Bristol Docks
- pengodber
- Dec 11, 2024
- 23 min read
Updated: Dec 12, 2024
Bristol Docks encompass five islands. In order of appearance: Swivel Island, the little one with Brunel's first swivel bridge on; Avon Quay Island, opposite the Nova Scotia pub; Spike Island, all the way up to Merchants Quay; Redcliffe Island past The Ostrich, round Temple Meads Station to the Totterdown Canal (now filled in); St Phillips Marsh Island which finishes where the Feeder Canal goes back into The Cut above Netham Weir.
Brunel's C19 Suspension Bridge floating in the air above a nice bit of well grounded C20 Bristol Brutalist our "brand new bridge". Photo by Jack Goolden
Hast seen our brand new bridge, up there in Cumberland Basin?
The cars go by like thunder, and up and round and under,
Where they goes, nobody knows, tain't no bleedin' wonder!
Adge Cutler, The Wurzels. Virtute et Industrial
This lovely city. Did Brunel look up from the river and catch his breath at the elegance of his design for the Suspension Bridge, the longest ever attempted in 1831? Such bravado. Look up at the jeopardy of that single span above the chasm of the Gorge.
It takes your breath away.
Today Cumberland Basin is spanned by a swirl of concrete flyovers, immortalized by Adge Cutler and the Wurzels. Because it’s Bristol they are all sprayed up with graffiti. What would Brunel have made of the fluid potential of reinforced concrete? He would have made the absolute most of it.
Brunel’s genius was to grasp the potential of materials and places and take them to audacious limits. The Suspension Bridge was the widest that had ever been conceived at the time. At her launch in 1843 the SS Great Britain was the largest boat of her time and the first of her kind to have an iron hull. The Great Western was the fastest. Brunel, as ever took giant strides. He was a consumate innovator.
Brunel built 25 railways including the wonderful Great Western Railway, London to Bristol and onwards. His ambition was that at London Paddington Station you could buy a ticket for New York: from London to Bristol on the GWR, at the docks you’d board ship and dine and dance your way to New York. The Great Western was built in and for Bristol. The problem was her great size displayed the shortcomings of the Avon: too narrow and too curvy for this new breed of vessels. When The Great Western arrived below the Statue of Liberty, the fastest boat in the world, she was met with astonishment and admiration. The New York Morning Herald described her as “rakish, cool, reckless and fierce.”
Brunel described the Suspension Bridge as “my darling, my first child.” Designed when he was 23, completed as a tribute to him only after his death, Bristol still basks in the beauty and glory of Brunel’s first child.
Bristol had long been Britain’s second city for trade because of the docks. The Romans had probably been the first to develop the Frome as a harbour. They had certainly re-engineered the line of the Frome. The Saxons built a settlement there named Brycgstow, meaning the “meeting place by the river”. The name later modified to Bristol thanks to the vagaries of the local accent, just as Adge Cutler modified Bristol’s moto from Virtute at Industria to Industrial.
Boats had been coming up the Avon on the flood tide to offload their cargoes since Roman times. It was described in 12th century Gesta Stephana as 'almost the richest of all the towns in the kingdom' with a harbour for a thousand ships. Over time trade expanded from Wales to Ireland to Western Europe and the Baltics, to Africa and the Americas.
Swivel Bridge in 1864. Bristol Museum
In the late 18th century Liverpool was just a pretty Lancashire village with a sandy beach and a good view of Yr Wydffa. But as the limitations of Bristol’s docks became apparent Liverpool snuck ahead with two major innovations: a “wet dock” and a canal: the Trent and Mersey Canal connecting her to the manufacturers of Birmingham and Lancashire.
Bristol’s docks were lame by comparison. The Avon was a challenge to navigation and the bends were infamous, claiming many a wreck. The Avon brought boats up river on the flood but, by the wharves of Bristol Docks, boats were dumped in the mud on the ebb. The saying “Ship Shape and Bristol Fashion” meant carefully stowed - or chaotic abandon. Cargoes risked being ruined by mud.
