Clydeside Distillery
Located at the entrance to the former Queens Dock on the River Clyde, nestling between the Scottish Event Campus and the Riverside Museum, the Clydeside Distillery features the restoration of an original B-Listed Clock Tower and Pump House, both dating from 1877, with the integration of a modern distillery featuring double two tonne stills, housed within a contemporary glazed extension. The visitor experience encompasses self-led tours, a shop, café and visitor centre.
Location: Glasgow
Client: McLaughlin & Harvey
Cost: £4.3m
Completion: 2017
Services: Civil & Structural and Building Services
Blyth & Blyth provided Civil and Structural design services for a team which incorporated Hypostyle (Architects), DSSR (M&E Engineers), Thomas & Adamson (Cost Consultants). Blyth & Blyth and Hypostyle were subsequently notated to McLaughlin & Harvey.
A new steel framed structure was erected to the south of the existing Queens Dock pump house, designed to house the two feature stills and associated distillery plant and equipment.
The existing sandstone pump house and water tower (a hydraulic accumulator for the original dock bascule bridge) were refurbished and annexed into the new distillery structure to house the visitor centre, shop and café.
The construction of the new structure consisted of piled foundation (and incorporation of an existing foundation), suspended concrete ground slab, braced two storey steel framed structure with composite concrete metal deck flooring.
The pump house and clock tower required various slappings and infills coupled with a new roof and new steel frame supported composite concrete metal deck suspended floors.
Key challenges
The key challenges centred around the existing pump house, clock tower and quayside location.
Opening up walls of the existing pump house required careful consideration of some of the ‘alterations’ which had previously been undertaken and augmented with new opening up works which didn’t affect localised or building wide stability.
Piling into an existing infilled dock entrance was always going to prove challenging with the potential for multiple ground obstructions and despite proof digging each of the proposed pile locations, encountering the existing dock entrance bridge foundation required a rapid redesign to incorporate a 10m deep concrete plug into the foundation proposal.
Results
Restoring the pumphouse to the dock which was once the centre for Glasgow’s original whisky exports, coupled with the creation of a new distillery and visitor experience, this new addition is expected to attract 60,000 visitors a year to Clydeside Glasgow.