‘Pigeons, beaten to a fine lead by hunger, flickered amongst the rusted girders of the railway bridge… rubble was being trucked from busted gable ends, and demolishers worked in a fume of dust and smoke. You would’ve thought that the Ruskies had finally lobbed over one of their big megaton jobs.’ Jeff Torrington’s brutal poetry in Swing Hammer Swing! captured the death of Glasgow shipbuilding, when the Clyde’s cranes fell silent and the yards were written off as relics.

Half a century on, the noise is back. The clang of cranes, the hiss of welders, the shuffle of apprentices in overalls: the Clyde is stirring again. Shipbuilding jobs in Scotland have risen from 6,000 to more than 7,200 in the past decade. It is not the mass employment of the 1950s and 60s, when tens of thousands crowded

See Full Page