Bristo l : a return to sanity?

Gavin Stamp

Isarnbard Kingdom Brunel was not a pristolian, but he might well have been in hew of all he did for the city. He designed ree geat steaships — w Great rr estern ,r the Greatm Britain andthe the Great eastern ___ in the attempt to sustain Bristol liala transatlantic port; his Great Western 1waY — with its seven-foot broad gauge the finest of all the railways — linked Lon- o°11 with Bristol and the West; and he tsigned the Clifton Suspension Bridge er the Avon Gorge, which was eventually c°41Pleted after his early death in 1859. Just lais ,h,e took the railway delicately through b:`" in stone-lined cuttings with lustrades, so Brunel paid tribute to the 411.dient city of Bristol by designing the ter- tin,us of the GWR at Temple Meads in the Tor style, so that those magnificently

ode and ains stood beneath a atintrnerbeam roof

co Fullers artistry and tact as an engineer thlitrast painfully with the ruthlessness of tie Ittodern road engineers wh9 have carved al Bristol with roundabouts and dual V„ ageways in recent years. And, of h,"rse, British Railways — who can only iim their high speed trains because of titr,lejnel's superb earthworks — have for tiona.des tried to demolish the original sta- ;; l'heY failed. It survives and is now safe Alst, for modern Bristol, or, rather, oristol Corporation, has not really deserved 4 respected Brunel. The proposal to build monster hotel in the Avon Gorge right : ,t to the Suspension Bridge in 1971 was 041,'Ykiust averted and when the proud hulk frot"e SS Great Britain was brought back ly hT the Falkland Islands in 1970 — entire- Al, ' voluntary effort — and towed up the bui°,11 Bris Gorge to the dock where she was Thelt, tol Corporation did not want her. thenlY had other plans for the docks: to fill 4 In and put roads across them. roa-riristol has, in fact, suffered from new as "s and ruthless redevelopment as much iitieallY, city in Britain. Much more has gone iii,i; 1945 than was destroyed in the terrible bi41:s of bombing in 1940, and the new titirullt8s which have replaced the old are of pans mediocrity — even by corn- vsgs°1-1 With, say, those in Birmingham or wouttester. In Bristol can be studied the full eti tking out of the process which has spoil- iron s° many of our cities. And here is the herY, for it was done without any outside Oft Le Corbusier and the utopian ideals chi,e Modern Movement cannot, for once, or 'Y be blamed. Bristol wrecked itself; ci: rather it was wrecked by a succession of plan Architects, City Engineers and City ksertill8 Officers. Bristol is an interesting There was certainly plenty to destroy.

Bristol was an important mediaeval port. Cabot sailed from there and its merchants grew prosperous from seaborne trade. Unlike most of the West, Bristol was for Parliament in the Civil War, and the aboli- tion of the slave trade in the early 19th cen- tury was far from popular. Until 1940 a remarkable number of ancient and pictures- que timber houses survived, such as the famous Dutch House, and there are still several mediaeval parish churches, the most celebrated of which is St Mary Redcliffe, one of the most sumptuous late Gothic buildings in the land. Bristol had a cathedral, an unusual early 14th-century building on the tall church' plan which was only completed, very sympathetically, in the mid-19th century by G.E. Street, the architect of the London Law Courts. The 18th century added to the mediaeval core of Bristol a series of fine streets and squares, such as Queen Square, and the Theatre Royal, of 1764-66, is the oldest theatre in Britain still in use. Possibly Bristol's greatest days were in the late 18th and early 19th century when, with great self- confidence, Bristol expanded up the hill, west and north, towards the Avon Gorge and Clifton was given its curves of Regency stone terraces, enhanced by raised pavements and dramatic changes in level. In the event, despite Brunel, Bristol lost out to Liverpool as a port but although its Victorian buildings are not as fine as those of its rival, there are splendid brick and stone warehouses and commercial buildings. Bristol had a last fling early this century; Charles Holden's Library next to the cathedral is as good as anything of its date in Britain, while a flowering of academic Gothic was promoted after 1909 by the local architect Sir George Oatley, who did for Bristol what James Gamble Rogers did for Newhaven, Connecticut. Oatley's neo-Perpendicular Gothic buildings, if a little pedestrian compared with Scott's Liverpool Cathedral, are very impressive and Park Street without the Wills Tower, completed in 1925 on the pro- fits of tobacco, is now unimaginable.

And then came the blitz. Worst hit was the old city centre: the narrow streets around Wine Street and Castle Street, still full of mediaeval and Georgian buildings. But what an opportunity! Bristol, like other British cities, almost looked upon the bom- bing as a boon. Planning could now make a brighter, better Bristol. Only the holes in the regular terrace fronts of Park Street were patched; there was no concerted at- tempt to restore the old city as there was in Florence, or Leningrad, or Warsaw, or Munich. Instead there was a plan for com- prehensive redevelopment, first mooted in

1943-44 and begun to be executed very soon after the war in 1946. The Wine Street area was not to be rebuilt: there would be a brand new shopping entre further east in Broadmead instead. Often the destruction of our cities is blamed on the greed of com- mercial interests. Not so in Bristol; the Chamber of Commerce wanted to rebuild the old shopping centre but shopkeepers were even prohibited from erecting tem- porary shops on the bomb sites. Broadmead had to be a success; to make it so, buildings that survived the war had to be demolished.

One of my mother's uncles had a workshop just off the old Horsefair; he was still there after the war — then he was evicted. In place of small shops, houses and arcades is one of the dreariest and most banal shopping centres anywhere, neither traditional nor modern in design; it is even worse than rebuilt Plymouth. It was all the work of the City Planning Officer, Mr H.M. Webb, and the City Architect, Mr J. Nelson Meredith. All this was going up when, as a child, 1 used to stay with my grandmother in Bristol. I remember Lewis's department store being built, a big semi; modernistic lump, little realising then that it displaced so many of the small businesses that were my family's background and the real basis of Bristol's former vitality.

