CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 23 INFRASTRUCTURE MILES OGLETHORPE Scotland’s uplifting heritage The rescued archives of Sir William Arrol and Co, builders of the Forth Bridge and iconic cranes, are an extraordinary record of prominent steel engineering structures worldwide. In 1987, the industrial heritage team of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) was alerted to an endangered archive of engineering records in an abandoned factory in Glasgow. The site was home to Sir William Arrol and Company, builders of the Forth Bridge (and the Forth Road Bridge 70 years later). My colleague Graham Douglas and I drove from Edinburgh to find a sad and chaotic scene. Scrap merchants had tipped the archives from their cabinets and the floor was covered with mounds of soiled photographs and drawings. We filled the car and took what we could back to Edinburgh, where it could be cared for by our own collection, the National Monuments Record of Scotland (NMRS). We set about sorting and cataloguing it over several years, a process led by our colleague Miriam McDonald. We suspect that the scrap merchants may have taken some of most recognisable material because there were very few records of the Forth and Tay Bridges, or of Tower Bridge in London, Arrol’s most famous projects. However, what remained was extraordinary and was evidence of the global stature of the company. Arrol led a structural engineering revolution that realised the potential of mild steel, a consistently reliable new material produced by the Siemens Martin process at much lower cost than had been achieved by Bessemer. The Forth Bridge was one of the first large-scale engineering structures to be built from this new material and mild steel remains a mainstay of the construction industry today. The rescued archives became the Sir William Arrol Collection, now held by Historic Environment Scotland. It is an extraordinary record of prominent steel engineering structures all over the UK and across the world. It took a great deal of research to identify many of these structures and we were greatly indebted to Brian Newman of Newcastle University, who helped us identify images and sites. Among the collection were photographs and drawings of iconic shipyard cranes. These prominent structures have become strongly associated with Glasgow and the River Clyde, but other examples exist across the world. By chance, Brian had completed his PhD on ‘Giant cantilever cranes’ and had consequently learned a great deal about Arrol. He was the perfect person to help with the collection. Early on, he was particularly impressed with a photograph of the jib of a crane that had been assembled at Arrol’s Parkhead in around 1912. This extraordinary image captures an inspection team from the Japanese Imperial Navy, to Far left: RCAHMS industrial heritage survey officer Graham Douglas examines some of the discarded Sir William Arrol records at the company’s factory in Dalmarnock, Glasgow, in 1987. (Photo: Miles Oglethorpe) Top right: Sir William Arrol and Co stationery from 1908 (Courtesy of HES, Sir William Arrol Collection) Bottom right: The two catalogues of the Sir William Arrol Collection, produced by RCAHMS in 1998 and 2000 from data compiled by Miriam McDonald (RCAHMS, now Historic Environment Scotland)
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