Bristol Robert Gore-langton
This historic city has so much to offer – with its culture, technology, food and much else, writes
Home of well-heeled students, the graffiti artist Banksy and the foodie capital of Britain, Bristol is considered one of the most youthful cities in Britain. But it is also a richly historic place with a mighty seafaring past, a formidable Georgian inheritance, and a mighty industrial legacy. The last due in large part to the genius — no other word will do — of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859).
Brunel’s Grade I-listed Temple Meads station is one of the most important railway sites in the world. In the mid-19th century one could travel on his railway from Paddington, take a carriage to the harbour at Bristol and set sail on his pioneering iron ship (SS Great Britain) arriving in New York 14 days later. Brunel’s famous Clifton Suspension Bridge, completed in 1864 after his death, spans the Avon George. The bridge — circled by peregrines — is a great place to watch the hundreds of hot air balloons at the annual International Bristol Balloon Festival (to be held this year from 9th–11th August), an event Brunel would have adored.
Bristol is as much a city of culture as of technology. The exceptionally pretty Bristol Old Vic — recently fully restored — is Britain’s oldest working theatre, built in 1766. It resides on King Street. A century earlier Pepys wandered here, finding the nearby quay ‘a most large and noble place’. It was a foodie city even back then. Pepys enjoyed a repast of venison pasties, strawberries and Bristol milk sherry — now known as Bristol cream.
Almost opposite the theatre is the ancient Llandogger Trow inn. Daniel Defoe met castaway Alexander Selkirk there, his inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. The pub was also the model for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Admiral Benbow Inn in Treasure Island.
The stinking nature of the docks and the city caused the rich folks to flee to what is now Clifton, famous for its high-altitude terraces of Regency splendour: Royal York Crescent is the longest of its type in Europe. The city is full of Georgian literary associations, though these are often overlooked, upstaged perhaps by nearby Bath’s association with Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.
It was the poet Robert Southey who introduced Coleridge to the Bristol Library, and who encouraged him to give his Bristol lectures in 1795. The two poets had a high old time. They drank together and they married the Fricker sisters in Redcliffe where the enormous spire of St Mary’s dominates the south of the city. They also joined in some hilarious experiments with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) at the premises of Humphry Davy — of miner’s lamp fame — at the Pneumatic Institute, still standing in Dowry Square.
William and Dorothy Wordsworth stayed at the house of merchant John Pinney in 1795, now the Georgian House Museum (open from 1st April), a perfect example of a top-end