Ian Lamb, DC Thomson (retired)Back to Dundee Ambassadors

Ian joined Dundee publishers DC Thomson when he was 18 and has spent his entire career with the company, starting off as a trainee reporter.  He has worked as deputy features editor and assistant editor of The Courier and also redesigned the newspaper into its current format.  He was DC Thomson's Editorial Development Manager.

I was completely taken with Dundee when I first came here. One of the reasons was the great nightlife. I arrived when I was 18 years old from Perthshire, and started work as a trainee reporter with DC Thomson. I was, and still am, heavily into music - listening and playing - and I loved the folk clubs. Good music spawns good music. Two of my sons played in a Dundee-based band and are friendly with ‘The Hazey Janes' who include legendary musician Mike Marra's son and daughter. I knew Mike back in the folk clubs. There's a real sense of community around that whole scene.

We're in a lively city. Without entirely losing sight of its past, the city is thrusting its way into the future. It's a world centre for life sciences, it's a world centre for the games industry and animation, it has two top class universities, an excellent college and one of the highest students per head of population ratios in the UK. Dundee has been through hard times but the regeneration that's happening in the city has to be seen to be believed.

Dundee's got a huge wealth of creative talent. DC Thomson has made a big contribution to that through some of the extraordinary artistic and writing talent it has fostered. It spawned a number of best-selling authors such as Jacqueline Wilson, Alexander McGregor and Andrew Nicoll.

I was proud to be part of the company synonymous with world-renowned characters - Desperate Dan and the Bash Street Kids are so well known and much-loved well beyond Scotland. I think it's great that the city pays tribute to that, for example, by placing Desperate Dan's statue in the city centre. 

Dundee's historic roots are hugely important. Everywhere you go in the city you can catch a glimpse of fascinating parts of our history - you just need to know where to look. There's the group of five historic 16th Century houses in the High Street known as Gardyne's Land and the Wishart Arch which is built into a small surviving section of Dundee's 16th Century city wall. There's the award winning Verdant Works jute museum and Scott's historic Antarctic expedition ship Discovery. It also boasts the frigate HMS Unicorn which is the world's last intact warship from the days of sail, and the North Carr, Scotland's only surviving lightship.

The V&A will be the cherry on the top for Dundee - there's loads going on here already such as the newly refurbished McManus Galleries, but the V&A at Dundee project will really put us on a global stage from a cultural point of view. I think the slogan "One City, Many Discoveries" we've selected for Dundee holds true about the city. Too often, people's perception of Dundee is grounded in the past, and if they would only visit the city and discover for themselves, they would appreciate the renewed vitality of the place.