Bristol’s powerful Merchant Venturers finally agreed to a plan for their own floating harbour and appointed a chief engineer, William Jessop. Jessop’s great innovation was to create lock gates with a new basin, Cumberland Basin, at Hotwells, effectively damming the River Avon. Jessop created a magnificent dock, 8 miles long following the river’s natural course. To allow the Avon’s natural flow to continue a New Cut was dug, three miles through Bedminster’s meadows from Hotwells up beyond Netham Weir.
"1000 years of Bristol Docks" An excellent history site from BristolCityDocks.co.uk
The Navvies started digging in 1805 and finished in 1809. Such progress is hard to imagine today. In one year they had dug out nearly 600,000 cubic metres of clay, earth and rock. The work involved was stupenduous, achieved by pure strength with mainly hand tools and wooden barrows. There was a great celebration on Spike Island for a thousand of the navvies with, Latimer reported: "two oxen, roasted whole, a proportionate weight of potatoes, and six hundredweight of plum pudding" along with a gallon of strong beer for each man. This turned into a mass riot which had to be suppressed by the press gang. Bristol did have a certain reputation for riots which it continued to live up to in the 19th century.
Amy, Margarita and I had launched onto the Avon above The Cut and had ridden the ebb tide down The Cut and into the Avon. We can’t hang about for long or we will be carried down the Gorge and won’t be able to get out till we get to Sea Mills. We have to ferry glide across the flow to the slip for the old Rownham ferry at Hotwells. But we take a moment to enjoy this beautiful iconic view. Clifton’s sugar cube crescents rising up the limestone escarpment speak of builders speculating on Regency pleasure and prosperity: Royal York Crescent, Sion Hill, Caledonia Place built so that Georgian wealth could escape the stink of the docks. Away from the rabble to enjoy their wealth in safety. It was ever thus. But the Suspension Bridge. It takes your breath away. It always does.
The sooner we make the ferry slip the less mud we will have to wade through. So we cross to the slip. Because we’re collecting for a charity they would have opened the gates if we’d got there at high water. It would have been fun just the three of us going through, but of course we hadn’t made it. We had launched onto the Avon at high water from Pump House Lane, some miles upstream on The Cut. We had ridden the ebb flow without much effort past fishermen, past tidy red brick closes of new housing, past aggressively grey industrial warehouses and then, without so much as a coffee coloured ripple over the submerged Netham Weir and into The Cut.
We go under a gormenghast of an iron bridge supporting Brunel’s Great Western Railway as it passes into Temple Meads Station, dripping with rust and slime, the rumble of trains above. How many journeys have we taken from there? From the end of the platforms you could look up to our old home in Richmond Street, Totterdown.
The curving escarpment that Richmond Street gardens back onto were the only major excavation Brunel had to do west of Bristol. You notice it from all over Bristol. That's where we lived as a "single parent family." I got Ossie, a boat builder from 3 doors up, to build a verandah on the first floor at the back of the house. It was wide enough that we could pull all our mattresses out onto it and sleep under the stars. At night the sound of the trains shunting in the goods yards was comforting once you got used to it. We had a fantastic view. Best in Bristol I thought.
People say Totterdown, as a community, was destroyed. Half of it was: 550 houses were bulldozered for "that" road plan. But what was left was warm and strong: so very tolerant, so sociable. It meant so much to me asa novice.
I remember hot summer evenings when we all brought chairs and sofas out onto the street, when we went out to country pubs en masse. I remember all the older, more experienced women cleaning their whole houses first thing, finishing with the doorstep then meeting up in each others houses to share a cup ot tea, wisdom and laughter. Sheelagh's table was lined with the previous evenings Bristol Evening Post. I don't remember any gossip or meaness at those tea sessions. People were accepting of each other. Friends like Alyson and Sheelagh were just wonderful.
