Discover Bristol

A port city that built its own bridge out of decline

Bristol grew rich and infamous on the water: a medieval wool and wine port that became, in the 18th century, Britain's second slaving port after Liverpool, a history the city now confronts directly through the M Shed museum and the removal of the Edward Colston statue in 2020. The same harbour built Isambard Kingdom Brunel's career. His Clifton Suspension Bridge, commissioned in 1831 and finally completed in 1864 after his death, still carries traffic 75 metres above the Avon Gorge, and his ss Great Britain, the first ocean-going ship built of iron and driven by a screw propeller, was launched from the harbour in 1843 and now sits restored in the same dry dock, a short walk from where she was built.

The docks themselves declined through the 20th century as ships outgrew the tidal Avon, and Bristol did what a lot of British port cities did not manage: it turned the empty warehouses into something else rather than letting them rot. The Floating Harbour, kept permanently full by lock gates since 1809, is now a working leisure harbour ringed by the M Shed, the Arnolfini gallery, Wapping Wharf's converted shipping containers and the old dockside cranes kept exactly where they worked. Up the hill, Clifton's Georgian squares and Stokes Croft's street art scene, the ground where Banksy started, sit within twenty minutes of each other on foot, which tells you most of what you need to know about a city that has never quite decided whether it is genteel or countercultural, and has stopped trying to choose.