Harbour Festival began as a protest aagainst council development plans

PICTURE PAST

THE decline of Bristol’s city docks as a commercial port in the 1960s left the city with a problem which would dominate local politics and debate for decades. While discussions came and went over what to do with the docks, including of course the plan to partly cover the area with roads, there was no question that it also had its uses as a leisure facility. From the early 1970s onwards the floating harbour became the setting for a number of big public events. In most years, there would be a day or weekend of family fun involving boats, ships and entertainment. The modern Harbour Festival originated as something the Council didn’t altogether approve of; in 1971 a ‘Water Festival’ was organised by the Inland Waterways Association. It was basically a protest against Council plans to fill in/ cover over the floating harbour and cover it with roads, but also a means of demonstrating the harbour’s potential as a leisure asset. This was a relatively small event, but by the following year had doubled in size and by the year after that wider economic circumstances killed off the road plans. The Water Festival became the Harbour Regatta. Some years were better than others; BT distinctly remembers one in the early 1980s which advertised a demonstration of fish-gutting as one of the major attractions. The same decade would see massive crowds gathering to watch the powerboat races, while the 1996 Festival of the Sea featured the departure of the replica of the Matthew for Atlantic waters, accompanied by an over-flight from Concorde and continuous weekend-long coverage on national TV. It was an absolute triumph. For our picture spread this week we’ve been looking through the Post’s picture archives for photos of the summer weekends of the 1970s and 80s which have matured into the big family event known as the Harbour Festival. Nowadays you get a well-organised programme of entertainment on and off the water, while the docks are thronged with small boats, and some interesting big ones, too. Not to mention the food stalls and live music and all the rest. Earlier events were similar, though the music programme in the first ones was often disappointing if you didn’t like sea shanties. They were also often a little more, well, spontaneous. Other things have changed, too. The Post archive includes a large number of photos of young women parading in swimming costumes. There’s no way modern Bristol would have a Miss Maritime Bristol beauty contest anymore. Nor do we any longer have the raft races in which teams from local companies would take to the water in home-made craft and bombard their rivals with flour and eggs and water. A handful of these vessels incorporated a high degree of marine engineering expertise. Most did not; they were knocked together in the firm’s yard after