As we float down the mud flats get fatter, a lurid mauve. Why is there so much mud in these tidal estuaries? I have paddled down the Severn, of which the Avon is a stub, and the Dee. The Severn is the biggest flow and it has the most mud. Some of the mud flats are six miles across at low water and are a paradise for birds. Where streams flow out through the mud they make their own waterfalls. Where the stream cuts through the mud you can see layer upon layer of crustaceans. It may look awful to us, but for birds it’s a cornucopia, a smorgasbord and no less a paradise that we humans can’t get to them.
Looking up at Totterdown as we zip down The Cut is thrilling. My nostalgia catches me by surprise. From the age of 23 to 39 Bristol was my home. Once we’d moved to Totterdown crossing The Cut was a given most days. Jack was born on Spike Island but Amy, Wilfrid and Rosie were born from Totterdown. I criss-crossed The Cut, on foot, pushing a pushchair, pushing a pushchair with child at heel, with two children, with three.
Later, the children in school and me on my way I'd bump my bike up the steps to the bridge on my way to University, books and A4 jotters in the back panniers. I’d left school, expelled no less, before my 16th birthday. Having the chance to pick up my education, do my A levels at night school with no money for books, to apply to 3 different universities and get accepted to them was just wonderful. Being a student at Bristol was awesome. You don’t take it for granted if you get there the hard way. I loved it.
I yell to Margarita and Amy to stop paddling as we pass under the Banana Bridge. This is the footbridge from Totterdown to Bristol. Me and my friend Alyson used it every day to get the children to the nursery school. My Jack and her Marten were best mates. Alyson and I had to go backwards to bump Amy and Karens’ pushchairs up the steps which gave the boys the chance to gallop ahead and pee joyfully through the diamond grid rails into The Cut. A rite of passage no less, a new skill which their little sisters couldn’t emulate. I never once saw a kayak as we crossed over. But we did often see other stuff: bikes, loads of them, prams, builder’s rubble sinking into the mud. Once a box of puppies which, of course, a team of lads from York Road managed to rescue.
Marten and Jack outside St Mary Redcliffe Kindergarten. Photo by Pen
Bedminster Bridge is, as usual, heavy with traffic. I feel childishly proud to slip silently beneath the arches, unnoticed. The tidal flow up the Avon, all 49 feet of it, rises and falls. It’s one of the greatest tides on the planet. But most Bristolians know little of that. They have lives to live. Bristol is a vibrant, creative fun place to live. If anyone does look down the slathering ebbtide mud spangled with plastic flotsam it is inconsistent with Bristolians' image of themselves, but, fortunately it is remote. The mud sucks and glistens and wobbles like mauvey toxic blancmange but then the water comes back in to cover it and that’s great because the look of it and the smell of the mud is objectionable, disgusting. Jack, a proper adult Bristolian now, says The Cut is not tidal, “it’s just muddy.”
I took this photo the day I got my acceptance from Bristol University. Annie and I took all the children out in the snow. I was so happy I just lay down in the snow.
Kayle Brandon, in the anarchic and delightful “Avon Canoe Pilot” writes of his own introduction to the flow “back then the closest I got to the New Cut was a night when we hung off Bedminster Bridge. High on mushrooms, I think... we hung by our feet with our bodies and hands dangling free. As Rachel hung we watched as her keys, money and fags fell into the dark waters below. I remember the interesting upside down view and a sense of total outrage towards the usual physical rules.” I'd love to meet any of the Avon Canoe Pilots.
Gaol Ferry Bridge, a footbridge carries a little jogging tribe of runners in trendy leggings and crop tops. Look down beautiful people: beneath your Nike Vaporflies the river has almost given way to an uneasy mudscape. For those who look, something shifts, but only for a moment. For that brief moment the diurnal uncovering of primeval mud undermines your sense of yourself and your fine, progressive city.
