Glasgow’s Govan-Partick bridge: how they did it & what happens next

Combined with deindustrialisation, we know what happened next to Govan. One of the locals who’s come along today to see the bridge as it nears completion is Pat Cassidy, who runs the local social enterprise Govan Workspace. He says Govan suffered from isolation once the ferry closed, but people also effectively moved away from the river. “We turned our back on it and thought of it as a sewer,” he says. “But all that’s beginning to change.”

David Buchanan of building and civil engineering company Farrans (Image: Colin Mearns)

We can see the change right in front of us from where we’re standing on the south side. Around us is a little plaza surrounded by blocks of flats, all brown brick and iron balconies, a mix of social housing and mid-market rentals. One of the people here today is Chris Burrows, principal officer at Glasgow City Council for The City Deal, which stumped up the money for the bridge (more of that later). He says a lot of people have looked at the flats and compared it to something you might see in Copenhagen and I can see what they mean.

The view from the flats and out across the river is also superb. In the background is Zaha Hadid’s transport museum, that great dramatic zigzag that’s already become pretty iconic in Glasgow. And in front of that is the Glenlee, the tall ship moored right next to the museum, masts pointing at the sky. Then there’s the bridge itself, a great swoop of steel which some have also likened to a ship. When it’s up and running, it will be one of the longest opening pedestrian/cycle bridges in Europe, and it looks very fine indeed.

Standing surveying the bridge is David Buchanan, the 41-year-old project manager who’s been overseeing the build for the main contractor Farrans. With just a few days to go, there’s still stuff to be done, mainly laying slabs and tar on the stretches leading to the bridge and he says it’s always a bit nerve-wracking. But the project has come in a couple of months early, he says, and more importantly it’s not over budget. They said £29.5m and that’s how much they did it for.

David describes the engineering of the bridge and it’s a rather beautiful thing how it all works. The main section, he says, is just under 70m long and sits on a concrete chamber that goes 28m into the river bed and contains the gearing mechanism that works the swing. Opening the bridge for shipping will take a remarkably quick 3-4 minutes, although it will be closed to pedestrians for 45 minutes in all so that if there’s a problem with the opening mechanism, they can radio to the ship and tell it to pull in.

Deirdre Gaughan is a former councillor and chair of Central Govan Action Plan (Image: Colin Mearns)

To get to this point has taken years of planning, says David, one of the potential stumbling blocks being the dangers that might be lurking on the sea bed. “This was one of the main routes for the Luftwaffe during the war,” says David, pointing up the river, “so it’s high risk for unexploded bombs. The bombs hit the water and can work their way in.”

The only solution was a painstaking process to scan the river, first with a massive magnet, then with sonar. In all, five potential unexploded bombs were detected and divers were sent down to find out more. What did they find? A wheel axle, a filing cabinet, a wheel from a tractor and various other bits of junk. But they couldn’t afford to take the risk.

Things should have gone relatively smoothly from there but that’s not how it works is it? Just after the contracts were signed, the war in Ukraine broke out, meaning a last-minute change of plan on the steel which had been coming from Russia (it was sourced from the Emirates instead). Building anything in Scotland also means dealing with the Scottish weather, so when the main span of the bridge arrived from Belgium, it was delayed in Greenock because of the wind. David shrugs his shoulders. It happens.

I have to ask about the Belgium thing though. We’re standing by the side of the Clyde in Glasgow, once the capital of construction and industry, and yet we had to get the bridge from Belgium? Why?

Chris Burrows explains the thinking. “We obviously have to put out a contract of this value according to the procurement rules, we’ve got to put it through a competitive process. So we did a two-phase tender, the first phase is the whole of Europe, anyone can bid and you might get a dozen companies putting their name in the frame. We then assess their suitability and invite a handful to actually tender, and what happens is that each of the companies, they then approach a different fabricator to be part of their team.

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“Farrans were one of five and they had a fabricating partner which was Victor Buyck in Belgium. Another company would have had Severfield in Yorkshire, probably the only place in Britain that could have built a bridge like this one. Effectively, you’ve got one plant in the whole of Britain that could have produced it and there’s a wider issue in terms of the deindustrialisation of Britain. But at the end of the day we are assessing the main contractor on cost and quality.”

From the start, it wasn’t all about cost and quality though – there was also the social, cultural and economic possibilities of the bridge. The money for the project was put up by City Deal, which is funded by the UK and Scottish Governments with the aim of supporting major infrastructure projects and encouraging the kind of positive effects they can have on community, jobs, business, and investment. And from the start, any company bidding for a City Deal project has to show what they will do to deliver those effects.

It's this that really interests some of the local people who’ve come along today, from both sides of the river. Local people like Deirdre Gaughan. Originally from Maryhill on the other side of the water, Deirdre used to work at her mum’s pub on Govan Road (long gone) and has lived in the housing estate adjacent to the new bridge for 30 years. She’s also been a local councillor and is chair of CGAP (Central Govan Action Plan), which aims to transform the area by attracting investment.

Deirdre is delighted the bridge is finally here – “at last it’s Govan’s turn!” she says – but in some ways she says it’s been a long time coming because the lack of a bridge has been an issue for local people for years. “I always felt there should be more connection,” she says. “People wanted to get back and forward - why else would there be a ferry?”

The problem, she says – and it’s a problem a bridge can’t fix on its own – is lack of investment. “Govan was neglected for many years and it’s been years and years since anything has really been done here – nothing ever happened. Certainly, most of the political power was over on the other side of the river but we kept trying.”

