George Square sits at Glasgow's civic heart, though for centuries it was nothing grander than a marsh with a duck pond. It takes its name from George III, a king so unpopular in Glasgow, having lost the American colonies, that no statue of him stands here. Grand Georgian townhouses, funded by tobacco fortunes, lined the square before Victorian merchants swept them away for something bolder.

Chief among the replacements is the City Chambers, faced in stone so lavish its interior runs to Italian marble, Spanish mahogany and Venetian glass. Reportedly more marble than the Vatican holds, that has not stopped filmmakers using it as both the Vatican and the Kremlin on screen.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace Glasgow's mercantile rise through the merchants whose tobacco wealth shaped the square, and uncover its darker side, where a ghost tour lingers by the Cenotaph among tales of the city's restless dead.