Glasgow's new Riverside Museum

Glasgow has a new transport museum. It cost over £70 million and it opened this week. As its name suggests it is by the Clyde, at Pointhouse Quay in Yorkhill. Many of the great Clyde shipyards used to be nearby.

The building looks  very good from the outside, but inside it is rather cramped. At 7,500 square meters it is about the same size as the old Transport Museum but has 3,000 exhibits compared to the 1,300 in the old museum. 

As you can see from the photographs many of the exhibits, like the bicycles above and wall mounted cars, cannot be inspected closely because they are out of reach.
 

I am not sure how they spent the  £70 million but they might have gone for a larger, if less architecturally impressive building.  Add visitors with prams or wheelchairs and getting around was stressful. Whenever I tried to stop and study an exhibit I would soon be pushed by someone trying to get past.

The real jewels in the  collection are the ship models. The museum has a lot and they are superb [but difficult to photograph in their glass cases]. Many of the shipyards used models as marketing tools. They employed teams of highly skilled model makes to make large models of their best ships, which could then be shown to potential customers. Other models were made by apprentices as graduation exercises.

There is parking by the museum but if you want to use public transport the nearest station is Partick. The museum's website promises that the route from the station to the museum is well signposted. It is not. When you come out of the station there is not mention of the museum and signs along the route are few and too small.