We’ve come to the Chocolate Path. I wish we could tarry but the flow is pushing us along. Our first Bristol home was a flat at the top of a house on Spike Island’s Cumberland Road. See that one? It’s the biggest one in the middle of a row of Georgian houses. Jack was born from there. I’d like to stop time and give my young self a bit of advice, but I’m not sure what I’d say. Maybe "It's going to turn out ok". I didn’t have a clue, sleep walking into the biggest responsibility anyone can take on.
The river pulls us on. See that parapet? I used to climb out of a dormer window up there and up onto a small flat area of the roof where I hung out the washing on a white wire drying rack from Mothercare. I sometimes fed Jack up there, looking down at the sand barges and timber boats from Russia. The docks were, at that time, still working.
I was a housewife for the first time. I wasn’t really sure how to do it or that I wanted to. I’d worked as a designer for a whole age. I knew how to do that. I missed being at work and being part of a team. I missed being paid. I was too embarrassed to push the pram. I got my Mum to do it and I walked twenty feet behind trying to get used to the idea. But then I got an allotment the other side of the river and that was my life. I wheeled Jack in his pram down the Chocolate Path, a mile or so of blue industrial brick and over the rail bridge to grow our first crop of vegetables. 50 years later I’m still growing them and it still matters that we’ll have enough to eat, from the allotment, should the money run out.
When Jack and I used to cross over the Ashton Avenue Bridge it was in an incredibly dilapidated and dangerous state. It was probably meant to be closed to the public but the fences were pushed down at convenient intervals by various miscreants. I used it. How else would I get to my allotment? The iron plates that made the floor of the bridge were rusted through in many places. One evening as we came back it was dusk and I saw, only just in time, that some joker had removed one of the plates and another step forward would have seen us fall sheer down to the muddy river. It’s been done up now and is yet another way for Bristolians to go safely to play in the dockside area.
As we turn towards Rownham Ferry slip and the dock gates we finish the first half of the journey. Brunel was appointed chief engineer for the docks in 1832. Hs mark is everywhere. We portage our boats across a footbridge onto a narrow man-made slither which houses Brunel’s swing bridge, Island no 1, Swing Bridge Island. This was Brunel's first large wrought iron opening bridge, it is far older than the Suspension Bridge, and is Bristol's only abandoned Brunel structure. It is is listed Grade 2 but is on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk Register slightly diminished by information boards and a plaintive appeal for funds lest rust should take it away. It was turned by a hydraulic mechanism which ran on fresh water supplied from a pressurised water system sited in Underfall Yard.
We launch again in Cumberland Basin and from there past Avon Quay island where Amy and I slept last night. We circumnavigate the islands by paddling right back to the lock gates.
Turn and we’re facing down Jessop’s Floating Harbour and it's not a sunny day. It's grey and the water fits like khaki clingfilm across the docks, stretched out from one great granite wall to the other. Such a tonnage of majestic granite blocks they built here. These walls and their bollards and capstans are so fine as to be Grade 2 listed.
The water, however, is gloopy, suffused with mud particles sifting down to great pillows of mud below embedded with everything the city has ever had to give: the skeletons of shallow river boats, iron chains encrusted with trailing plastic, supermarket trolleys, shoes, twisted bike frames, beer bottles, the bones of the murdered and the drowned. Twenty metres deep in places, seething with eels. But that doesn’t for one moment perturb the multicoloured fleet of canoes, motor boats, sail boats, water taxis and pleasure boats out on the water today.
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The harbour was built to save Bristol from the upstart claims of Liverpool. It didn’t succeed and, ironically, that was partly down to Brunel. With the Great Western, completed in 1838, Brunel proved that bigger, longer boats were faster and more fuel efficient. But these long hulls were the end of Bristol’s Docks and trading eminence. The Avon was too narrow and too bendy for them. The SS Great Britain was built by renowned Bristol boat builder Patterson at the Great Western Yard. She was completed in 1845 but proved too big to get out of Jessop’s original lock. Brunel had to persuade the Merchant Venturers to let him widen it. Perhaps that was an omen. The biggest of all Patterson’s boats, the Demerara, proved to be the death knoll of his shipyard, Bristol’s finest. She launched in 1851 and, because she had launched late on the tide the tug boat took her too fast. She struck the rocks on the Gloucester side of the Avon, the ebbing tide swung her across blocking the river and there she was stranded, blocking the river through three tides as she twisted apart.
