HMS Glasgow (F88): The Newest Ship to Carry a Name With Nine Centuries of History

The First of a New Class

HMS Glasgow is the lead ship of the Royal Navy's new Type 26 City-class frigates, a multi-mission warship built around anti-submarine warfare, air defence and general-purpose operations, designed to gradually replace the venerable Type 23 frigate fleet that has served the Royal Navy since the 1990s.

At around 8,000 tonnes fully equipped, 149.9 metres long and powered by a hybrid arrangement combining a Rolls-Royce MT30 gas turbine with four diesel generators driving electric motors, she is built to run quiet, propulsion tuned specifically to keep her acoustic signature down while a Type 2087 towed array and bow sonar listen for exactly the kind of stealthy submarine a noisier warship would never hear coming. Above the waterline she carries a 5-inch Mark 45 gun, Sea Ceptor air defence missiles, a 24-cell strike-length Mk 41 vertical launch system reserved for weapons still to be fitted, and a flexible mission bay amidships that can swallow four sea boats, a stack of shipping containers or a small fleet of underwater drones depending on the job in hand.

The word quiet is doing an enormous amount of work in that paragraph, and it is worth unpacking, because it is the whole point of the ship. A submarine finds a frigate by listening to her, and a frigate finds a submarine by listening for it, so every decibel she makes is both a beacon and a blindfold. The answer runs through the entire design. The propulsion is CODLOG, which means the gas turbine and the electric motors are alternatives rather than partners: the MT30 is there for the sprint, and for the long slow hours of actually hunting, the diesel generators make electricity and the motors turn the shafts, with no mechanical path from a running engine to the water. The hull is shaped to reduce flow noise. Machinery that cannot be made quiet is mounted on resilient seatings so its vibration goes into rubber rather than into steel, and the principle is followed down to the level of individual pipe runs and cable trays. It is an expensive way to build a warship, and it is the reason she exists.

The other numbers tell you what she is for. A core crew of 157 in a ship of eight thousand tonnes, with berths for around fifty more; sixty days of endurance and something like seven thousand miles of range; forty-eight Sea Ceptor cells in two blocks of twenty-four, and the twenty-four strike-length Mk 41 tubes alongside them. Set that against a Type 23, which is roughly half the displacement and carries a crew of much the same size, and the shape of modern warship design becomes clear. Ships have grown, crews have not, and the space has gone into fuel, weapons, quieting and room to carry things nobody has invented yet.

Her construction formally began on 20 July 2017, when the then Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon cut the first steel at BAE Systems' Govan yard, part of a £3.7 billion order covering the first three ships of the class. Work began on her second hull section that following January 2018, her fore section was moved out of the building shed on 18 April 2021, and the two major sections were finally joined together on 1 May 2021, a particularly lengthy and methodical process reflecting just how complex a modern anti-submarine frigate has become.

The gestation behind that first cut of steel is longer than the build, and considerably stranger. The requirement began life in 1998 as the Future Surface Combatant, and the first thing the Ministry of Defence did about it was to order a trimaran. RV Triton was a 90-metre, three-hulled demonstrator built by Vosper Thornycroft, launched in May 2000 and sent to sea wired with some three hundred sensors to find out whether a warship with outriggers was a sensible proposition. She did helicopter trials, replenishment trials and boat work, and the conclusion was that a conventional monohull remained the better answer; she ended her days doing survey work off Great Yarmouth and then patrolling for the Australian Customs Service. A two-class plan followed in 2005 and was abandoned. The Type 26 assessment phase proper began in March 2010. Nineteen years passed between the requirement and the steel.

By now a 6,000-tonne hull, HMS Glasgow was rolled onto the semi-submersible barge CD01 at Govan on 25 November 2022 using a distinctive float-off method rather than a conventional slipway launch, engineers having rehearsed the entire manoeuvre in advance on a full 3D digital twin of the ship. The barge was towed down the River Clyde to the Firth of Clyde and on to Loch Long's Glen Mallan jetty, and as the sun set on 3 December 2022 it was slowly submerged until her hull lifted free and touched open water for the first time, before she was towed back up the Clyde to the BAE Scotstoun shipyard for fitting out.

The float-off deserves a moment, because something ended with it. For a century and a half a Clyde launch meant a hull going down greased ways into the river, watched by a crowd, checked by drag chains before it reached the far bank. HMS Duncan, launched at Govan in 2010 and described in the article on HMS Duncan (D37), was the last ship launched that way on the Clyde. The reasons for stopping are unromantic and completely sound. A dynamic launch loads the hull heavily for a few seconds; the river at Govan is narrow enough that the ship has to be pulled up almost as soon as she is moving; and a modern anti-submarine frigate carries a sonar array in her bow, which is not a thing to introduce to the water at speed. A barge that sinks by inches lets the ship take her own weight gradually while engineers watch the bilges and shift ballast. It is a worse spectacle and a far better piece of engineering.

