The Glasgow Harbour Tunnel
For my Clyde Built project, I decided to explore the Glasgow Harbour Tunnel, an underground relic that once symbolized a thriving era, now left to the ravages of time…
Glasgow’s unique variety of architecture is always fascinating to indulge and delve into. Every building, from industrial grit to Victorian grandeur, captures the city’s vibrant spirit and rich history. The Glasgow Harbour Rotundas for example, two buildings parallel to one another that stand watch over the River Clyde, they blend into the background of the city’s landscape. Traveling past these unique, domed roofed, circular structures on the bus piqued my curiosity, and having only imagined the significance of these identical structures, discovering their purpose had me taken aback. A fragment of history abandoned to deteriorate in silence beneath the busy streets and the Clyde’s tides.
The story of the rotundas is one of connection and ambition, and a time when industry, innovation, and ambition shaped the city’s soul. Built in 1895, the rotundas once marked the entrance to a tunnel beneath the Clyde, an underground passage that helped the workers and citizens of Glasgow traverse the river during the city’s industrial boom. The tunnel was a marvel of engineering in its day, featuring two large ventilation shafts and hydraulic lifts, originally intending to transport horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians, then later adapted to motor vehicles. Brick and cast-iron segments were used in the construction of the tunnel, which were 720 feet long between the shafts and 16 feet in diameter. The vehicle tunnels were closed in 1943 due to the removal of metal and the vehicle lifts to contribute to the war effort. Later, the completion of Bell’s Bridge in 1986 subsequently marked the end of the Glasgow Harbour tunnel, with the pedestrian tunnel closure in 1987 due to safety concerns and declining use.
The reverberated sounds were heavily inspired by a quote by a columnist for the Evening Citizen who recalls a trip beneath the Clyde in 1932:
❝ The door of the passenger tunnel has long been disused, and foot-passengers now enter by one of the four elevators for vehicles at the other side of the rotunda. Choosing the company of a horse and lorry as preferable to that of a motor-car, I soon found myself smoothly and quietly descending among a bewildering medley of wheels and cables, through which I could see the mouth of the old disused foot-passenger tunnel as we passed on the way down. At the bottom water oozed through the iron sides of the great tube, which has never been totally watertight. At one place a single stalactite a font long hung from the roof, ❞ (Johnstone and Halliday, 2004).
