Watt Cairn

Explorer Tom Greenock put a museum beside its Watt Library in 1876, then proceeded to gather plenty to make a curious person miss a bus. The McLean Museum and Art Gallery now sits within the Watt Institution on Kelly Street, where Inverclyde's local stories share space with art and objects collected from much further away. The Greenock Philosophical Society began the collections. There is archaeology, natural history, decorative art and social history, but the local material is the anchor: this is a museum about a working Clyde town and its wider world. Its art collection includes Scottish painters and the Glasgow Boys. A collection of First World War posters, assembled by museum treasurer Thomas Thomson then, reaches beyond Britain. Tom would have liked to borrow a poster, but the curators are quite right to keep their hands on it. One striking room created in 2024 was devoted to ancient Egypt, using objects from a collection of around three hundred pieces. The museum's links with Egyptian archaeology include nineteenth-century support for the Egypt Exploration Fund and an 1888 Greenock lecture by writer Amelia B. Edwards. Those details tell you how a port town's appetite for the wider world became a lasting collection, and asks how objects travelled and were acquired. Inverclyde Council says the Watt Institution is temporarily closed for building work while a lift is installed. It has not given a firm reopening date on its current visiting page, so check the council's latest notice before making the journey. The address is 15 Kelly Street, Greenock. For now, let the collections tempt you from afar; Greenock's cabinet of curiosities is having its hinges improved.