NOW I’m sure this view of a chimney demolition has been foreshortened, and the onlookers aren’t really that close to the tumbling brickwork. Health and safety wasn’t that bad in the seventies, I don’t think.
This is the first of the chimneys at the old Pinkston Power Station in Glasgow, up beside the Forth and Clyde Canal at Port Dundas coming down in a controlled explosion on a Sunday in April, 1978. Someone had calculated it contained 4,200 tons of bricks. A klaxon was sounded and traffic on the motorway nearby was temporarily halted. The second chimney met a similar fate the following Sunday.
The coal-fired power station, whose cooling tower was given a coat of camouflage paint during the war, was built by the council in 1900 to provide power to Glasgow’s trams. The coal could be brought to the power station by barges on the canal.
Eventually it was transferred to the South of Scotland Electricity Board to provide power for the national grid and was decommissioned in the sixties.
The cooling tower, the largest in Europe when it was built, leaked warm water into the canal, with claims at the time that fish in the canal grew to enormous size because of the warm water. Probably not true of course but it didn’t stop hordes of kids from going to the canal in the hope of spotting huge specimens.
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