Bristol
Bristol in Spring: Clifton Downs and Harbourside Come Alive
Bristol in spring is the city at its most optimistic. Here is how to enjoy it properly.
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Bristol Stories
Independent recommendations, neighbourhood knowledge and the stories shaping the city.
Culture
Banksy: Where He Came From and What He Left Behind
Banksy's identity remains protected, but the Bristol connection is well-established. Here's what's known, what's still on the walls, and why Bristol claims…
Bristol
Easter in Bristol: Suspension Bridge Walks and Leigh Woods
Easter in Bristol makes full use of the city's extraordinary natural setting. Here is how to spend the long weekend.
Features
Clifton Suspension Bridge: Brunel’s Bristol Legacy
Brunel designed it. He died five years before it opened. The Clifton Suspension Bridge is the most visible object in Bristol's skyline…
Bristol
Hotwells: Bristol’s Georgian Spa, the Pleasure Resort and What Became of It
For about a century from the 1690s, Hotwells was one of England's most fashionable resorts. The spa water had a reputation as…
Bristol
Brunel’s Railway: Temple Meads, the Broad Gauge and the Battle That Settled It
The Great Western Railway opened from London to Bristol in 1841. Brunel had built it to a gauge of 7 feet and…
Bristol
Thomas Chatterton and St Mary Redcliffe: The Forger Poet of Bristol
Thomas Chatterton wrote fake medieval poetry using parchment from St Mary Redcliffe and convinced London it was genuine. He was dead at…
Bristol
The SS Great Britain: Brunel’s Ship, the Atlantic and the Return from the Falklands
Brunel's iron ship sat rotting in the Falkland Islands for over a century. In 1970 a salvage operation brought it back across…
Bristol
Banksy in Bristol: The Early Work Before It Was Art World
Banksy started on Bristol walls in the early 1990s. The work was in the city before it was in galleries, before the…
Bristol
Spike Island and the Bristol Art World That Made Banksy Possible
Banksy's first major show was at Severnshed on the harbourside in 2000. The Bristol art world that made it possible had been…
Bristol
The Clifton Downs: Gorge, Walkers, Suicides and the Samaritans
The Clifton Suspension Bridge is Bristol's most recognisable landmark. The gorge below it is also one of the UK's highest-volume suicide sites.…
Bristol
The Bristol Sound: From Trip Hop to Post-Punk to IDLES and What Connects Them
Bristol music has a quality that is hard to name but easy to recognise. Slow, heavy, angry, melancholic, political. IDLES sound nothing…
Bristol
Hartcliffe: The Estate the Tourist Trail Doesn’t Reach
Hartcliffe is six miles from the Arnolfini and the SS Great Britain. It might as well be a different city. The 1992…
Bristol
The Bristol Bus Boycott 1963: Paul Stephenson and the End of the Colour Bar
The Bristol Omnibus Company refused to employ Black or Asian drivers or conductors in 1963. Four months later they changed their policy.…
Bristol
Stokes Croft: Tesco Riots, PRSC and the Fight Over a Street
On the night of 21 April 2011, police raided a squat in Stokes Croft and the street became a riot for two…
Bristol
Concorde’s Bristol Story: Filton, British Aerospace and the Last Flight Home
Concorde was a French-British project and the politics always made that complicated. But the aircraft was substantially built in Bristol, at Filton,…
Bristol
Dickens and Bristol: How Nicholas Nickleby Mapped the City
Nicholas Nickleby contains a substantial Bristol episode that Dickens based on specific places he had visited. The Theatre Royal, the Clifton hotels…
Features
Harbourside: From Working Docks to Cultural Quarter
Bristol's harbour was a working industrial port until the 1970s. What it became - the SS Great Britain, the Arnolfini, the Watershed,…