School of Social & Political Sciences

 

 

In 1962, Lithgow's shipbuilders in Port Glasgow designed and built a full-scale replica of the PS Comet, thought to be Europe’s first commercial steam vessel, which had been built in the town and launched in 1812. The original ship lasted only eight years on the water before it split in two in strong currents, its wreckage now lying at the bottom of the Dorus Mor, west of Crinan in Argyll and Bute. The replica of the Comet was placed in the centre of Port Glasgow – still surrounded at the time by the industrial architecture of shipbuilding - as a memorial to this proud history. Despite a restoration in 2011, the replica was removed from the town centre in 2023 when its “deteriorating condition” meant that it was deemed beyond repair. Its remaining parts now lie in storage. Whilst other memorialisations to the Comet exist around Port Glasgow, it felt fitting that the proudest memorial to the wrecked steamship had also succumbed to nature. A memorial to a ruin had itself become a ruin.  

Whilst undertaking a year’s field work in Port Glasgow for my MSc, the visual and spatial essence of industrial memorials in the town struck me profoundly. Memorials to shipbuilding and maritime history lie around every corner. Some, like the famous ‘Shipbuilders of Port Glasgow’ (or ‘Skelpies’), or Malcolm Robertson’s 2012 ‘Endeavour’ in the centre of town, are large sculptural memorialisations that have been placed prominently in the urban landscape, hard to miss. Others are hidden and must be found. Some are raised to face the sky and the river; some you can sit on; others you can walk over without noticing, as I did. On multiple visits to the town I wandered, drifted, got lost, turned this way and that and no matter which way I walked, no matter if I was going the ‘right’ way or not, I uncovered a memorial that transmitted history back into public space. It felt as if, at no point, were you allowed to forget. 

Memorials are pieces of the urban landscape that take on multiple meanings and contested interpretations within communities – particularly those that have experienced seismic socioeconomic and cultural transitions such as Port Glasgow. As Purcell has said, they become sites for a “dialogue between past and present”. The demise of the shipbuilding industry in Inverclyde has left material traces of the past in its wake - part of what Sherry Lee Linkon calls the ‘half-life’ of deindustrialisation, processes visible within the urban fabric of Port Glasgow.  

One particular set of memorials in the town left me with a particularly sinking feeling. Whilst searching for a sculpture dedicated to Sir Stanely Spencer’s artistic legacy in the town, I walked from the ‘Skelpies’ to Argyle Parade, my eyes firmly ahead, taking in my surroundings. Only on my way back along did I look down at my feet. Etched into the floor of this walkway that leads past a McDonald’s drive-through to a Tesco Extra the size of an aircraft hangar, are the names of five shipyards that no longer exist: ‘Newark’, ‘Glen’, ‘East’, ‘Castle’ and ‘Bay’. Walking across them had a haunting impact on the experience of wandering in the town. Not only did they go unnoticed the first time I walked over them, but their location is a fitting reminder of just how monumental the palimpsestic processes of deindustrialisation have been on the physical environment of this town.   

They’re a fitting reminder of Zygmunt Bauman’s assertion that we have moved from a society of producers to one of consumers, with this site now a large retail park. What once was a place of industrial production, thought to be a site of permanence, has been replaced by a site of consumption and transience. In that moment, as I walked over this history, at first unthinkingly and then with caution, I came to appreciate the immense changes wrought here. As the photos I took suggest, these overlapping traces of, and memorials to, the past, mixed in with the urban materiality of the town – multinational companies with no financial or social roots in the area, car parks, drive-throughs, vacant and derelict plots of land, enclosed public spaces, shops boarded up – can only be experienced as a profound haunting.  

Hauntology has taught us a number of things about how we negotiate our perception of the past, our experience of the present and our anticipation for the future. It is, as Jacques Derrida says, a “politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations”. As such, it has also taught us that ‘futures’ we may have once imagined, once expected to materialise, have failed to do so. Thus, as Mark Fisher reminds us, the future - and ‘lost futures’- are “always experienced as a haunting”, conditioning our expectations in the present. We associate ghosts with ruined spaces and architectures, places where disturbed histories and memories tussle for room in our imagination as they impinge on the material remnants of the past. But what if memory, crystalised in the form of physical public memorials, also haunts the modern, glistening spaces of late-stage neoliberalism? What if, as Marc Treib remarks, “memory haunts not only the derelict house but the vibrant plaza”? As I looked down at these trodden-over memorials to a proud industrial heritage, and up at cars passing in and out of the McDonalds drive-through, I contemplated the eerie salience of this remark. The ‘vibrant plazas’ of capital were being haunted by their predecessor.  

The ‘half-life’ of deindustrialisation in this region is palpable in many ways. According to a local authority report published in September 2025, Inverclyde has lost approximately 22,000 people since 1981. Between 1998 and 2021, its population declined by 8.9% - the highest negative change for any local authority in Scotland. If the current pattern continues, it is projected to lose a further 6.1% by 2028, and another 13% by 2040. Another report in 2021 the Inverclyde district “registered the highest number of alcohol-related deaths in Scotland”, some of the highest drug-related deaths – which are themselves the highest in Europe – and the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation from 2020 showed that Inverclyde “has the highest local share of all councils for the percentage of data zones in the 5%, 10% and 20% most deprived”.  

With these conditions in mind, the spectres of the past, and of the futures that could’ve been, linger painfully on in a town in which there are so many memorials to its industrial heritage that it demanded the creation of an entire ‘Port Glasgow Art Trail Map’ just so that people can find them. Memorials within these postindustrial urban spaces remind us of the immensity of the processes of deindustrialisation carried out in places like Port Glasgow. The hope that remains is that they can conjure the memory of this injustice sufficiently to catalyse new methods of collective action, to rewrite the narratives of urban decline and challenge the power of territorial neglect and stigmatisation.  

References:

Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press.  

BBC News (2023) ‘The Comet: Wreckage of rare steamship given protected status’, 9 August. 

Derrida, J. (2006) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. 1st edn. New York: Routledge Classics.  

Fisher, M. (2006) ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly, 66(1), pp. 16-24. 

Linkon, S. L. (2018) The Half-Life of Deindustrialisation: Working-Class Writing About Economic Restructuring. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.  

Long, L. (2020) Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) 2020, report to Inverclyde Integration Joint Board by L. Long, Inverclyde Health and Social Care Partnership, 17 March.  

Purcell, S. J. (2003) ‘Commemoration, Public Art, and the Changing Meaning of the Bunker Hill Monument’, The Public Historian, 25(2), pp. 55-71.   

SIMD (2020) The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation 2020, National Statistics/Scottish Government report. 

Treib, M. (2009) ‘Yes, Now I Remember: An Introduction’, in Treib, M. (ed.) Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape. New York/London: Routledge. 

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Further reading:  

Ian Jack wrote a very insightful article about the CalMac scandal and the history of shipbuilding in Port Glasgow up to the present in the London Review of Books in 2022, available here. 

Les Back’s chapter on walking as a sociological method inspired my use of it during my time researching in Port Glasgow.

For a wider look at deindustrialisation in Scotland, Philips, Wright and Tomlinson’s book from 2021 is essential reading and can be accessed through the university library, available here.  

First published: 9 January 2026