Liverpool won the day. But Jessop and Brunel are still Bristol’s heroes. They laid down the foundations for modern Bristol’s claim to glory: the Docks.
In the 70s Jessop and Brunel were joined by another champion, an architect called Casson. It’s hard to believe it now but Bristol was on the brink of destroying its dockland heritage, concreting it over with flyovers and roads. The model that they emulated was the Bullring road system in Birmingham. Like kids with a new Scalextric set they were carving up and remodeling Bristol. They were getting on well, demolishing swathes of houses in poorer areas like Totterdown in preparation when the middle classes of Clifton started to protest. The Council called in an architect called Casson to assess their plan.
Casson’s report astounded them. Casson saved the docks from being concreted over. He explored the city on foot and on bike and pronounced that the docks were the jewel in the city’s crown, that the city’s story was told by the docks. He described the harbour as a "shining wedge of water" which should be used to enrich the lives people of Bristol.
The docks were re-imagined. They became the playground Amy, Margarita and I are now exploring. The austere, beautiful view I had looked down on when I was feeding Jack has become part of history. The commercial docks were closed. Merchant Dock was filled in for new housing: “Rownham Mead”. And very nice it is if you can afford it. The steam crane was preserved as a novelty. The dredger buckets which we wrongly believed dated back to Brunel were carted off. What would become of the tramp who had slept in one of the buckets and left his blankets as a mark that this was his home?
We had had the Docks as our private playground. We had explored and loved every granite blocked railway lined inch of it. The last boats I remember were the sand boats and the Russian timber boats with their mournful crews, a couple of old fellas, a woman with a pram went elsewhere. They lived their own very private lives on board. They were never up for a chat. The Harry Brown sand boat was the last commercial working boat in the dock.
Our Cumberland Road neighbour, also Jack, had been born on Spike Island. He remembered when boats were three deep on the wharves. The Cumberland Road children would rush the boats, jumping from boat to boat and leap into the water from the outermost boat for a swim. At night when the coal trucks rumbled in everyone would rush out and pull open the hatch on one of the coal trucks and shovel the falling coal into prams and buckets escaping before the police arrived. The coal yard was banished in the early 80s.
The docks we are paddling up, snaking up into the heart of Bristol have been “re-purposed for recreation and housing”. Millions have been invested. There are people everywhere just having a good time. I have a sudden memory, from 1975, of a disconsolate Father Christmas, in an inflatable, in his red robes and cotton wool beard floating all alone in the drizzle, taking a break, getting some solitude, having a fag. No chance now. There are cafes! Some of them have smashed avocado. Some are called “eateries”. M shed warehouse is a museum and absolutely packed with children and their parents. The Harbour House, designed by our Isambard is now a pub. The sand boats and the doleful Russians were replaced with the first Bristol Regatta. Flocks of runners trot by, so healthy, so gorgeous!
Still room for a Banksy, near Aardman's studios on the docks. Photo by Pen
Still room for people to fix up boats and make little gardens. It ain't all too expensive for the young and the brave. Photo by Pen.
A Marina was dug out from Albion Yard and Baltic Wharf. Another marina was dug out from the old gas works site. And, another sad blow, the original Jessop/Brunel lock on the South side of Cumberland Basin was decommissioned.
Underfall Yard, built on one of several Jessop dams, is still there and still operating. Amy’s brother Leo started his boat building life there, walking in one day and asking if he could have an apprenticeship, if he could work there for nothing. They said yes, and Leo must have learnt a lot because look at him now. We shamelessly name dropped when we asked if we could sleep in Underfall Yard for our Spike Island sleep.
