Greenock Quotes

“Paris is quite a place, to look at as well as the people. I suppose it's because so much has happened here and you know it even if you don't know what it is. In Greenock you know nothing ever happened nor ever will happen, in the historical sense I mean, so you look at it differently, or you don't look at it at all.”
― Alan Sharp, A Green Tree in Gedde

“Mr. Roslin, it seems, had been detained in Greenock for some time, by a foul south-west wind; and everybody knows that Greenock, which is dreadfully addicted to south-westers, is, when they soak, a most wearisome place.”
― John Galt, Selected Short Stories

“Greenock lies along the Clyde littoral and is built up onto the hills behind. Thus it is a long lateral town and the streets rise steeply and provide open view of the river and the Argyllshire hills. In the winter there is snow on them and in the summer their great tawny flanks are charred occasionally by heather fires. They are seen across an expanse of roofs and chimneys, the slates dull purple scales and the ridges presided by clumps of lums, cans churning and smoke pennons flying. The buildings are of sandstone block, greybuffs and occasional reds, and are erected in monolithic tenements, achieving their only rhythm in the flowing lines enforced by the land.”
― Alan Sharp, A Green Tree in Gedde

“The town and harbour of Greenock occupy a sheltered site, set amid surroundings of great natural beauty, at a point of strategic value which may justly be described as the Portal of the Clyde. For here the artificially deepened shipping channel of the river, flanked for miles down stream from Glasgow's docks by wide mudbanks and shoals, gives place to deep water at the famous "Tail of the Bank" of sailing men; the "Clyde Anchorage" of their war-time successors.

Here, too, the fairway flows close to the shore under the lee of a great promontory which affords shelter from the prevailing south-wet winds.

Thus Greenock, blessed as are few other ports by the twin assets of deep water and protection from storm, has taken high rank among them since the period when our overseas trade was first being built up.”
― Frank Mears, Greenock, Portal of the Clyde: An Outline Plan for Redevelopment

“To the west are the residential streets, wide, treey, high cambered and in genteel disrepair. There are few tenements and further out only the large square sandstone houses of the doctors and lawyers and owners and inheritors, of the clergy and the architects and the retired wealthy. There are no shops and few cars and children play faintly in back gardens. There is quiet and the regular grid of the streets beats a slow drum, the tempo of security. Here the prosperous have always lived and had the message boys come cycling out on big basketed bikes, have walked their dogs and trimmed their privets and the reiteration of these events has given to the place a distinctive brooding aura.”
― Alan Sharp, A Green Tree in Gedde