Of all the old tales I’m gathering in my outing to Port Glasgow, there’s one concerning Addison’s, the newsagent’s shop, that delights me.
Not long ago, this wee emporium was situated at the other side of the precinct where it now sits. Back then, it had a rather rudimentary supply-and-demand arrangement with its lively client-base. Having purchased their bottles of affordable wine, thereafter to be consumed al fresco in the nearby park, they could return to have their bottles topped up from the shop’s own barrel.
After a solid shift of drinking, conducted at pace, it was hardly surprising when differences of opinion were settled in the traditional manner. And so, the area where these outbreaks of bare-knuckle belligerence occurred came to be known as Addison Square Garden.
Just across the dual carriageway is Coronation Park which overlooks the River Clyde at its widest point and its most majestic. You’ll have glimpsed the park’s two permanent residents: a pair of stainless steel shipbuilders weighing in at around 14 tonnes and towering 33 feet above the grass.
This breathtaking sculpture – designed and made by artist, John McKenna – demands a visit in itself. Fittingly, it sits in the shadow of Ferguson’s Marine, the last live shipbuilding remnant of this once thrumming neighbourhood.
Today though, I’m captivated by the little warning signs that gather around the base of the artwork. “DO NOT CLIMB ON THE SCULPTURE”. Am I missing something here? This big metal colossus would have given Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Dougal Haston a run for their money.
The big shipbuilders, Coronation Park and Addison’s reside within one of the most eye-catching and historic neighbourhoods of west central Scotland.
Further down the Firth of Clyde lie Greenock and Gourock. Port Glasgow is considered their edgier, more rambunctious cousin, but it’s always been my favourite of the three since I used to stop here for liquid reinforcements en route to Greenock Morton’s Cappielow Park whenever Celtic were visiting.
It’s impossible fully to convey here how historic and grand is this jaggy arrondissement. It’s studded with architectural gems which are embedded in the glorious and inchoate narrative of Glasgow’s rise to become the second city of the British Empire and the fortunes that flowed from it.
The very sudden decline of the yards were a gut-punch to Inverclyde, but it was most painfully felt in Port Glasgow. Even so, a walk around the knot of streets which form its core soon becomes rewarding.
There are three and four-storey red sandstone tenements on John Wood Street which would fetch around half a million if they lay within London’s commuter belt. Port Glasgow railway station runs dozens of 25-minute train journeys each day. Just over there, at the end of King Street, you can see the Arrochar Alps peeping at you across the water.
Sadly, these streets are punctuated with the familiar residue of urban decline: empty shop-fronts, vaping salons and fast-food outlets. But their wonderful built heritage remains.
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Last week though, an architectural journal called Urban Realm specialising in the niche ‘Up Itself’ style conferred the title of Scotland’s most dismal town on Port Glasgow. This annual award has become known as the Plook on the Plinth and routinely targets places trying to overcome profound social challenges and displacement.
This year though, they picked the wrong fight with the wrong people. Port Glasgow was having none of this boutique, middle-class, supper-party effluence. Not to put too fine a point on it, Urban Realm got their fundaments handed to them.
Among the resistance leaders was Kevin Green, a social entrepreneur who was born and raised in the Port. Mr Green re-settled here after a successful career recycling high-end corporate office fixtures and fittings into communities which badly needed them.
He confronted the Urban Realm people at their vainglorious press event and gave them a rather elegant seeing-to.
“From my perspective, this was an architect coming here and saying ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with your town. We know what’s wrong with our town, but we’ve got plans for it and we’ve had them for a while.
“There’s a lower quarter plan which blends in the retail park with the historic core. We’re currently awaiting funding to knock down the health centre so that we can form an authentic heritage space. Then we plan to straddle it over that busy carriageway. This will provide an eye-catching and sorely-needed linkage to the waterfront.”
In any direction you care to look there are pillars of the Port’s majestic cultural and economic heritage. To the east, just beyond the health centre and an escarpment of tree-lined wasteland is the old rope factory, which had once been a sugar refinery.
The elegant grid pattern of wide streets built in the 17th century pre-date Edinburgh’s New Town and Glasgow’s Georgian boulevards. This was the original design model that inspired New York and Chicago.
“There might be a scarcity of money in Port Glasgow,” says Mr Green, “but in that we’re no different to many other small towns which have had to endure the process of de-industrialisation and the austerity crises and the impact of Covid. I don’t look at what’s wrong though; I look at what’s strong.
“We’re an hour away from half of Scotland’s population. We have a retail park which attracts tens of thousands of people and it sits between the 100 square miles of the Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park and the river.
“We’ve done 40 years of the deprivation, addiction and unemployment narrative. Today, we have a different story to tell and it’s different from the story which these architects and the press are telling. We’re simply not having that.”
He points to the King George VI building, the oldest in Port Glasgow, built in 1758. This was the oldest purpose-built masonic lodge in the world and is now a fully net-zero £3.5m Community Hub which looks brand spanking new.
There are future plans to create a leisure space within the historic core, including a water-sports park and a mountain bike park. The retail centre could tail off into smaller shops, restaurants and bars. They’ve got the well-preserved, 17th century Newark Castle here FFS.
Underneath the health centre car park sits the oldest dry dock in Britain, designed by James Watt. If the car park was removed you get to see the first few steps of the dock. Over there to the west is the neo-classical bell tower of the Town Buildings designed by James Hamilton (again FFS). Just behind are one of the oldest Victorian swimming baths in the UK.
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When Specsavers are making their next television adverts they should feature those weapons at Public Realm. Port Glasgow is one of several places defamed by these lunchtime professionals. And here’s the main irony. The heritage and design genius interred in the Port’s old streets and stones should attract conservation status and provide access to the transnational funding pots that would come with it.
It’s getting towards tea-time and the Clyde is looking absolutely different class shimmering in its early autumn raiment. Before leaving the Port, I pop into Addison’s hoping perhaps to see an old cask of the Vino Falldoono. Instead, I settle for the shop’s last copy of the stalwart Greenock Telegraph still heroically reporting the human dramas every day from the Tail O’ The Bank.
Curiously, there’s a copy of the New York Times sprawled out on the shelf beneath. Perhaps though, there’s nothing curious about it.
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