A Suspected Act of Sabotage

HMS Glasgow's fitting-out was disrupted by a troubling incident on 11 May 2023, when workers discovered that over 60 of the roughly 23,000 cables due to be installed throughout the ship had been deliberately cut. BAE Systems said it had "uncovered a limited number of cables on HMS Glasgow earlier in the week, which appear to have been damaged intentionally", immediately launched an internal investigation alongside its suppliers, and temporarily paused work to inspect every area of the vessel. Police Scotland confirmed it was looking into a report of damage to the ship, and the team involved was reportedly a subcontracted group caught up in a pay dispute, though BAE never officially confirmed a motive.

It was a stark reminder that even in peacetime, industrial disputes and workplace grievances can occasionally spill over into acts that threaten the integrity of a vital piece of national defence infrastructure, though normal operations resumed within days and the build schedule was barely dented by 60 damaged cables out of 23,000.

Christened With Clydeside Whisky

HMS Glasgow was formally christened on 22 May 2025 by Catherine, Princess of Wales, who broke with tradition by pressing a button to release a bottle of single malt from the Clydeside Distillery against her hull rather than the customary champagne, a fitting nod to the ship's Glasgow origins and the river on which she had been built, declaring: "I name this ship Glasgow. May God bless her and all who serve in her." Each commemorative bottle sold to mark the occasion contributed to Place2Be, the ship's adopted charity supporting children's mental health in the city that gave her her name.

The Prince of Wales joined her for the ceremony at BAE's Clyde shipyard, while Defence Secretary John Healey called the frigate "a formidable defender of our national security and a powerful asset for NATO", and Vice Admiral Sir Martin Connell described her as representing "a step-change in anti-submarine warfare capability". Once in service, HMS Glasgow will be based at HMNB Devonport in Plymouth alongside the rest of the Royal Navy's frigate fleet.

Approaching Sea Trials

By February 2026, newly released imagery showed HMS Glasgow with her hull and superstructure largely complete as outfitting continued to advance at the Clyde shipyard, her tall integrated mast, expansive flight deck and enclosed mission bay all clearly visible for the first time.

Her diesel generators were switched on for the first time in December 2025, letting the ship generate her own power ashore and enabling the beginning of integrated systems testing, a crucial step before a vessel of this complexity can safely put to sea.

Sea trials, once expected during 2026, were by the summer of that year looking more likely for late 2026 or early 2027, with formal entry into Royal Navy service anticipated in 2027 and roughly a year of navy-led weapons trials to follow before she is fully operational around 2028. That makes HMS Glasgow the vanguard not just of the Royal Navy's own planned fleet of eight Type 26 frigates, but of a much larger international family besides. Australia and Canada are building their own variants as the Hunter class and River class respectively, and in August 2025 Norway signed a £10 billion deal for at least five Type 26s of its own, a combined fleet of thirteen near-identical frigates that four allied navies will eventually operate side by side.

Her sisters are coming up behind her, and the yard is busier than it has been in decades: five Type 26 hulls, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, Birmingham and Sheffield, were under construction on the Clyde at the same time in 2026. The second of them is covered in the article on HMS Cardiff (F89), which also sets out the mission bay concept and how a British frigate design ended up being built for four navies.

A Name Nine Centuries in the Making

HMS Glasgow carries a name with a truly long Royal Navy pedigree behind her, following in the wake of previous ships that fought at Coronel and the Falkland Islands in 1914 and survived an unexploded Argentine bomb during the Falklands War.

That pedigree is worth spelling out, because it begins in an unusually pointed way. The first HMS Glasgow was not built for the Royal Navy at all: she was the Royal Mary, a frigate of the Scots Navy, taken onto the British list at the Union in 1707 and renamed Glasgow because the English fleet already had a Royal Mary of its own. Her consort was renamed Edinburgh for the same reason. Ships of the name followed in 1745, 1757, 1814, 1861, 1909, 1937 and 1976. The 1909 Glasgow was a Town-class light cruiser and the only British ship to fight in both South Atlantic actions of 1914, escaping the disaster at Coronel on 1 November and helping to finish the Leipzig off the Falkland Islands five weeks later, before running the Dresden to ground at Juan Fernandez the following March. The 1937 ship took the King of Norway out of a burning Molde, as described in the article on HMS Glasgow (C21). The 1976 ship took an Argentine bomb clean through her engine room without it going off, which is told in the article on HMS Glasgow (D88). A name that arrived by way of a political union in 1707 has spent much of the time since being carried by ships that got themselves into trouble in the South Atlantic.

As she moves steadily towards sea trials and eventual service, this newest HMS Glasgow represents both the latest chapter in that long naval tradition and the leading edge of the Royal Navy's next generation of frigates, built to keep watch over waters that have grown no less contested in the decades since her illustrious predecessors last put to sea.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.