Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon

Named after the Brumelaw Croft, a stretch of land running along the north bank of the Clyde, the street known as the Broomielaw extends from Jamaica Bridge to Finnieston Quay. It was Glasgow merchant Walter Gibson, “the father of the trade of all the west coasts”, who financed the building of Glasgow’s first quay, at the Broomielaw in 1688. Significant progress in bringing shipping into the heart of Glasgow would have to wait until the Clyde was made more navigable and major obstacles such as the sandbank at Dumbuck cleared. By 1775, the channel from the Broomielaw to Dumbuck was almost 8 feet deep depending upon the tide. Europe’s first commercial steamer service in the form of Henry Bell’s “Comet” departed from the Broomielaw in 1812. It was the Scottish civil engineer, Thomas Telford who redesigned the Broomielaw quays to handle the busy steamboat traffic as thousands of immigrants came over from Ireland in the mid 19th Century to work in the new industries generated by the Industrial Revolution. Glasgow was becoming an industrial powerhouse.