A community mosaic created by pupils from Anderston and Saint Patrick's Primary Schools in association with Impact Arts to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the fire at a bonded whisky warehouse on Cheapside Street in Glasgow where fourteen firemen and five members of the city's salvage corp were killed.

#glasgow #firefighters #memorial #glasgowfireservice #cheapsidestreetfire #clydewalkway #kingstonbridge #anderstonprimary #stpatrickaprimary

The Cheapside Street fire was one of the worst peacetime fires in British history and every fire engine on Glasgow attended the blaze. The warehouse contained a million gallons of whisky and thirty thousand gallons of rum. When some of the casks ruptured from the heat, it created a BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion) which blew out rhe walls of the building, killing some of the firemen instantly and burying others. It took a week to finally extinquish the blaze.

As well as this community mosaic, there is an official memorial plaque on the banks of the Clyde near the Kingston Bridge and a tomb where those who were killed are laid to rest in the city's Necropolis.

#glasgow #firefighters #memorial #glasgowfireservice #cheapsidestreetfire #clydewalkway #kingstonbridge #anderstonprimary #stpatrickaprimary

@thisismyglasgow The testimony from survivors of the #cheapsidestreetfire was horribly evocative, the outbreak "like a tracery of ivy on the walls illuminated by blue flame", then "blazing whisky ... coming down like rain", images that stay in the mind. (Quoted in Kenneth Roy's fine postwar #ScottishHistory , "The Invisible Spirit" p250-5)