Bristol

We are staying in Bristol while visiting it in addition to Bath and Cardiff, Wales.  In a recent Rick Steves article about traveling to Europe in 2022, he suggested visiting Bristol rather than Bath to avoid crowds.  Well we had always planned on staying here, but I am not sure why he would not have you visit Bath since it is less than 20 miles away or in our case 1 train stop.  Bristol is a true city whereas Bath is a tourist town.  Even our guide in Bath said until recently only retirees were living there - it is now starting to pick up again as a place to live.

We are staying in a short term apartment that is a AirBnB in a part of town that like a couple of other areas  is undergoing a lot of growth (lots of high rise construction).  We are less than half a mile to the train station and to the riverfront where there is a lot of activity.

I said river above, but they call it a harbor actually they call it the floating harbor which I could not understand until the captain of our boat ride explained it all.  The harbor is a busy place these days with tourists.  Originally there was a port for cargo and had a large shipbuilding contingent too.  

They kept the old cranes for unloading cargo as part of the tourist area so you can see both a steam run crane and electric ones.  The second Sunday we were in town, they had both of them open for tourists/children to check out for small fees.  In addition to the cranes, there are old ships, canal type boats, ferries, and a museum.  When I say ships, there are a variety of old ships that had ties to Bristol - mostly having been built there.  The oldest is a  remake of a wooden sailing vessel the Mathew.  Its significance is that it was used by John Cabot on a voyage where he discovered Newfoundland Canada. 

Mathew replica of John Cabot’s 1497 ship that sailed to Newfoundland

You move up a few  hundred years or so to the SS Great Britain.  It was built and designed in Bristol.  Bristol's favorite son Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the ship.  It was the first of its kind by combining several innovations.  First, its a metal hulled steam ship.  If you notice, it does have sails on it too to take advantage of fair winds and backup.  Many people did not believe the ship would be able to float let alone make it across the ocean.  Second, it was also one of the first ships with a propeller instead of a paddle wheel which enabled great speed.  Supposedly people were shocked when it showed up in New York City in 14 days vs several weeks significantly faster than any other ship.  This speed enabled the first class to enjoy fresh food, making it the first luxury liner.   There was one problem for Bristol with the ship though - it was too big for their harbor at the time so it meant the beginning of the end of the usefulness of the floating harbor.

Great 9 min video on the first ocean liner SS Great Briton

Now what is this floating harbor you ask?  Well as you look at it from the shore it appears to be a normal harbor.  You have to go out toward the sea to discover the difference.  In Bristol as in much of England, there is a significant difference in tide levels - we are talking 17 feet or more twice a day in Bristol.  Tides that different meant that the large ships had to be unloaded and restocked quite quickly or they would end up sitting on the mud aground.  This is not a good thing for an area that is trying to become a major shipping port.  Oh I should add this waterway is the River Avon which then continues on to Bath.  So the good people of Bristol dug an alternate route for the river around the port so that it still flowed and then built a lock and dam to hold the water to a height that kept the ships floating in the harbor.  Thus the floating harbor.  Our captain said a couple of times a year the tide gets higher than the dam so they open the gates and leave them open for a few days a year.

Loch circled in blue, alternate route to right

As I mentioned we took a boat ride one day, a 4 hour tour of the Avon River Gorge on a canal boat.  On this trip, we went through the locks, past the Clifton suspension bridge, along the gorge past a couple of towns, saw the new commercial port and then stuck our ship's nose in the sea since it was a calm day.  Happily it was a sunny, pretty day for the boat ride.  

Our tour boat was the 1920s Tower Belle

Ships were required to unload their gun powder here before entering the harbor

With the Mathew in the lead, we journey through the gorge

As I mentioned above there are also canal boats and ferries at the harbor.  Many of the canal boats are residences for people.  We saw boats with flower pots and elaborate decorations set up on roofs or their little out door areas most appeared to be permanent residences, but we saw a couple that were short term rentals.  The last type of boat at the harbor were the ferry boats.  The River Avon goes through a major portion of Bristol and while there are quite a few very nice pedestrian bridges there are also a couple of long stretches where there is no easy access or if you want to go aways along the river hence the ferry boats.

View of the floating harbor

canal boat full of flower pots

Below is a collage of pictures of the various pedestrian bridges across the river in Bristol.  One of them is a drawbridge, another is a big zigzag and some are just a nice normal bridge.

