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
The port of Bristol was the departure point in 1497 for Giovanni Caboto on his way to 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 beginning of English colonial activity in North America. Henry VII, promoter of Cabot’s expeditions, laid the foundations to transform Bristol into a monopolistic port, concentrating all the wealth derived from commercial relations, unfortunately also from morally unacceptable ones, between England and the New World in the city.
Initially, the trade was 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. The commerce was conducted through a 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 take them to Bristol and restart the cycle.
Through the port, from the early 20th 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 fusion of migrants’ musical culture with the English one has 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 city’s two symbols: 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 long, 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 worked successfully on the Great Western in Bristol, decided to apply two technological innovations to this ship: an iron hull instead of the traditional wooden hull, and screw propulsion instead of paddle wheels.
The study and application of these two solutions on a ship of such large size caused a delay of about 5 years compared to the planned launch date, compromising the financial sustainability of the project. Additionally, there were some costly repairs due to navigation accidents. Therefore, the ship was sold the year after its launch and changed purpose, 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 titanic recovery and restoration effort began that now 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 the port of Bristol, when the landscape changes from urban to hilly, at some point the bridge will appear before us, pleasantly surprising us with its 75 meters of height and 412 meters of length. The original design, as mentioned, is by Brunel, but it was revised 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 very popular decoration at the time.
The warehouse
From Bristol’s flourishing commercial activity remain the warehouses, the storage facilities for goods. Some of them have undergone transformations and, thanks to their new function, have helped preserve the port area from degradation. The Bush House, from the mid-19th century, originally a tea warehouse, currently hosts 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 on Canon’s Road. The Arnolfini, from an architectural point of view, was the first example of Bristol Byzantine style, a peculiar style of this city developed between 1850 and 1880, used predominantly 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 vibrant music scene where it is easy to find a selection of live concerts and club nights of good quality every evening. Some venues are almost legendary, such as the Thekla, a party boat moored at the port, 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 Canteen, that offer excellent 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. Bristol’s underground scene was largely influenced by the Caribbean ethnic component of the city’s population, which introduced sound system culture to England in the 1970s: these are impromptu musical performances conducted by DJs and MCs held 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 use by the police of arbitrary searches especially targeting people of color. All this culminated, in 1980, in the St Pauls riots, ending with 130 arrests and 25 hospitalizations. Since then there has been greater tolerance and the equipment was no longer seized.
The meaning of sound systems cannot be reduced to simple unauthorized parties: for Jamaicans it was a way to maintain a connection with their roots in the land to which they had emigrated. Music, moreover, was a vehicle to voice their concerns about social hardship, but also to spread pacifist messages.
Originality determined the success of individual sound systems. So over time they no longer limited themselves to playing reggae, hip hop, and funk, but sampled and remixed these music styles creating something new. When the new tracks had very fast breakbeats and strong bass presence, it was drum’n’bass. When instead the rhythm was slow and the sound enriched with suspended, dreamy electronic tones, it was trip hop. Both of 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 location (such as “The Grim Reaper,” which was moved from the hull of Thekla to the M-Shed museum). However, some very significant ones remain, such as “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 cocktail at police officers; and finally the graffiti of Saint Valentine, in Barton Hill, where the artist spent a good part of his youth.
Many works by Banksy are site specific, meaning they are created especially for a certain place that enhances their meaning. In some cases, it is as if the Bristol graffiti want to add a layer to walls built with money earned from the slave trade and want to pose questions to us who walk the streets. The recent episode of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston being thrown into the harbor is a result of this continual questioning. And, once again, the origin and answer are found in the harbor.
