THE gentrified West End of Glasgow may not be immediately associated with heavy industry.
THE gentrified West End of Glasgow may not be immediately associated with heavy industry.
But for more than a century the shipyards along the banks of the river at Partick, Yorkhill and Whiteinch produced hundreds of Clyde-built ships.
The paddle steamer Waverley was built at A&J Inglis yard on the River Kelvin and the Falkland troopship Uganda at the Barclay Curle yard in Whiteinch.
Partick was also the "bread-basket" of Glasgow - the place where grain was turned into flour, then into bread.
All but one of the shipyards - BVT's thriving warship yard at Scotstoun - and the massive Meadowside granaries which once dominated the skyline are gone.
In their place stand the Glasgow Harbour flats and the soon-to-be-completed Riverside Museum.
Like the rest of the Clyde it is a quieter place now than in the heyday of shipbuilding when tens of thousands of workers converged here every day.
Author and historian Ian R Mitchell, who moved to the West End from Aberdeen in 1973, caught the tail-end of the Clyde's industrial era.
He said: "I can remember the Finnieston Crane still working, loading boilers to go and build Russian pipelines.
"The granaries were still in operation and, although it wasn't like the Clyde in its industrial heyday, it was still very much an industrial area in the 1970s.
"Barclay Curle was a huge shipyard and you can still see the hammerhead crane, it's A-listed, in fact the whole building of Barclay Curle's is listed because of the special design they imported from Germany.
"Further down there were the smaller shipyards in Partick, the Meadowside yard and the Inglis yard. The Inglis yard built the Waverley paddle steamer in 1947, they were still operating until the late 1950s, early 1960s.
"This place was crawling with tens of thousands of workers, not only shipyard workers but dock workers, supply workers, railway workers, there was marine engineering and all sorts of different industries here."
Mr Mitchell has taken a passionate interest in the area's history since he moved to the city.
He said: "Partick in particular has changed a lot since I moved down, it's now an annexe of the West End, a kind of West End overflow.
"Most of Partick, Yorkhill, those sort of areas, was much more working class than it is today. A lot of the poorer areas of Partick were demolished to make way for the Clydeside Expressway."
Like many people he is unsure if the riverside flats will last as long as the granaries they replaced.
He added: "The flats are on the site of the old Clyde Navigation Trust's granaries which were built here at the beginning of the 20th century.
"They were famous or infamous for having displaced Partick Thistle - the land they stood on was originally Thistle's ground and the club moved to Maryhill.
"The granaries were fine buildings and unfortunately weren't converted into flats.
"Whether the new flats will last as long as the granary we'll just have to see. I suppose it would have been a lot more expensive to turn the granaries into flats and sometimes economics tends to rule redevelopment rather than sentiment or heritage issues.
"It's trying to strike a balance between the two and I think Glasgow does reasonably well in that."
He added: "Most of the industry in the West End was concentrated on the riverside or on the banks of the Kelvin.
"What people tend to have forgotten about is that originally Partick was where all the grain came in to Glasgow to be turned into flour and then into bread. There is still one granary at the foot of the River Kelvin but back in the 1950s there were still three or four which went up the river as far as the Kelvingrove Art Gallery."
Mr Mitchell is a keen walker and has published a book about his travels in Glasgow.
He said there is now much greater interest in walking and he leads tours in different parts of the city.
He added: "I get a lot of requests from people to take them guided walks in places like Govan and Partick.
"With Glasgow becoming increasingly a tourist city it's good to get people away from the honeypots of the city centre, West End and Merchant City and show them there's a lot more to Glasgow than that."
Mr Mitchell is conscious the West End is fortunate compared with other more deprived parts of the city He said: "I think there's about a dozen different Glasgows.
"What's unique about the city is that there are so many sub-divisions within it but wherever people are in Glasgow they have a strong sense of identity with the city as a whole, the 'Glasgow belongs to me' syndrome."
