Clydebank

The crane and the ships

The Titan Crane stands 161 feet above the waterfront, painted, riveted and no longer lifting anything. When it was finished in 1907 it was the world's first electrically powered cantilever crane and the largest of its type, built to lower engines and boilers into the ships below. A lift now takes you to the viewing platform, and since 2015 you can jump off it on a bungee rope.

The ships it served came from John Brown & Company, the shipyard that made the town. The Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the QE2 and the Royal Yacht Britannia were all built here, along with the Lusitania and HMS Hood. J & G Thomson had moved their Clyde Bank yard onto this flat land in 1871, and the workers who followed lived in tenements they nicknamed Tamson's Buildings. The yard joined Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, staged the 1971 work-in under Jimmy Reid, and closed in 2000.

Singer, canal and Roman frontier

The other great employer was Singer, whose sewing-machine works at Kilbowie once held around 11,000 people before closing in 1980. The Clyde Shopping Centre is built on the site: a covered centre that opened in 1982 and, after refurbishment, was reopened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003. The Clydebank Co-operative Society keeps outlets in the town.

For walking, the Forth and Clyde Canal threads straight through Clydebank and gives you a level towpath in either direction — west to Bowling, where the canal widens into a basin and drops through a sea lock into the Clyde, or east toward Glasgow. The John Muir Way follows the same waterfront corridor on its way across Scotland. North of the town, beyond Duntocher and Faifley, the Kilpatrick Hills rise for higher walking. At Goldenhill Park in Duntocher you can walk the exposed stone base of the Antonine Wall, the Roman frontier that ran through here and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008; displayed millstones nearby recall the village's cotton-mill past.

The night the Blitz came

The town's defining night was 13–14 March 1941, when the Luftwaffe raided over two nights and killed 528 civilians, seriously injuring more than 617 — one of the worst raids Scotland saw. The Linnvale scheme was rebuilt afterwards, its streets named for Attlee's government: Attlee Avenue, Bevin Avenue.

Four stations and wider horizons

Getting here is easy. Four stations — Clydebank, Dalmuir, Singer and Drumry — run frequent trains to Glasgow, six and a half miles east, and the Erskine Bridge carries the A82 across the Clyde toward the M8 and the airport. Loch Lomond's southern gateway is twenty to thirty minutes north-west. Dumbarton Castle sits seven miles west on a 240-foot volcanic plug, with 627 steps up to the White Tower Crag and, its keepers claim, the longest recorded history of any stronghold in Scotland.

A band chooses music

Wet Wet Wet formed in Clydebank in 1982. Their bassist, Graeme Clark, once explained the choice this way: "It was either crime, the dole, football, or music...and we chose music."