A Visit to the Riverside Museum

Finding ourselves with a few hours to spare in Glasgow last week, Alison and I took ourselves to the Riverside Museum. I can highly recommend this to anyone with an interest in older forms of transport, which I guess is anyone reading this.

The building, opened in 2011 to replace the old transport museum in the Kelvin Hall is quite a remarkable piece of architecture, a few minutes’ walk from the Subway station at Partick. It’s not just about cars, with buses, trains, ships and some more obscure forms of transport (skateboards!) on display.

In particular, this is the place to go if you want to see that rare bird, the Scottish-built car. They have several examples of Argyll, Albion, Arrol-Johnston and Galloway cars, not to mention the more recent Imp from Linwood. There’s a telling display counting up the number of Model ‘T’s rolling off Ford’s production line in Detroit compared to the number of hand-built cars coming out of Argyll’s palatial factory in Alexandria. At the point I saw it, the Ford count was over 5000 while Argyll had yet to get off the zero mark. No prizes for guessing which company is still in business! My only criticism of the museum is that if you want to see all the vintage Scottish cars you have to wander all round as they’re scattered all over the building, not that that’s any real hardship unless you’re in a hurry – there’s plenty of other exhibits to see.

Definitely worth a trip if you’re in Glasgow