Bristol is the most important city in the South West of England. It overlooks the mouth of the River Avon, at a point where river and sea become one. Its port has been over the centuries the focal point of the city’s history and culture.
Bristol: places of interest in the English city
The Port of Bristol
From the Port of Bristol in 1497, Giovanni Caboto set off for the New World and, although he thought he had reached the northeastern tip of Asia, he was the first to discover Canada, effectively marking the start of English colonial activity in North America. Henry VII, promoter of Caboto’s expeditions, laid the foundations to transform Bristol into a monopolistic port, concentrating all the wealth deriving from trade relations, unfortunately also from morally unacceptable ones, between England and the New World on the city.
Initially, trade mainly took place with Spain and its colonies. With the development of English colonies in North America, from the 17th century onwards, Bristol played a crucial role in the slave trade. The trade took place through triangulation: goods produced in England were sent to West Africa and exchanged for slaves. The slaves were transported and sold in North America; here the ships loaded plantation products (tobacco, sugar, and cotton) to bring them back to Bristol and start the cycle over.
Through the port, from the early 20th century onwards, migrants also arrived who now form an integral part of the population. According to the latest demographic data, 16% of the population belongs to black or minority ethnic groups. Among these, those of African and Jamaican origin are the most represented. The union of migrant musical culture with that of England created original “made in Bristol” genres that have spread worldwide.
Therefore, whether you want to visit Bristol in a traditional way or discover it through its underground culture, the port is always the main point of reference, real or symbolic.
Brunel’s Works
In Bristol, any place of tourist significance displays photographs or illustrations of the two symbols of the city: the ship Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Both are works of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the brilliant civil engineer best known for the first tunnel under the Thames.
The Great Britain, launched in 1845 and currently transformed into a museum ship, dominates the port of Bristol. At 98 meters, it was the longest passenger ship in the world for nine years. It was intended for the transatlantic route Liverpool-New York, which it typically completed in fourteen days. Brunel, who had already successfully worked in Bristol on the Great Western, decided to apply two technological innovations to this ship: the iron hull instead of the traditional wooden hull, and propeller propulsion instead of the paddle wheel.
The study and application of these two solutions on such a large ship caused a delay of about 5 years compared to the scheduled launch date, compromising the financial sustainability of the enterprise. To this were added some costly repairs due to navigation accidents. Therefore, the ship was sold the year after its launch and changed function, becoming an emigrant transport ship to Australia, coinciding with the gold discovery in the State of Victoria. After being completely converted into a sailing ship, it was used to transport coal and later as a storage and quarantine ship, until it was deliberately sunk in 1937 near the Falkland Islands. In 1970, a gigantic recovery and restoration operation began that today allows us to visit and discover it in all its parts in the same dry dock where it was built.
The suspension bridge connects Clifton, a suburb just outside Bristol, with Leigh Woods in North Somerset. If you follow the pedestrian and cycle path that, following the river, leads out of Bristol from the port, when the landscape changes from urban to hilly, at some point the bridge will appear before you, pleasantly surprising you with its 75 meters of height and 412 meters of length. The original design, as mentioned, is by Brunel but it was reworked and completed in 1864, five years after his death, by William Henry Barlow and John Hawkshaw. If Brunel‘s design had been followed to the letter, atop one of the towers we would now see ten sphinxes, a very popular decoration at that time.
The warehouse
Of the flourishing commercial activity of Bristol remain the warehouses, the storage warehouses for goods. Some of them have undergone transformations and, thanks to their new function, have helped preserve the port area from decay. The Bush House, from the mid-19th century, originally a tea warehouse, currently houses the Arnolfini, an international art center with a rich program of exhibitions, performances, cinema, and conferences. The Watershed Media Centre, with its three cinemas and multimedia production center, occupies the E and the W Shed of Canon’s Road. Architecturally, the Arnolfini was the first example of the Bristol Byzantine style, a peculiar style of this city developed between 1850 and 1880 and mainly used for warehouses and industrial buildings. It is characterized by Byzantine and Moorish influences, the use of arches and stones of different colors, mainly red, yellow, white, and black. Although many of the buildings in this style no longer exist, some remarkable examples remain, both in the port area and other parts of the city, such as the Granary, the Robinson’s Warehouse, the building at 35 King Street, and the Clarks Wood Company Warehouse.
The Bristol Music Scene
Bristol is a city with a very lively music scene where it is easy to find a choice of live concerts and club nights of good quality every evening. Some venues are almost legendary, such as the Thekla, a party boat moored in the harbor, or the Motion, the largest club in Bristol located in a former skatepark near the Temple Meads station. But there are also many pubs and bars, like the Canteen, which offer great live music.
All this does not come out of nowhere, but is the result of a cultural ferment that began about half a century ago. The underground Bristol scene was largely influenced by the Caribbean ethnic component of the city’s population, which introduced the sound system culture to England in the Seventies: these are impromptu musical performances led by DJs and MCs held on the street, in disused warehouses, or in clubs. The police used to break up the events and seize the equipment. This led to growing social tensions, also fueled by the massive use by the police of arbitrary searches, especially against people of color. All this erupted in 1980 in the St Pauls riot, which ended with 130 arrests and 25 hospitalizations. Since then there has been greater tolerance and the equipment was no longer confiscated.
The meaning of sound systems is not to be reduced to mere unauthorized parties: for Jamaicans, it was a way to maintain a connection to their roots in the land where they emigrated. Music was also a vehicle to raise their voices on issues of social hardship as well as to spread pacifist messages.
Originality decided the success of individual sound systems. Over time, therefore, people no longer limited themselves to playing reggae, hip hop, and funk, but sampled and remixed these genres creating something new. When the new tracks had very fast breakbeats and a strong bass presence, this was drum’n’bass. When instead the rhythm was slow and the sound enriched with suspended and dreamy electronic tones, it was trip hop. Both these genres were born in Bristol and some of their representatives (Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky, and Roni Size), starting from the city clubs, later became international stars.
Banksy and street art
Music has always had a close relationship with art, particularly with street art, which often conveys political and social messages. Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack was also very active as a graffiti artist. But the most well-known name is Banksy, the famous artist whose identity is unknown, although one hypothesis is that it is the same Del Naja.
Unfortunately, many works by Banksy are no longer visible, and some are no longer in their original locations (such as “The Grim reaper”, which was moved from the hull of the Thekla to the M-Shed museum). However, there are still some very significant ones, like “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in the port area, where the earring is the external unit of an alarm system; “The Well Hung Lover” on Frogmore Street, on the wall of a clinic for sexual disorders; “Mild, mild West”, near The Canteen, featuring a teddy bear throwing a molotov at policemen; or finally, the graffiti of St. Valentine, in Barton Hill, where the artist spent much of his youth.
Many works by Banksy are site-specific, that is, designed specifically for a certain place that strengthens their meaning. In some cases, it is as if the graffiti in Bristol wanted to add a layer to walls built with money made from the slave trade and wanted to pose questions to us who walk the street. The recent episode of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston thrown into the harbor is a result of this continuous questioning. And, once again, finding the origin and the answer in the port.
