MANY plans have been suggested over the years for the derelict site at the A-listed Govan Graving Docks. There was once a determined campaign to house the royal yacht, Britannia, there as the centrepiece of a £27million maritime heritage park. In 1992, Strathclyde planners wanted to include the facility in an £8 million facelift of former Clyde shipbuilding areas in order to exploit tourist potential.
In late 2017, industrialist Jim McColl’s engineering firm, Ferguson Marine, lodged blueprints to restore the graving docks as a ship repair and maintenance facility. Mr McColl said that should Glasgow planners greenlight the plans, they would send out a “huge message that shipbuilding and ship-repairing was back on the Clyde”.
The docks are the subject of a plan by owners, New City Vision; but in the meantime, they have had a brief but pivotal role, doubling as a long canal, in Sam Mendes’s First World War film, 1917. The film last week received 10 Oscar nominations, putting it on a par with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The picture (above right, by Jamie Simpson) shows the film set under construction.
Speaking on BBC Scotland’s The Edit, Glasgow-born Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who wrote the script with Mendes, said of the scene: “We shot it in the graving yards, Govan dry docks, and my grandfather used to drive haulage out of there, like, 90 years ago. So it was incredible to me. You go all over the world, looking for the right location, somewhere that will double for this long canal, and they find it in my back garden, where my grandpa used to work. It was lovely.”
Michael Dick’s history of city shipping, Half of Glasgow’s Gone, records that the first vessel entered the new graving dock in December 1875. The facility proved popular with shipowners and shipbuilders. A second dock opened in 1886 and a third, 12 years after that.
The docks had a long and eventful history. In 1977 Clyde Dock Engineering Ltd began operations there; writing in 1986, Dick said that apart from a brief spell in 1981 when Clyde Dock was put on a care-and-maintenance basis, its order-book was “very healthy”. However, the graving yard was closed down in 1988.
Harry O’Donnell, of New City Vision, told the Herald: “Following the excitement of the filming last year we have been progressing our emerging plans for the docks which now consist of a blend of ship-repairing, maritime heritage and a scaled-down affordable housing element.
“Given the scale of the project we are having to work closely with a wide range of stakeholders including Glasgow council, Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Historic Scotland and others as we seek to obtain a consensus around scale and massing for the new development”.
Read more: Herald Diary
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