’s cultural offerings.
Frustratingly, this project – which will hinge on Tay Cities Deal cash – seems to have been on the horizon for a long time.
There has been plenty of behind-the-scenes progress on the Perth City Hall revamp in the last two years, but I worry that after a burst of excitement, momentum seems to be flagging.
Meanwhile, talks are still ongoing to secure the Stone of Destiny as a centrepiece for the new city hall museum, suggesting that these negotiations might be more complex than we were initially led to believe.
And we are still waiting for news of a crucial, purpose-built storage building, which is needed to hold the city’s vast collection of paintings, artworks and artefacts, before any work can begin on the £10 million revamp of the Perth Museum and Art Gallery.
As the Tay City Deal negotiations drag on – they were initially meant to have been sorted before the summer – it’s important that these cultural projects stay a top priority for Perth.
