Inchgreen drydock in Greenock is still an active site – currently leased to BAE Systems, it was last used to assemble a giant floating dock for Faslane naval base. It also once played host to the Queen Elizabeth liner – it’s a pretty big dock 🙂

The dock has three goose-necked level-luffing cranes – one of them made by Sir William Arrol, so of course that’s the one I went for (plus, it’s the biggest). This took two trips – first time, with no harness, I wasn’t going to attempt to get to the end. Second time, success…

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There are four giant cantilever cranes left on the Clyde – the Finnieston, Barclay Curle, John Brown, and this one – the James Watt dock in Greenock. The latter three were all made by Sir William Arrol & Co. Ltd. – this is a picture of the James Watt crane from a 1927 Arrols catalogue:

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The Armadillo, or to give it it’s proper name, the Clyde Auditorium, is probably the most photographed building in Glasgow. Everyone photographs it from the side:

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Barclay Curle is the Clyde’s forgotten Titan crane – everyone sees the Finnieston Crane on the news every night, and it’s right in the city centre, but Barclay Curle is in the middle of an industrial area with no good way to see it from the other side of the river – it someimes looms surprisingly on the skyline, but getting close is impossible.

Which is why this took a year’s planning 😉

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As it’s Christmas, how better to celebrate than to climb a cathedral?

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The Finnieston Crane is a Glasgow icon – the giant cantilever crane was used for fitting boilers into shops and loading large cargos, including locomotives. Now it stands disused in the middle of modern dockside redevelopment, appearing behind the presenter on the nightly news, but rarely visited.

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Built in 1878, the A-listed Glasgow Central Post Office was the city’s postal headquarters until 1995; in 1999, it was bought by Stefan King’s G1 leisure group with plans to turn it into a 5-star hotel, but this fell through, and it was sold again in 2005 to partners AWG and HF Developments, for conversion into office space.

Conversion is now almost complete – the facade has been retained, with a new interior built and a new steel cupola. At present, though, and for the past 8 years, it has been a giant billboard:

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