About Bristol

Bristol grew on the River Avon's tidal gorge, a port far enough inland to be defensible and close enough to the Bristol Channel to trade with Ireland, Europe and, from the 15th century, the Atlantic. It was England's second city by the Middle Ages on wool and wine, then grew rich and complicit in the 18th century on the transatlantic slave trade, a history the city confronts directly today rather than tidying away; the toppling of the Edward Colston statue into the harbour in June 2020 was a Bristol story before it was a national one. Isambard Kingdom Brunel effectively launched his career here in his twenties, building the Clifton Suspension Bridge across the Avon Gorge (designed in 1831, finished in 1864 after his death) and the ss Great Britain, the world's first great ocean-going iron ship, launched from the harbour in 1843. The docks declined through the 20th century as ships grew too large for the tidal river, and Bristol did something a lot of English port cities failed to manage: it reused the emptied docks rather than abandoning them. The Floating Harbour, kept permanently full since 1809 by a system of locks, is now ringed by museums, bars and Wapping Wharf's shipping-container shops, with the old dockside cranes kept standing exactly where they worked. Above the water, Bristol carries two more identities at once: Clifton's Georgian squares and independent shops, and Stokes Croft's street art and countercultural scene, the streets that gave Banksy his start and that still argue, piece by piece, over what stays on a wall and what gets painted over.