Transporting Scotland back to an era of cars, cafes and flat caps

For 20 years, visitors at Glasgow's former Museum of Transport made a beeline for Kelvin Street, the recreated row of shops from old Glasgow that was rated the favourite exhibit.

• Alma Reid and Giocomo Turri worked in the original Le Rendezvous in Duke Street which was run by their grandfather Giovanni Tognieri

But they often wandered up and down tugging on the doors, trying to open them rather than just peering inside, senior curator Rosemary Watt admitted.

Not any more – the city's new 75 million Riverside Museum opened its doors to the media yesterday and beneath the soaring zig-zag metal roof designed by Iraqi "starchitect" Zaha Hadid, a new highlight is certain to be Main Street – a rechristened symbol of the museum's startling transformation.

"We decided to open up the street," Ms Watt said.

Visitors can now walk freely into seven of nine shop units, spanning from 1895 to 1930. They can eye the pottery lions, cameras or clocks in a pawn shop; get their picture taken in the photographers; and hear the growling voices of the customers at the bar of The Mitre pub.

The Riverside Museum is filled with touch screens telling stories of the people who rode its trams or drove its cars, and the shops are no exception. Some are positioned at knee level for the under-fives, while the street itself has an "audio show" soundtrack designed to bring it alive.

New attractions include Le Rendezvous, the well-known Duke Street cafe founded by Giovanni Tognieri in the 1920s. After it closed in the 1980s, Glasgow Museums uplifted its stylish internal wooden counter and booths, and kept them in store for more than 20 years.

"It brought back so many memories," said Mr Tognieri's grandchild Alma Reid, who with her brother Giocomo Turri worked in the cafe as a child.

"I am absolutely full of emotion. It's true to life. Awesome."

Her family's memories and mementos are now on show – her voice coming from a screen in the booths where her grandfather once served ice-cream.

"It was the ins and outs of everybody's life. It was almost like The Steamie," she said, referring to the comedy drama of gregarious 1950s Glasgow.

Glasgow's new museum was unveiled to reporters yesterday, three weeks before it opens to the public on 21 June.

The steel, zinc-clad roof is supported without a single pillar and loops down inside the building in giant folds, painted in the building's trademark lime-green, with lines of fluorescent lighting highlighting its contours.

Highlights include the Wall of Cars, with cars stacked three high, and the hanging Bicycle Velodrome, where 31 bikes from an 1897 Dursley-Pederson to a slick carbon-fibre framed Lotus model are suspended from what looks like a giant chandelier. The Glenlee, a three-masted Clyde-built "Tall Ship", launched in 1896, is moored alongside the museum.

Officials say they are showing 3,000 items – more than double the previous museum's displays – while the interactive "e intro" screens will offer virtual tours of the objects close up.

There are two more "streets" recreated and wandering into them gives a chance to get closer to bizarre four-seated bicycles, period prams, toys, and an original Volkswagen or a Triumph Herald in recreated workshops. New highlights include a South African Railways locomotive, which features the story of Alex Warren, who worked on it as an 18-year-old apprentice in Glasgow in the 1940s, mostly making bolts. "It turns the clock back," he said.

Right beside it, standing on its end, is a 1910 Bute Sharpe boat used in regatta races.

Officials say the museum's interactive exhibits bring home the stories of people, with filmed interviews with those who worked on or travelled in trams or trains.

They include Strathclyde police officer Neil Wood, who was stabbed in 1986 when he confronted a man who assaulted a Glasgow bus conductress.

His Ford Granada squad car, his uniform, truncheon, and police medal for bravery are all on show. "Very few people apart from some famous people or inventors get to be almost immortalised," said Mr Wood, 60, showing off a scar across his palm. "For somebody very ordinary, who left school at 15, I'll still be living on in this car and in the display. It's quite special."

The bikes that featured in The Flying Scotsman, the film about champion cyclist Graham Obree, are among the new exhibits along with a film of his achievements.

Mr Obree said: "Every kid used to visit the transport museum, it was part of Scottish youth life to visit the transport museum.

"There's more depth to it now, the kids can actually engage in it."