It had been completed in 1867 between Windmillcroft Quay and the former headquarters of the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society on Morrison Street, adjacent to where the bridge now stands.

The dock was eventually closed to navigation in 1966 when work began on the construction of the Kingston Bridge; the basin was subsequently filled in and housing built on the site.

[10] A longer-term attempt to solve the problem of chronic congestion is the M74 motorway northern extension, to act as the southern flank of the unbuilt Glasgow Inner Ring Road first planned in the 1960s.

The existing "ski jump" where the Inner Ring was intended to continue on has remained unused; the extended M74 (opened on 28 June 2011) meets the M8 secondary carriageways a few hundred metres further south at Scotland Street giving both access to the northern end of the M77 motorway, but requires M74-to-M8 traffic and vice versa to leave one motorway and navigate through a few urban blocks to access the other.

[11] Prior to the M74 completion, a solution to the congestion problems was the Clyde Arc or "Squinty Bridge", which opened in September 2006 – this route was expected to take at least some of the local short-distance traffic away from the Kingston.

[13] The bridge's 50th anniversary took place in 2020;[14] at the end of that year it was listed at Category C by Historic Environment Scotland as a "significant – albeit controversial – infrastructure project which transformed the city of Glasgow... also has special architectural interest".