As Casson suggested, the SS Great Britain has become a major attraction bringing tourists to admire her in her dry dock. Margarita shepherds us along to have our picture taken. Now rescuing this boat was an amazing audacious project. 200,000 people turned up to watch her being towed by tugs back up the Avon all bruised and bedraggled from an ignominious resting place in the Falkland islands. My partner Colin remembers visiting the boat and finding just one man working on her with a big tub of filler. Look at her now: 72 percent of Bristol’s tourists do.
The Frome is the oldest part of the docks, first remodelled in the 13th Century
We turn left up the Frome, up to the Centre. Bristol built its wealth and eminence on trade. Ther was wool, timber and sugar, There was tobacco. There was the slave trade. By the late 1730s Bristol was Britain’s premier slaving port. This is a disgrace that we are still only beginning to acknowledge. Bristol thrived on slavery.
Edward Colston, a powerful Bristol trader, was part of the Royal African Company with a monopoly on the English slave trade along the West Coast of Africa. They kidnapped 84 thousand men women and children from Africa. They shipped them to the Caribbean to work in the tobacco and sugar plantations. In conditions such that around 19 thousand people died en route.
Colston endowed the city magnificently, allowing him to be described until quite recently as a philanthropist and a general good guy despite a slightly shady background. It was only in 2020 that his statue was toppled into the docks. That would have been a good place for it to stay perhaps, with a viewing periscope for tourists.
The four young activists charged with criminal damage for their part in it were found not guilty in 2022, not because the facts were disputed but because the jury found themselves in agreement with the sentiment of the defendants “that a statue that celebrates a figure such as Colston was disgraceful, and offensive to the people of Bristol.” The Sun editor Kevin MacKenzie thought the jury were insane. One Conservative MP questioned “Are we now a nation which ignores violent acts of criminal damage?” The riposte, from a Labour MP was “Today’s verdict makes a compelling case that a majority of the British public want to deal with our colonial and slave trading past, not run away from it.”
This stretch of the docks, once Jack was old enough for school, was our walk - or run - to school. Jack trotting to keep up, Amy in her pushchair. We went over the Banana Bridge, over the swing bridge, up the docks, past the great Co-operative WS building with its splendid bas relief of workers and peasants (they pulled that down, more fool them).
We had to cross over two big roads to get to College Green and then Park Street. This was the dodgiest part of the journey: so long as the pushchair was going at almost running speed Amy would stay put. But slowing down to negotiate two big roads and a great squirming and wriggling would begin within her pushchair. On a good day we could get across at a trot. But often she would escape the safety harness and be out and gamboling winsomely (she thought) through the traffic with me trying to grab her, hold onto Jack’s hand and the pushchair. Hard to imagine ain’t it? Such an angelic child. By the time Rosie was born my sister Jen had told our Dad that he had to get me a second-hand car or we’d all be done for.
Amy escape artist and Bread Monster
Arnolfini and Watershed: not much changed there but the rest of the warehouses are all full now. The new, shiny Peros Bridge. Canon’s Marsh, that’s too much of a transformation for me to absorb. The end is a water feature now, splashy fun for the children in the centre of the city. The Frome is a marina now so we get yelled at by a bloke in a boat for not obeying the rights of passage. I’m enough of an old timer to ignore such frivolities. Last time I was here the only other traffic was Father Christmas in an inflatable.
Under the swing bridge and down into Bathhurst Basin. Memories of meeting my friends, often Annie at the Ostrich, below the old Bristol General Hospital, sharing a single half and a slice of their legendary cheese and onion pie when we could afford it. Sharing the cost of the baby sitter too. Smoking roll-ups. Fifty metres away there’s a pub called the Louisiana facing onto The Cut. One day I was driving back (school run with car, thank you Dad) and they’d thrown out a big old pine table. Our table at that time was a board on some boxes so I asked them if I could take the table and they gave me a bin full of china too. Lovely stuff. A big meat dish had St Mary Redcliffe Church on at a time when the steeple had blown off and not been renewed and, of course, the harbour was full of boats. The children loved the new, non-wobbly table. They drew villages on it with blackboard chalk and we had to somehow fit ourselves round these important layouts at meal times. That kitchen table is still doing time with us. It has supported 50 years of our family life.