Bristol is a very "green" city, it is where a national network of bicycle trails was started and while we were there, they were having a walking festival.  So on one of our first days in town, we did a self guided hike around town.  We started out towards the harbor and then crossed it where we found their main performing arts theatre and a street food site.  The street food side had a changing group of food vendors which was good because it provided lunch twice.  I had a really good grilled cheese sandwich with sausage and tomatoes in the cheese and Jeff had a Mediterranean dish one day.  After we were fueled up we started walking up the hills to more of the city.  There is some very nice street art on some of the buildings as seen below.  We walked around their city library, couple of old churches including the cathedral and the University of Bristol which has some nice, interesting old buildings.  Below Jeff put together another collage of photos this time from our walk.

       

The above building was on our walk too, but I wanted to point it out.  I don't remember who now, but a leading citizen of Bristol built this building as an alms house - a place for people who were broke to live.  Nearby there are a series of steps up the hill called the Christmas steps which is where some of those residents sold things to raise money.  To this day, the area is known for its neat independent shops.

Guess we did not get enough hill climbing after one day, so on another day we did a hike up to the Clifton Suspension Bridge.  We did cut a little off by taking a ferry though.  The Clifton Suspension Bridge is one of the well known sites of Bristol.  It is old for a suspension bridge and it crosses the Avon River Gorge.  Our plan was to hike there, eat and then hike down the opposite site which is a parkland.  We did that, but I goofed.  I knew that the lido had an excellent restaurant and that it was by the bridge did we eat there?  No I let Jeff lead the way and followed him to the observatory where we had a basic sandwich - but a nice view.  Before we actually crossed the bridge, we went down into the hillside to a cave that gives a great view of the area.  In the picture below   yellowish/orange lines are the railing for the cave and its overlook.  After we crossed the bridge we walked through a very nice neighborhood and then found a park with a path that took us down to basically river level on the opposite site and back to the floating harbor.

Clifton Suspension Bridge completed in 1864

As I mentioned above, Isambard Kingdom Brunel is a favored son of Bristol.  He lived there in the 1800s - he never saw the Clifton bridge completed but he had figured out how to build it.  He also invented several other things such as:

    Rotherhithe Tunnel under the Thames with an innovative shield design that saved construction workers lives

    Portable hospitals for the Crimea war that Florence Nightingale referred to as those “wonderful huts.”

    Giant steam ships and the SS Britton mentioned above.

    The Great Western Railway from London to Bristol including Paddington Station that we traveled through on our journey.  

    Many bridges including the Clifton Suspension bridge that we saw from all sides when we hiked up one side and down the other.  

Current day, Bristol has another famous son.  The artist Banksy.  He first did his street graffiti in Bristol before moving on to other forms of art.  For us, that meant another guided walk to find some of this artwork.  We found 3 peices that were relatively close to where we were staying.  There is also one in the Watershed museum on the harbor.

Banksy

 On anther day, we decided to go for a bike ride.  The bike store said oh it is 5 minutes from here to the trail that goes from Bristol to Bath.  Um yeah it is 5 minutes if you know where you are going - longer if you have trouble finding  the route when there is a diversion (detour to us in USA).  When we found the trail, we enjoyed ourselves.  While we both agreed it would be nice to go all the way to Bath, we knew we had not ridden bikes for a couple of months and there was this thing here called hills which we were not used to and on unfamiliar bikes.  In the end, we stopped a little over half way when we saw an interesting place to explore and to get lunch.  It was the  Britton and Avon Valley Railway.  We literally had to open a gate and walk our bikes across the train tracks to continue on the trail so of course we had to stop and check it out!

In honor of Centenary College of LA and my methodist friends, I made a point of visiting the "new Room."  I read about in a guidebook in our room.  Seems that John Wesley first started preaching in Bristol - his father had been a preacher with the Church of England.  Wesley preached more to the common, working class people of the time.  So today there is chapel in the middle of a street of an outdoor shopping mall.  The first floor is the chapel with a museum above.  While visiting the shopping mall, one day I realized there were statues in back.  I found the placards in the chapel interesting.  I learned that his brother Charles wrote over 6,000 hymns including a couple I recognized (Christ the Lord is Risen Today and the Christmas Carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing).  The other interesting fact I learned was that when he went to the USA, he went to the state of Georgia.