Author : Bill Clark ISBN : 9781840339567 Cover : paperback Price : £12.95
Port Glasgow is in Renfrewshire, not in Glasgow. Its earliest building is the 15th-century Newark Castle, but it was in the late 1600s that the town came into being to service trade with the New World and the Baltic on behalf of Glasgow many miles further up the Clyde. Trade increased rapidly in the 17th and 18th centuries, and then around 1833 the upper Clyde was deepened so ships could sail up to Glasgow, and Port Glasgow’s importance diminished. The town’s making required land to be reclaimed from the sea to make docks, harbours and shipyards, and in the last century, some of these themselves have been infilled. The differences between then and now are pretty dramatic. When it comes to the town’s streets, some are much as they were 100 years ago, and others have been obliterated, giving the author the challenge of figuring out the location of the viewpoint. With the combination of archive photos and the author’s modern colour equivalents, the reader can see all the changes wrought on Port Glasgow over the years.
