Port Glasgow can take an insult. This town on the Clyde has way too much pride in itself — in its storied past and its community — to be bothered by the views of others.
For years the place was dismissed as the Dirty Wee Port. Then, in the digital age, social media influencers picturing themselves in the condemned Clune Park scheme came up with what they thought was a new zinger: Scotland’s Chernobyl.
Now architects have named Port Glasgow as Scotland’s most dismal town, awarding it the infamous Plook on a Plinth trophy, one of the Carbuncle awards that nobody wants to win and which are back after an eight-year hiatus.
Drew McKenzie, the town butcher and provost of Inverclyde, the local council, is not impressed. “Pish,” he says, when told of the news. Then he comes up with a response he sees as more fitting for his office: “Nonsense.”
McKenzie, an independent councillor, is in his shop, Robert Alexander Butchers on Princes Street, the town’s main drag. “This is a decent place to stay with decent folk,” he says. “It just needs a little care and attention. I would not say it has been neglected. The retail side of things has been in decline in all of Scotland’s towns, thanks to out-of-town shopping and Amazon.”
Clune Park Primary School, which was built in 1887, has fallen into disrepair and is slated for demolition
JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
McKenzie is up at 5.30am to cut his meat for the day. His shops still offers things you cannot get in supermarkets: his own sausages and steak pies. But walking down his street, McKenzie admits there are “too many fast-food shops”. The tiny grid centre — with a history to rival any town in Scotland — is also dotted with the Turkish barbers, vape stores, charity shops and bookies.
A block from McKenzie’s shop stands the carcass of the former Woolworths, which shut in 2008 when the chain closed. “People say this looks like 1970s Romania,” the provost says. “But it is ripe for redevelopment.” The council has bought most of this part of town, the lower quarter. With a motorway east and five trains an hour to Glasgow, the local authorities see potential in the Port.
So does the organisation behind the Carbuncle awards, Urban Realm magazine. “Port Glasgow is a town of squandered potential,” argues John Glenday, the publication’s editor. “Look beyond the grey walls, rubble and boarded-up windows to long vistas and you will see the beauty of the place, still punctuated by the grandeur of the library.”
Glenday is talking about one of Port Glasgow’s genuine architectural gems: old municipal buildings where people can borrow books under a stunning early 19th-century clock tower. The town is not without other treasures — it is also home to Newark Castle, an elegant Georgian kirk and the world’s oldest Masonic hall.
“Unfortunately, the immediate environment fails to do justice to what could and should be a jewel in the Clyde’s crown,” Glenday adds. “Clune Park was solidly built and once home to a thriving community — and with investment it could have done so again. Issues around population decline and deprivation are real but are best dealt with by working with established assets, not sweeping buildings aside in the hope that the underlying problems will go away.”
Glenday stresses that decades of bad planning — most obviously a big road separating the town from the river — have blighted its image.
The derelict estate has been the subject of a long-running stand-off between private landlords and the local council that has prevented redevelopment
JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY
Houses were secured prior to the start of a demolition programme at the Clune Park estate earlier this year
JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY
In another of Port Glasgow’s central streets, Kevin Green, a community activist brimming with ideas, agrees with every word Glenday says. “We basically were cut off from our shore and our park by a bypass to get people to Greenock and Gourock.” From his base at PG25, a social enterprise looking at ways to boost the town, he welcomes the Plook on the Plinth. “Good,” he exclaims.
Green is still cross about Clune Park’s demolition. It symbolises, he reckons, half-hearted efforts at regeneration. A while back, when the council wanted to save the scheme, it tarted up Robert Street, the main road through the community, installing stone spheres to separate the roadway from pavements. The new street furniture has been taken away and installed in better-off parts of Inverclyde. Green, tongue-in-cheek, compares this to the Elgin Marbles. “We want the Boab Street baws back,” he smiles as he slips into Scots.
Green is convinced his town has a future. The Port, he stressed, has a history of ups and downs which coincides with Scotland’s. From 1668 to 1775 this was part of Glasgow — the original town centre grid was built by the old corporation of Scotland’s biggest city on 13 acres bought from a local laird. Why? Because this was as far up the Clyde as ships could go. It was from here, as well as Leith, that Scotland’s ruinous effort to set up a colony in the New World began. It was to Port Glasgow that the would-be colonisers returned — at least those who survived.
The Ferguson Marine shipyard and CalMac ferry Glen Sannox on the Clyde at Port Glasgow
ALAMY
Port Glasgow was awarded the Plook on the Plinth trophy for its dismal appearance
ALAMY
Glasgow ditched its port after dredging the upper river. And then — crucially — America declared independence. Port Glasgow, built on the Atlantic trade, including slave-derived goods, lost its purpose. So it switched to building ships, and is still doing so at ferry-maker Ferguson Marine.
Its biggest yard — Lithgow’s, which was also the world’s largest — is now a giant retail park anchored by one of Scotland’s biggest Tesco superstores. The shopping centre is connected to the town by a pathway in which the names of long-closed shipbuilders are engraved.
It is exactly 250 years after Port Glasgow “won” its independence from Glasgow — and 50 years since it lost its burgh status and self-government. Green reckons it is time for a rethink. “We need, again, to find out what Port Glasgow is for,” he says.
One idea: hospitality and tourism. “The distance from the far end of the retail park right through the town is less than the length of big malls like Silverburn or Braehead,” he says. “Right now there is a disconnect. But we can merge our town with the retail park.”
The Dirty Wee Port, Green argues, is nothing of the kind. It boasts stunning views, striking architecture and enviable transport links. But can it come up with a plan to shake off all the old insults?