The rebirth of Glasgow's industrial past

In the Gorbals, smart new housing and streets bearing home-grown businesses have transformed a district once thought beyond redemption. Here too, you can see the imprint of this new approach: that sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing design concepts can help build a sense of community pride.

To the east, amidst the sprawling concrete fastness that is Easterhouse, the old bishop’s hunting lodge of Provan Hall is providing a haven and a destination for local families. Before Glasgow’s delinquent planners gouged their motorway through the city’s north-eastern communities, Provan Hall formed a portal to acres of woodland.

A £3.5m refurbishment has restored this place to its former splendour. Last month Glasgow City Council formally handed it back to the community which had always cherished it.

The old meat market between Duke Street and Parkhead is also undergoing a process of rekindling. Young families are returning, attracted by affordable and handsome homes, far removed from the barely functional brick portacabins that were once considered sufficient for working class communities. Once, it was thought by the civic authorities that, so long as they’ve got roofs and windows who cares about design?

Even the historic High Street is getting a turn. This place, the gateway to the east end, was once home to fine tenement architecture – the best in Europe – and is the birthplace of Glasgow as a great metropolis. Lately it has become hollowed out by the dismal, low-grade gimcrack edifices of Strathclyde University, like a hanging garden given over to weeds. But even here some of the old local pride is being restored by its community garden.

And now, to the west on a sprawling patch of land running south of the Clyde, this urban regeneration has also come to breathe some life into an old boneyard. You’ll have driven past the old, A-listed Govan Graving Docks and barely glanced beyond the security fencing and scattered bushes sprouting over wasteland. You’d know, of course, that the River Clyde flowed somewhere beyond and that this had once been a place connected loosely with the old shipyards.

It once teemed with welders, engineers, shipwrights and all those other highly prized craftsmen that made the Clyde one of the world’s great marine construction centres. Now, a multi-agency strategy, headed by the city council, is proposing to make it shimmy once more and, like some of those other urban projects, connect it to the city beyond and its old siblings: Partick, Whiteinch and Finnieston.

Yesterday, we walked among the bushes and uncovered the cobbled walkways where the craftsmen repaired the ships that were hospitalised here. The Graving Docks are owned by New City Vision, who propose to build new homes on the southern edge of the site – beside Govan Road – and overlooking one of its three dry docks.

One of these docks will shortly receive the stripped-down body of the 90-year-old TS Queen Mary, one of the old Clyde steamers and pre-dating The Waverley. The trust which maintained her for the last eight years will transfer her from her current position adjacent to the Science Museum and into Dock 1, where she’ll be made ready to set sail at the end of 2025. Thereafter, the dock will operate as a fully reactivated repair centre for heritage vessels, a sort of live maritime museum where it’ll be possible to watch old skills and crafts being put into use.

Dock No 1 was the first of the dry docks to be constructed in 1875 and will soon be reopened as a place of work for the first time in more than 40 years. The Docks and Piers Trust has agreed an initial five-year lease to carry out repair work to historic ships, several of which have already been identified. When all the appropriate consents have been granted, this place will ring once more to hammer on metal and the compressed heat of blue flames. Jobs and training opportunities will return.

The entire dockyard site – homes, vessels and greenspace – will bring this space back into the wider Govan community, whose members are being consulted widely on how they want this place – which once provided work for their parents and grandparents – to look. It’s to be hoped that a substantial number of the new houses will be affordable and social rather than frilly and overpriced.

Having lain derelict for 40 years, these docks will soon become a distinct, mixed-use neighbourhood. In recent years, the only mixed use had been that favoured by the city’s al fresco, daytime drinking community: vodka, fortified lager and Buckfast tonic wine.

Chris Burrows, lead council officer for the project, points to the Glasgow skyline from the deck of the TS Queen Mary. All the big-ticket, signature projects are there, including the Needle, the BBC and STV headquarters and the Science Museum and O2 arena. This one, though, has the potential to top the lot. “It’s an amazing space,” he says. “The initial challenge is to clear it and to meet all the health and safety requirements.

“We are currently getting around 1.6m visitors each year at the Riverside Museum and 400,000 attending the Science Centre. But there’s nothing to connect the two except this derelict land. This has the potential of hundreds of thousands of people moving between and all the points in between.”

He points to the shell of A-listed pump-house which sits in front of Dock One. This could easily be a restaurant and café with the greenspace beyond it hosting pop-up businesses to re-animate the entire terrain.

“We need attractions to keep people interested. That skyline traces the history of the city and its recent modernisation. With the Queen Mary and the re-emergence of Dock One, we’ll have a living shipbuilding museum where you can see people utilising the old skills.”

Central to the sustainability of this, he adds, is community involvement, with New City Vision agreeing to the transfer of all parts of the site outwith the residential development to community ownership at nil value. This approach will be a condition of funding agreements.

Glasgow City Council are currently in the process of discussing projects with potential funders for the redevelopment of the Graving Docks over the next decade. This week, they approved an offer of £200,000 from Sustrans to develop concept designs for a travel route through the site, including a potential new bridge link to Pacific Quay.

This new funding follows an award of nearly £2.5m earlier this year from the Scottish Government’s Vacant and Derelict Land Investment Programme which will meet the costs of initial improvement.

It’s recently become fashionable to complain about many years of under-development of the riverside. In other great cities favoured by a river running through them, the waterway has been the font of cultural and commercial vibrancy. In Glasgow, large swathes of the land around the Clyde has been swallowed up by featureless apartment blocks conveying a breezeblock dormitory effect.

The gradual transformation of these docks marks something more substantial, imaginative and long overdue. Susan Aitken, leader of Glasgow City Council, said: “Recent years have seen significant regeneration activity on the Clyde in Glasgow, and the emerging work at the Govan Graving Docks means the potential of another site on the river is on the way to being unlocked.”

The New City Vision chairman is the highly respected construction entrepreneur Harry O’Donnell who has spoken passionately about the plans to transform the site and bring life back to the historic docks area. “These visionary proposals encapsulate a bold and imaginative balance between creating new homes and preserving, repairing, and reopening the docks for historical ship repairing. It’s our aim to make this area swing once more and a place of which Govan and Glasgow can be proud.”

Today, across from the Govan Graving Docks the main span of the pedestrian and cycle bridge over the Clyde is due to arrive by barge at Yorkhill Quay. The £29.5m, two-part Govan-Partick Bridge will re-establish the historic connection between these two old Glasgow burghs. The moving span is six metres wide, weighs 650 tonnes and is 99 metres long; the fixed span nearly 16 metres and 45 tonnes.

The numbers alone are as nothing though, to this bridge’s eventual worth to the communities it will bring together.