A MUSEUM to celebrate Glasgow’s rich heritage of shipbuilding should be incorporated into plans for the development of the Graving Docks in Govan, according to one of Scotland’s most celebrated businessmen.
Jim McColl’s Ferguson Marine is to lodge plans with Glasgow City Council for returning the docks to operation as it extends its business into ship repair and maintenance. And the man who is among the wealthiest in Scotland believes it is only right that a museum celebrating the city’s shipbuilding past is built on site.
“We lack something to celebrate the shipbuilding history and heritage that we have,” said Mr McColl. “Amsterdam has a fantastic maritime museum, if you go to Northern Ireland there is a good one over there. Glasgow has nothing like that.”
Mr McColl said he would not be willing to foot the full cost of establishing such a museum but would be happy to lead the campaign for a maritime museum to be built in the city.
“We would want to have the docks there for our repair facilities, but the remaining land would be ideal for doing a really ambitious maritime museum that is worthy of the shipbuilding heritage of Glasgow,” he said.
“I’d be open to working with anyone who is interested at looking at that side of it.”
Referring to the Science Centre and Riverside Museum on the opposite bank, he added: “A maritime museum would be very good for the area, [and then] looking over and see an actual working repair dry dock.”
A grass roots campaign to acquire the site and transform it into a visitor attraction has been ongoing since 2014 through the Clyde Docks Preservation Initiative (CDPI).
The group’s executive director Iain McGillivray said: “It sounds like a really exciting proposal for returning the site to a working dock and creating jobs and apprenticeships as opposed to just private housing.”
CDPI is currently working to build a database of the Clyde’s maritime artefacts, assets and resources.
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