Shipbuilding, and yachtbuilding, are long gone from the Clyde, and the former yards along Glasgow’s waterfront have been replaced with shiny concert and conference venues and the like. But there are still active and lively links with the city’s maritime past.
Known locally just as ‘The Tall Ship’, the 245ft, three-masted barque Glenlee, the last big Clyde-built sailing ship afloat in the UK, is moored there. She’s both a tourist attraction and a fantastic educational resource – thanks to Glasgow’s free museums policy, her well-laid out displays in the holds are always crawling with parties of fascinated schoolchildren.
Her history, although long, and including four circumnavigations, is not particularly distinguished – she had three name-changes, and though built as a cargo-carrier also served as a sail-trainer – but the life of her seamen, and the challenges of sailing a ship with nineteen sails, carrying a range of different cargoes are vividly brought to life.

Sir Thomas Lipton’s ‘Gamest Loser Trophy’, presented by respectful and affectionate Americans after the last of his five unsuccessful America’s Cup challenges

The Glenlee, her masts and rigging are reflected in the frontage of another shiny new building – the Zaha Hadid-designed Riverside museum of transport. It’s mostly land-based though none the less fascinating for that, but it does include some marine items – especially the story of Glasgow grocer Thomas Lipton’s five attempts with his five Shamrock yachts on the America’s Cup. The display includes the actual cup awarded to Sir Thomas at the end of his last attempt in 1930 – the gold, silver and enamel ‘Gamest Loser Trophy’ paid for by 16,000 Americans through one-dollar subscriptions.
Peter Willis

Main photo: Old and new – the Tall Ship Glenlee reflected in Glasgow’s Riverside Museum.