The Titan Crane

The giant crane that helped build the great ships – and still stands over the Clyde today.

Stand almost anywhere along the river at Clydebank and you will see it: the Titan, a vast cantilever crane that has watched over the waterfront for more than a century. Completed in 1907 at the John Brown & Company shipyard, it was built to lift the heaviest parts of a ship – engines, boilers, funnels and great steel sections, and later even battleship gun turrets – and swing them into place as the famous liners took shape below.

It was a genuine marvel of its age: the world's first electrically powered giant cantilever crane, and the largest of its kind anywhere when it was finished. It was designed by the engineer Adam Hunter for Sir William Arrol & Co – the same firm behind the Forth Bridge – and could lift 160 tonnes, a figure later raised to more than 200 tonnes to handle the heaviest naval work.

For the best part of a century the Titan stood at the head of the fitting-out basin while some of the most famous ships ever built were completed beneath it – among them the Lusitania, the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth and the QE2. To work in its shadow was to belong to something the whole world recognised.

Saved for the future

When the shipyards wound down, the Titan could easily have gone the way of the cranes around it. Instead it was preserved and, a hundred years after it was built, reopened in 2007 – restored and given a new life. Today it is a category A listed structure, the highest grade of protection in Scotland, and in 2013 it became the first place ever to be named an International Historic Civil and Mechanical Engineering Landmark by four leading engineering institutions together.

Now a seasonal visitor attraction, the Titan rewards those who climb it with sweeping views over the river and the town, and a real sense of the scale on which Clydebank once built for the world. Floodlit after dark, it remains the town's most recognisable landmark – a proud reminder of the age of the great Queens.

Remember the cranes on the skyline?

We would love to hear your memories of the shipyard years – come in for a chat, or send us your photographs. Share your story.

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Paul James Home, inside the Co-op Department Store, Clydebank. Monday to Saturday 9 to 5. 0141 266 0400.