Photo: Holger Uwe Schmitt (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A self-guided audio walk through Dundee, the city of whaling ships, jute, marmalade and comics. It starts on the waterfront with RRS Discovery, built here and launched in 1901 for Scott's first Antarctic expedition, Kengo Kuma's V&A Dundee, opened in 2018, and Slessor Gardens over the old docks. In the centre: City Square and the Caird Hall, paid for by a jute baron, the bronze Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx, St Mary's Tower, held against General Monck's army in 1651, the Howff burial ground where the Nine Trades met, D. C. Thomson's Courier Building, home of The Dandy and The Beano, and the McManus. Then east to the Wishart Arch and the frigate Unicorn, launched in 1824, and west to Verdant Works, the jute mill of a city where most jute workers were women, ending at the riverside memorial to the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879.
13 narrations, yours to keep — no subscription, no expiry. Works offline once downloaded, and if it isn’t for you we’ll refund it.
Going somewhere with no signal? Put the guide on your home screen first, then download it from that icon while you are on wi-fi — that way you download once, and it works in airplane mode with no roaming charges. Show me the order →
Every claim in this tour traces back to a named source — excavation records, the heritage authority for the site, and the primary texts themselves. Nothing is copied from other guidebooks, and anything we can't source doesn't make the recording.
Each stop is built from OpenStreetMap · 162 features in this old town (the field-surveyed mapping database behind Apple Maps), Wikidata · 105 cross-referenced entries (peer-reviewed structured records), the heritage authority below, and the primary historical texts where they exist.
Cross-referenced against Modern excavation publications · academic peer-review.
Every sentence is checked against those sources before it is recorded. If a claim can't be traced, it doesn't make the audio.
Every tour is reviewed by a person before it goes on sale. Stop selection, the route and anything ambiguous come back to the editor for a decision, and those questions routinely send a stop back for another accuracy pass. Nothing publishes on a machine’s say-so.
Spot anything inaccurate? Email [email protected] — fixed in the next pass.
RRS Discovery, V&A Dundee, Slessor Gardens.
City Square and the Caird Hall, Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx, The City Churches and St Mary's Tower, The Howff, The Courier Building, Meadowside, The McManus.
Wishart Arch, The frigate Unicorn, Verdant Works, Tay Bridge disaster memorial.
Built in Dundee for Scott's first Antarctic expedition, launched in 1901 and frozen into McMurdo Sound for two winters.
Kengo Kuma's museum of 2018, its walls hung with some 2,500 precast panels meant to recall Scottish sea cliffs.
Bronze figures of 2001 for the comics D. C. Thomson published in Dundee, with Minnie aiming her catapult at Dan.
A 46-gun frigate launched at Chatham in 1824, roofed over in reserve and never in active service, a drill ship in Dundee from 1874 to 1968.
A flax mill of 1833 that later spun jute, in a city where about 35,000 people worked in jute in 1901, some 70 percent of them women.
Granite panels naming the known dead of 28 December 1879, when Thomas Bouch's bridge fell in a storm under the evening train.
Tap "Start Walking Tour" and allow location access. The map shows all 13 narration points.
Follow the suggested route or explore freely. GPS tracks your position. Reach a site and the narration plays automatically.
Each site has its own narration. 13 narration points.
Narrations play when you reach each site. No buttons, no track numbers. Walk naturally — the stories find you.
Premium narration that sounds like a documentary. Warm and knowledgeable, not a textbook reading.
Every narration is drafted, cross-checked against primary sources, then passed through a second editorial pass that strips unsupported claims. Dates, names, and citations verified.
See all narration points on the map. Tap any point to hear it early or replay it later.
Every narrated point in Dundee — Discovery, Jute, Jam and Journalism, each with its own narration.
Spend an hour or a full day. Skip sites, revisit favourites, take breaks. The tour adapts to you.
13 narration points, including RRS Discovery, V&A Dundee, Slessor Gardens, City Square and the Caird Hall and Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx. That is about 34 minutes of narration in all, and you walk between the stops at your own pace.
Yes. It plays in your phone’s browser as you walk: no guide, no group, no app to install and no fixed start time.
Yes, from Dundee. There is no start time and no group to keep up with, so you can stop at any point and head back to the ship. Keep your own eye on the all-aboard time.
Three ways, all built in:
The map-tap option means you can stand anywhere — even at home before you travel — and play any narration. GPS just makes it hands-free while you’re actually walking the site.
No. Use the “Download for offline” button before you go, and the entire tour — audio, maps, narration text — works without any data connection. Tap-to-play and the map both work fully offline. GPS itself doesn’t need data; only the download does.
Add the icon first, then download from the icon. On iPhone a guide downloaded in Safari cannot be seen by the home screen icon, so downloading first means downloading the whole thing twice.
Putting it on your home screen — iPhone or iPad (Safari):
On Android (Chrome): tap the three-dot menu at the top right, tap Add to Home screen (some phones say Install app), then confirm. On Android either order works.
If you opened this link from inside Instagram, Facebook or Gmail, you are in that app’s built-in browser. It cannot add anything to your home screen, and a guide downloaded there is thrown away when the app closes. Open the link in Safari or Chrome first.
Two backstops. First, the map shows every site — just tap the marker for the place in front of you. Second, you can manually queue any narration even when GPS is off. The platform never assumes GPS works; it’s the convenience layer, not the gate.
The audio runs ~2½ hours total, but you walk at your own pace. 13 narration points across the site. Most visitors take 2–4 hours; some spread it over multiple visits. Once you buy it, it’s yours — there’s no expiry and no subscription. Come back next year if you like; the link in your receipt always works.
One purchase covers one device session. Most couples share earbuds and use a single phone — the audio is paced for that. If you want everyone listening on their own device, each person needs their own purchase. We do not gate sharing aggressively; we trust visitors to do the right thing.
Full refund if you never trigger a single narration on-site. Partial refund based on how far you got. See the refund policy for specifics.