Glasgow is the only city on earth to have grown and prospered on a great river and then turned its back on it with a contemptuous shrug.
The great ships no longer loose their chains and birth themselves in the River Clyde, chapped hands no longer clap, the champagne remains in the icebox. True, the Govan Yard is recruiting apprentices and ther are faint stirrings, but a renaissance cannot be founded on defence contracts.
Belfast, with it's mighty cranes, restricts itself to its pathetic sectarian huddles and forgets that it once looked west.
Rivets are in our blood, even if they are obsolete. The tang of the salt air should resonate with steel crashing into the surf.
It's all we're skilled in.
About pretension
1 week ago
5 comments:
I do find it depressing going down the Clyde coast past Greenock and Port Glasgow and see nothing but empty shipyards. Just feels wrong somehow. Plenty new warehouse flats but no-one to live in them.
From Govan to Largs... nearly all the shipyards are dead and gone.
In Clydebank they are planning to build 500 riverfront apartments for the overpaid fitba players, and heroin dealing gangsters.
A real travesty!
I love that song.
My ex is from Barrow. They are usually in direct competition with Glasgow for shipbuilding contracts. At one time everyone in the area worked for Vickers - now it's not good.
Ah well at least 'The Onedin Line' is still big in Yugoslavia.
Seriously though it is an absolute tragedy. And where are those super luxury cruise ships being built these days anyway? Not here by the sound of it.
All the shipbuilding is going on in China nowadays, where they build the luxury liners, the gigantic tankers, and the juggernaut container ships. And the old beauties of the past are being beached in India and Bangladesh, to be torn apart by desperately poor people for scrap and allowed to leach their toxins into the sea. It's a sad bastard of a world we live in.
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