The Clyde: The Making of a River

It used to be said that “Glasgow made the Clyde and the Clyde made Glasgow”, by which was meant that the City of Glasgow had made the Clyde a navigable river, and the river had thus become the source of the city’s industrial and trading prosperity. In this book we find a detailed history of that process, starting with the geology which had produced a river so shallow that at Glasgow pedestrians could ford it at low tide. This was a hindrance which the city’s merchants began to address, with the aid of one of England’s first civil engineers, in...