IT’S hard to imagine that Glasgow has ever looked more like a model railway set than it does in this bird's-eye photograph of 1932. Captured from the long-since demolished tower of the Sailors’ Home, the scene depicts a lost vision of Broomielaw, brimming with paddle steamers (each set to take locals ‘doon the watter’ for seaside jaunts) but here docking just two.
The opening of the George V Bridge, some four years earlier, had diverted tourist traffic to the south bank, leaving Broomielaw with an industrial intake.
Financed by Glasgow merchant Walter Gibson – the so-called "father of the trade of all of the west" – Broomielaw took its name from nearby Brumelaw Croft to become the city’s first quay in 1688. It was not, however, until the 19th century that the it really bloomed. In 1812, Europe’s first commercial steamer – Henry Bell’s Comet – departed here, whilst the Industrial Revolution of the coming years would go on to propel Glasgow into the big leagues.
The Jamaica Street bridge is just one of five that can be seen, this side of the smog, in the picture, and is one of the only features in the view reconcilable with the – now significantly greener – site today. Certainly, you won’t find a large cigarette advert on the side of the railway bridge these days. Back then, people apparently smoked like the sixty chimneys topping the rooftops on the left.
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