Govan

Elder Park

Isabella Elder's 1885 gift to Govan: 37 acres, two statues, a library.

You're standing in 37 acres of park that a widow gave to the Burgh of Govan in 1885. Isabella Elder's husband John built the compound steam engine that let Clyde ships burn less coal and sail further, and when he died in 1869 she ran the firm herself for a time before partners took it on. She bought Fairfield farm for this ground and left the farmhouse standing. Her plan for it was simple: it was for what she called healthful recreation by music and amusement, and ball games were not allowed.

Find the two statues. Isabella's was unveiled in 1906 and shows her in the academic robes of the doctorate Glasgow University gave her in 1901. She also paid for the library at the far end, 10,000 pounds of her own money, on one condition: that it open on Sundays so working people could get in. Andrew Carnegie came to open it in 1903.

Nearby, two memorials remember Govan men killed in the SS Daphne disaster in 1883 and in the submarine HMS K13 in 1917.

Fairfield Heritage Centre

Free museum in the 1891 offices of a record-breaking shipyard.

The building facing you, on the other side of Govan Road, is the head office of the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, finished in 1891. Upstairs, the boardroom and the ship models survive, which is rare: most yard offices went the way of the yards. Fairfield started in 1864 on the site of a farm of the same name. Under Sir William Pearce it built transatlantic liners fast enough to take the Blue Riband, the Campania and the Lucania among them in the 1890s.

Before World War I, 19 yards on the Clyde employed 70,000 people. The site went into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1968, and survived the 1972 decision to keep two yards working, this one among them. Warships are still built here. The trust that runs the heritage centre describes Fairfield as the greatest and most successful shipyard in the world.

Entry is free, with a suggested donation of 3 pounds, and the doors are open every day from eleven in the morning to four in the afternoon, April to October.

Govan Cross

Mary Barbour's statue and the fountain called the Govan Baby.

Two monuments stand within a few steps of each other here, and both were paid for by people who lived around this corner. The bronze of Mary Barbour went up on 8 March 2018, International Women's Day, funded by 110,000 pounds raised in public subscription by the Remember Mary Barbour Association. She led the 1915 rent strike, when Govan women organised against landlords raising rents and evicting the families of men away at the war, and in 1924 she became the city's first female Bailie. Her figure leads a line of adults and children carrying placards that read We want justice and The will of the people is law.

A few steps away is the Aitken Memorial Fountain, cast iron, made in 1884 by Cruikshanks and Company at the Denny Iron Works, and the only one of that foundry's drinking fountains left anywhere. It honours Doctor John Aitken, Govan's first Medical Officer of Health, who was 44 when he died and was said to have worn himself out on the poor of the burgh. The small boy at the top gives the fountain its local name: the Govan Baby.