From left Jane Cowie (from Annexe Communities, Partick), Katie Gourlay (a teacher from Bankhead Primary, Knightswood), Deirdre Gaughan and Pat Cassidy (Image: Colin Mearns)

One positive effect the bridge will have, she thinks, is an influx of newcomers, particularly students who can take advantage of the cheaper accommodation on the south side of the river and cycle or walk up to uni (it’s what Deirdre’s own granddaughter intends to do when she starts at Glasgow University in a few weeks’ time). But it’ll work both ways, she says: Govan to Partick and vice-versa.

Someone who agrees with that is Jane Cowie, a community worker in Partick who’s also been a big supporter of the bridge plan. She points out there’s always been a lot of kinship between Partick and Govan because they were the last two burghs to become part of the city of Glasgow (they were always a bit reluctant, she says). She’s also seen how people have effectively drifted away from the river and hopes the bridge will encourage them back. She talks about the concept of “blue space” as opposed to “green space”: a place by the river where people can relax and hang out. “The bridge could be a start,” she says.

One person who knows for sure that the demand is there is Pat Cassidy, who ran a temporary ferry across the river in 2017. “We ran it in the summer for two to three months to test the demand and although it was only a 12-seater, 35,000 people used it. People were coming to see a bit of the heritage of Govan, visitor numbers went through the roof, and people in Govan were going to the transport museum for the first time or shopping on Dumbarton Road.”

Pat believes the bridge could accelerate that effect and help to drive the regeneration in Govan, partly by attracting new people to live in the area, knowing they will be able to get about pretty easily.

“Govan was always a mixed community,” says Pat. “It wasn’t just shipyard workers who lived here, it was teachers and lawyers, it was very, very mixed. But from the demolitions of the 60s, it became a very unbalanced community and the reality is that a lot of the people who remained in Govan were among the poorest. The thing that Govan never lost though was its identity.”

What local people are hoping now is that the bridge will be adding something new to that identity but it’s obviously not going to be a completely smooth process. Some locals, for example, have complained that the view from Govan Cross across to the transport museum has now been blocked by the new flats. Building something that attracts new people to an area also raises the tricky question of gentrification.

The council’s Chris Burrows understands where the concern comes from but says the new flats, which have been built by Glasgow Housing Association, are designed to encourage a mixed community.

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“It gets a bad rap in some places,” he says, “but basically the flats are for couples who both might be on £22,000 a year or something. They’re also for people who might have been brought up in Govan but don’t qualify for social housing themselves because they earn too much.

“People will say you’re gentrifying Govan, but gentrification is where you displace a community, but we’re bringing new people in with a bit of money in their pockets to support the services.” It’s also more subtle than the big high-rise projects of the 1960s. “I’ve heard it called place-mending rather than place-making,” he says.

This is certainly the thinking of the government ministers who’ve supported the project through the City Deal: UK and Scottish. The Scottish minister for investment Tom Arthur believes the new bridge will unlock opportunities for people on both sides of the Clyde.

“It will link up existing walking and cycling routes in Govan and Partick and enable more businesses to trade across the river to drive growth in western Glasgow,” he says. UK Government Minister for Scotland Kirsty McNeill also believes it could kick-start growth. It will help boost the economy, she says, bring communities together and support redevelopment.

There’s also a hope on both sides of the river that the bridge could be starting a process with effects that we’ll still be able to see in 50 to 100 years in areas of deprivation. It’s interesting that the visitor figures for the transport museum show that, of all the wards in Glasgow, the lowest number of visitors is from Govan even though it’s so close as the crow flies. Once the bridge opens, schools, young people, families will be able to walk over easily. And vice versa: some of the visitor attractions in Govan, the Old Stones for example, expect to see their visitor number go up.

But first, the contractors need to get the thing finished before the bridge opens to the public on September 7. A big sign at the entrance to the building site reads “Nothing you do on this site today will be as important as going home to you family and loved ones” which is lovely and everything, but there’s also a sense in the air that we need to get cracking and get this job done pronto. Project manager David assures me they’ve been working to a series of mini-deadlines for months now and it’s all going according to plan.

David is also extremely proud of what he and his colleagues have achieved here and he tells me the bridge has been designed to last 120 years. But he rolls his eyes slightly when I tell him that I love the new bridge but secretly prefer the old Victorian ones.

The Govan-Partick Bridge is due to open next Friday (Image: Colin Mearns)

“It’s an argument that comes up all the time,” he says, “There’s no way this bridge could be built from stone and what people don’t realise is the amount of maintenance and repair work that needs done on those Victorian bridges.”

A lot of the sandstone will have been replaced on the old bridges and a lot of the parapets, he says. It’s not really the same bridge anymore – it’s Trigger’s broom.

I’m also starting to pick up that building a bridge can be quite an emotional process for construction guys like David, who’s from Ireland but has been working in Scotland since 2008. He’s worked on big projects in that time, including the M80 and the decommissioning of the Dounreay nuclear plant in Caithness, but the bridge is something a bit special.

“I got the opportunity two and a half years ago to take this and there aren’t many opportunities like this in your career. My kids are Glaswegian and it’s ‘daddy’s bridge’ to them. And engineers all work the same way. If you’re driving down a road, you’ll think, ‘I built this road’ or I did a night shift on that bridge. A lot of my friends are also people I met through jobs so there’s an emotional element; we’re not just here to build a bridge and we’re gone. It’s not all just concrete and steel. When I bring my family back in ten years’ time, we’ll have that connection.”

David also believes the new bridge will quite quickly become one of the most photographed buildings in Glasgow and will end up on tea towels and mugs. And he hopes Glaswegians will take it to their hearts and is certain they’ll come up with a nickname in no time at all.

So what will it be? Swingy? Pointy? I’m told another candidate for the unofficial name of the longest opening pedestrian/cycle bridges in Europe is “pineapple”, and the reason may not be obvious until you realise what the pineapple is. It’s the unofficial symbol of a certain underground group of fun-loving people in Britain who like to swing.