Finnieston Crane

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Finnieston Crane and the North Rotunda

The Finnieston Crane sitting beside the River Clyde

The Finnieston Crane is a crane and landmark in Glasgow, Scotland. It is now disused but is retained as a symbol of the city's engineering heritage.

The crane was commissioned in 1926 by the Clyde Navigation Trust, the operators of the port and dock facilities in Glasgow. It was completed in 1932 by Cowans, Sheldon & Company of Carlisle on the Stobcross Quay on the north bank of the River Clyde in Glasgow, and cost a total of £52,351. It is officially known as the Stobcross Crane (or, to the navigation trust as Clyde Navigation Trustees crane #7), but its proximity to the (now filled-in) Finnieston Quay has led to its being popularly known as the Finnieston Crane. It is a giant-cantilever, or 'hammer-head' crane, measuring 50.24metres (165 feet) tall with a 45 metre (150 feet) cantilever jib . It has a lifting capacity of 175 tons. It can be ascended either by a steel staircase or an electric lift.

Connected to a spur of the Stobcross railway, the crane's primary purpose was to lift massive boilers and engines onto new ships; at the time Glasgow was one of the leading shipbuilding cities in the world. With the decline of the shipbuilding industry, the crane survived with a secondary use, loading heavy machinery – mainly Springburn's then renowned locomotives – for export. With the downturn in seafaring trade, use of the crane continued to decline and it fell completely into disuse in the early 1990s.

Today the crane remains as a landmark, a Category A listed structure, and one of the most identifiable images of Glasgow. During the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival (sited on the Princes Dock on the opposite bank of the river) a full-size replica locomotive, made from straw by local sculptor George Wyllie, was suspended from the crane. The crane's image is used extensively in the media, including by BBC Scotland news programmes and for the quintessentially Glaswegian crime drama Taggart. It stands as a symbol to the industrial heartland that Glasgow and the Clyde were in the early to mid-20th century, and as a symbolism of the downturn of those industries. The docks having long since been filled in to be replaced with the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre and the Clyde Auditorium. The North Rotunda (part of the defunct Clyde Harbour Tunnel) stands next to the crane.