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 even though he thought he had reached the northeastern tip of Asia, he was the first to discover Canada, effectively marking the beginning of English colonial activity in North America. Henry VII, promoter of Cabot’s expeditions, laid the foundations to turn Bristol into a monopolistic port, concentrating on the city all the wealth derived from commercial relations, unfortunately also from morally unacceptable ones, between England and the New World.
Initially, trade took place mainly with Spain and its colonies. With the development of the English colonies in North America, starting from the 17th century, Bristol played a crucial role in the slave trade. Commerce was carried out 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 to Bristol and restart the cycle.
Through the port, from the early twentieth century, migrants who make up an integral part of the population also arrived. According to the latest demographic data, 16% of the population belongs to black or minority ethnic groups. Among these, the most represented are those of African and Jamaican origin. The union of the migrants’ musical culture with the English one has created original genres “made in Bristol” 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 importance displays photographs or illustrations of the two symbols of the city: the ship Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Both are the work 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 converted 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 covered in fourteen days. Brunel, who had already worked successfully 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 screw propulsion instead of the paddle wheel.
The study and application of the two solutions on such a large ship caused a delay of about 5 years compared to the planned launch date, compromising the financial sustainability of the venture. Additionally, there were 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 Victoria State. After being fully 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 titanic recovery and restoration effort 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, along the river, leads out of Bristol from the harbor, when the landscape changes from urban to hilly, at some point the bridge will appear before us, pleasantly surprising us with its 75 meters height and 412 meters length. The original design, as mentioned, is by Brunel but 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, we would now see ten sphinxes at the top of one of the towers, a decoration very popular in that era.
The warehouse
From Bristol’s flourishing commercial activity remain the warehouses, the storage buildings for goods. Some of them have undergone transformations and, thanks to their new function, have helped preserve the port area from decay. Bush House, from the mid-19th century, originally a tea warehouse, currently houses the Arnolfini, an international arts center with a rich program of exhibitions, performances, cinema, and conferences. The Watershed Media Centre, with its three cinemas and its multimedia production center, occupies the E and the W Shed on Canon’s Road. Architecturally, the Arnolfini was the first example of Bristol Byzantine style, a peculiar style of this city developed between 1850 and 1880, 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 buildings in this style no longer exist, some remarkable examples remain, both in the port area and in 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 selection of live concerts and good club nights every evening. Some venues are almost legendary, such as the Thekla, a party boat anchored in the harbor, or Motion, the largest club in Bristol located in a former skatepark near Temple Meads station. But there are also many pubs and bars, like the Canteen, that offer great live music.
All this does not arise out of nowhere, but results from a cultural ferment that began about half a century ago. Bristol’s underground scene was largely influenced by the Caribbean ethnic component of the city population, which introduced the sound system culture to England in the seventies: these are impromptu musical performances conducted by DJs and MCs that take place on the street, in disused warehouses, or in clubs. The police used to raid and seize the equipment. This led to growing social tensions, also fueled by widespread arbitrary police searches especially against people of color. This culminated, 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 seized.
The meaning of the sound systems should not be reduced to simple unauthorized parties: for the Jamaicans they were a way to maintain, in the land where they had emigrated, a connection to their roots. The music was also a vehicle for voicing social discomfort, but also for spreading pacifist messages.
Originality determined the success of individual sound systems. Over time, therefore, it was no longer enough to just play reggae, hip hop, and funk, but they sampled and remixed these musics creating something new. When the new tracks had very fast breakbeats and a strong bass presence, it 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 local clubs, later became international stars.
Banksy and street art
Music has always had a close relationship with art, especially street art, which is often a vehicle for political and social messages. Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack was also very active as a graffiti artist. But the most famous 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 location (such as “The Grim reaper,” which, from the hull of Thekla, was moved to the M-Shed museum). However, some very significant ones remain, such as “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in the harbor area, where the earring is the external unit of an alarm system; “The Hanging Lover” on Frogmore Street, on the wall of a clinic for sexual disorders; “Mild, mild West,” near The Canteen, with a teddy bear throwing a molotov at police officers; or, finally, the Valentine’s Day graffiti in Barton Hill, where the artist spent much of his youth.
Many works by Banksy are site-specific, i.e., designed specifically for a certain place that reinforces their meaning. In some cases, it is as if the graffiti in Bristol want to add a layer to walls built with money made from the slave trade and want to ask questions to us who walk the streets. The recent episode of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston thrown into the harbor is a result of this continual questioning. And, once again, finding the origin and the answer in the harbor.