We touch the Bathhurst lockgate that connects back to The Cut, completing our circumnavigation of Spike Island, back under Redcliffe Bridge and along Redcliffe Reach. There are two major features on Redcliffe Island, St Mary Redcliffe Church and Temple Meads Station. The church is beautiful as anyone can see. Queen Elizabeth 1st, in 1574 described it as "the fairest, goodliest and most famous parish church in England". Pevsner, John Leland and Charles 1 said much the same. Maybe that’s why Bristol Council, during their Scalextric prime, diverted a major traffic route to go beside it before putting a major road diagonally across the grandeur of Queen’s Square.
Welsh Back was so called because of the number of Welsh boats that used that area of the docks in the 15th Century. Recreational boats thin out after the swing bridge. We’re under Bristol Bridge where the original Saxon settlement was and then there’s a little bit of green stuff on the outside of a big bend: Castle Park. The castle was built in the 12th century on the eastern side of the walled town, with the Avon to the south and the Frome to the north. The two rivers were joined by a canal to make a moat that surrounded and protected the town as well as the castle. It was almost impregnable until Cromwell ordered its demolition in 1645, thus saving the 1960’s City Fathers the trouble. Millerds map of 1656 shows that the demolition had taken place. Apparently the moat, though covered over, is still navigable. If we’d’ve known that we could have added another island!
Another bend and we’re behind Temple Meads Station. You can pick up a water taxi for the centre here, a nice way to travel. In the other direction the Totterdown canal once joined the harbour to The Cut. We’re just a stone’s throw from The Cut. Totterdown Canal was filled in during WW2 to reduce the potential for damage to the docks from bombing. But, in honour of Totterdown, I hereby pronounce the end of Redcliffe Island, island no 4, and the beginning of St Philips Marsh Island, island number 5.
Now we’re paddling down Feeder Canal through the backs of a more decidedly industrial area, past what was once Silverthorne Marsh Wharfs. It’s tighter, narrower. We pass through trading estates and garages and walls made of rusty corrugated iron. But there are signs of rebirth: great cranes hauling stuff around behind high billboards. Where there’s a dock there’s scope for some fancy new apartments. Bristol, so one housing developer says, has become a “stellar example of regeneration, balancing modern living and historic preservation…in Bristol’s vibrant heart.” Well I suppose it has. Casson’s Report changed the future for Bristol in 1972. London’s Docklands Strategic Plan was not till 1976. Not such a sleepy little town.
One more old-style non-vibrant retail centre and then we emerge where the Avon flows into The Cut. We back track a little way to admire Netham Weir and then back to where began.
It’s been an emotional day, one of the most exciting kayak days ever. Its been a unique experience. I’ve travelled “my” city in a completely new way, fitting the pieces together. I am going to say it again: Thank you! Thank you to Margarita, who just said yes! And showed us how. We toddled off to sleep on Spike Island. Margarita drove home so she could cycle back so she could do an evening session guiding youngsters on the river. Energy, generosity and kindness all tied up with an infectious smile. Thank you Margarita.
That's 5 more islands circumnavigated and 4 islands slept on, £45 for Aban
This is an excellent site for tracking the history of the docks.
For the Adge Cutler and the Wurzels, Virtue et Industrial, live at The Royal Oak, Nailsea
I was determined to get my head round how the docks were made. It seems to me that it's cruial to the city's history. This film was really useful.
Avon Canoe Pilot is ...awesome. I would love to paddle with any of these people. If anyone knows how I could contact any of them please drop me a line!
So nice to hear from you and I'm glad you enjoyed dear old Brisstle. I hope we'll all get to meet up this year too...maybe in Scotland? Love to you both xxx
This was a perfect start to my day Pen, thank you! Sipping from the internet firehouse seldom tastes this good. With love from us both to you all, Spike