James Watt Dock

This morning I had to take my car in for a service, so I walked back into town past the James Watt Dock.

As today was my 500th blip I was looking for something interesting this morning. The tidal current of the river was creating a beautiful silkiness in the dock and I liked the refections of the stunning morning sky. This is a view looking east towards the Titan crane, with the CalMac ferry MV Bute sitting in the dock.

The James Watt Dock opened in 1886 and was created to enable Greenock to compete with Glasgow, with the aim of attracting transatlantic shipping traffic and establishing Greenock as, “one of the greatest and best equipped British seaports”.

At the time it was believed to be the only dock on the Clyde where vessels of large tonnage could be kept afloat at all states of tide. It was thought that such a facility would allow Greenock to benefit from the larger ships which were being used for trade and passenger traffic that were constrained in their draft to navigate the upper reaches of the Clyde at anything below high tide.

For a period the dock allowed Greenock to expand and with industries such as sugar refining and shipbuilding, the boom in trade fuelled significant development leading to the growth of the town.

Thank you for following and commenting on my blip journey. As Robert Louis Stevenson said 'To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive'.