My kind of town - Clydebank and Hanley

Pert, Alan (2009) My kind of town - Clydebank and Hanley. Architecture Today (199). p. 96.

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Abstract

My kind of town is shaped by the experiences of childhood, growing up in the heart of industrial Britain, and now fearing that Starbucks will start to sell fish suppers. The Pert family came from Ferryden, a quaint village with a long history of seafaring on the south side of the River South Esk, opposite Montrose. My great-great-grandfather was a fisherman and recent trips have uncovered numerous remnants of an industry of smoke-houses, ice-houses, harbour walls and coastal defences like Scurdy Ness Lighthouse, an infrastructure serving a community that has now all but gone. Following the decline of fishing in Ferryden large parts of the community relocated. My grandfather headed west to Clydebank, north-west of Glasgow, a town created to house the shipyard workers who built the Lusitania (1906), Queen Mary (1934), Queen Elizabeth (1938) and the QE2 (1967). Also here was the Singer sewing machine factory which opened in 1885 and by 1960 employed 16,000 workers. In 1941, the Clydebank Blitz destroyed 4,000 and damaged all but seven of the town's 8,000 houses.

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