No river is more closely bound to a city’s identity than the Clyde is to Glasgow. In the early eighteenth century it was so shallow that it could be forded at Glasgow, and seagoing ships had to unload their cargoes miles downstream. The deepening of the Clyde describes how engineers narrowed and dredged it, and from 1858 the Clyde Navigation Trust took charge of turning it into one of the great industrial waterways of the world. The River Clyde tells the river’s wider story.

Henry Bell’s Comet of 1812, the first commercially successful steamboat in Europe, began the age of Clyde-built steam. Robert Napier trained a generation of engineers who went on to found their own yards, and by the early twentieth century the river was producing around a fifth of the world’s ships; in 1913 alone more than 370 were completed. The shipbuilding industry explains how ‘Clyde-built’ became a byword for quality, and the great yards each have their own story: John Brown at Clydebank, Fairfield at Govan, Yarrow at Scotstoun, Scotts at Greenock and Beardmore at Dalmuir.

The ships themselves became legends. Clydebank launched the Lusitania, the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth and the battlecruiser HMS Hood. Famous Clyde ships covers many more, and the Clyde in the Second World War shows the river working at full stretch.

Decline came after the war, as foreign competition and outdated yards took their toll. When Upper Clyde Shipbuilders went into liquidation in 1971, the workers, led by Jimmy Reid, occupied the yards in a famous work-in rather than going on strike. The decline of shipbuilding follows that story, while the regeneration of the Clyde describes the riverside’s new life. Shipbuilding has not disappeared: Type 26 frigates for the Royal Navy are being built today at the BAE Systems yards in Govan and Scotstoun.

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