BACK in 1967, construction work on the foundations of the huge Kingston Bridge and its extensive approach roads was just getting under way.

On one of the banks of the Clyde, as the Glasgow Herald would later narrate, a bare track of earth, “torn by the bulldozers through old Glasgow, past the charred hulk of Cheapside, revealed the intentions of the builders – a run-up for the 470-foot leap of the Clyde”.

The bridge, over time, sprouted “from the midst of the fussing cranes and the gangs pouring concrete into the earth until the half-spans grasped out for each other across the river and Glasgow held its breath”.

By October 1969, there was a gap of just 90ft between the north and south sides of the bridge, and it was closing at the rate of 10ft a week. A workman was photographed (main image) waving to a passing motor vessel from the gangway that linked the two sides. In March the following year, a Herald photographer took the image (right) of the north approaches to the bridge at Anderston.

The £11.5m bridge, then the third-largest of its type in the world, and the longest piece of free cantilevering in Britain, was opened by the Queen Mother three months later, on Friday, June 26. “Here on this great river,” she declared, “generations of men of Clydeside have grappled energetically and successfully with the vital problem of bridging the Clyde without hampering the movement of shipping which means so much to your welfare and the national economy”.

By nightfall, more than 800 vehicles were using the bridge every hour. “From our reports”, said the RAC, “motorists are treating the new motorway bridge with some respect. Many are daunted no doubt by its scale and grandeur”.

A breakdown of the cost of the project revealed that while the bridge itself cost £1.6m, another £1.6m went on the southern approach, and £2.5m on the northern approach. Work on services and support roads cost £400,000, and £3m was paid to the Clyde Port Authority.

The bridge was, in the admiring words of the Herald’s municipal correspondent, Claude Thomson, “a thing of elegance, even beauty”.

It was, he added, the realisation of a far-sighted plan drawn up 25 years earlier by the late Robert Bruce, when he was Glasgow’s master of works and city engineer. His proposals, reported to Glasgow Corporation in 1945, had called for an inner ring road, including a new bridge over the river. They were now being carried out by the present master of works and city engineer, John Armour.

The Kingston was the first bridge to be built over the Clyde in Glasgow since King George V Bridge at Oswald Street was opened in 1928 to relieve the serious congestion on Glasgow Bridge – which itself had been opened in 1899 as the successor to two previous bridges on that site.

Read more: Herald Diary