As for the Wine Street area, this was reserved for a new Civic Centre, the Bristol Corporation said — until, that is, one pro- minent site was leased to the Bank of England in 1958 and another to the Nor- wich Union in 1960. So much for planning. The rest to this day remains a bomb site — sorry, public open space, sensitively land- scaped by Sir Hugh Casson.

It must be admitted that the roots of all this replanning were established long before the war, when traffic needs and the desirable necessity of modernisation dominated municipal thinking. One of the attractions of Bristol used to be the Floating Harbour, an arm of water running into a wide space west of the old city — an unplanned but integrally urban focus which my mother still calls the Tramway Centre. Here tall-masted sailing ships stood, sur- rounded by a varied mixture of houses and commercial buildings until, between the wars, the water was gradually covered over and replaced by a banal strip of municipal park. The same deadening process overtook College Green when Vincent Harris's Council House was finally completed after the war. The trees were felled and the High Cross and the statue of Queen Victoria removed, all to create a featureless expanse of lawn.

The immediate post-war planning may have been bad, but worse was to come. The planners began to work on comprehen- sive redevelopment schemes which were published in 1966 in the Development Plan Review. This envisaged new roads cutting through every part of Bristol and was much more affected by utopian planning and the imagery of tower blocks and pedestrian walkways than the immediate post-war schemes; almost all the built-up area was expected to be rebuilt within 50 years, other than scheduled historical monuments. At the same time tall buildings were allowed to wreck a skyline which, with its hills sur- rounding a flood plain, is particularly sub- tle. The first to obtrude was the Robinson Building of 1964 — 16 storeys — which was followed by the Bristol & West Building by Broad Quay in 1968. Colonel Seifert could have made a better job of both.

Perhaps the worst example of official redevelopment was the systematic destruc- tion of Kingsdown, an inner Georgian suburb which had survived the war largely intact. Today it is dominated by high-rise blocks of flats, with some low-rise develop- ment as a sop to the opposition. The few surviving old streets have now, naturally, been restored and are rather smart. In Kingsdown, the Corporation was abetted by a hospital which, with typical expansion mania, bought up whole streets, evicted the occupants, demolished the houses and left the sites empty. Another ally was, of course, the university, which has done its dirty work on the nearby heights by St Michael's Hill. Even by the notorious stan- dards of post-war award-winning British university architecture, Bristol University's buildings are conspicuously crude.

The destruction in Bristol of old buildings both ordinary and special seems all the more terrible as we know what has gone, for Bristol is photographically the best recorded city in Britain. This is due to the excellent Mr Reece Winstone, who has systematically published the old

photographs he has been collecting for decades. Among many beautiful, haunting images is one in Bristol's Earliest Photographs (1970): a photograph of St Mary Redcliffe taken as early as 1843. The stonework is decayed, the tall spire still in- complete (the top two-thirds is entirely Vic- torian), and all around are little houses, topped by brick pottery cones. Today this noble church stands as in that caricature vision of the future drawn by Osbert Lancaster in Drayneflete Revealed: it is preserved clinically as a monument in an unremittingly contemporary setting. St Mary Redcliffe now stands by a huge round- about with heavy traffic roaring past; acres of houses have been cleared so there is little else but open space and the nearest building is a vulgar, ugly modern hotel.

Why did Bristol do this to itself? As half of my family were Bristolians, I am reluc- tant to see them as peculiarly philistine and destructive, although the episode of the Bristol Riots may be instructive. In 1831, during the agitation and political crisis over the Reform Bill, Bristol suffered the worst of any urban riots in Britain in modern times. The mob attacked the New Gaol and burnt the Mansion House and Custom House as well as the Bishop's Palace and the cathedral chapter house with all its ar- chives. At least 12 died before the militia restored order; four were hanged. As in the Gordon Riots in London, many more pro- bably died in drunken revels in buildings set on fire by other rioters. The mediaeval Bishop's Palace stood as a romantic and salutary ruin — until 1963, when the work of the rioters was completed by modern ar- chitects and bureaucrats; it was removed to make way for a new hall and gymnasium for the cathedral school.

But at last, as elsewhere, true Bristolians began to fight back against the arrogant of- ficials acting on their behalf. In the 1960s local societies and conservation groups began to question the merits of the plans promoted both by Conservative and Labour councils and in 1971 they succeeded in having the project for a 100-feet-high modern hotel in the Avon Gorge called in for a public inquiry. Though backed by the City Council and approved by the Royal Fine Arts Commission, it was not built. Owing both to local opposition and shor- tage of money, the megalomaniac system of new roads envisaged in the 1966 Develop- ment Plan Review remained largely on

And what's more, I don't give a damn.'

paper, and although the notorious Outer Circuit Road destroyed several residential areas it was never completed. What prodoe' ed the greatest opposition was the proposal published in 1969 to redevelop (that is, ill in most of the docks and the Floating Balt,: bour. This seemed to deny both Bristol history as a port and its position on the Avon. Opposition was so intense that the City Council was obliged to commission consultants, Casson, Conder & Partners, te produce an alternative plan. In the event the SS Great Britain, which the planning ,, ficers feared would get in the way of 11,." Outer Circuit Road, came home to we Floating Harbour to stay.

Perhaps I am 'a little hard on Bris,t°„1' whose councillors and officials Ma 1; worse in these years than their colleagues is Birmingham or Newcastle. The trouble that I know too much about what has 01.e1 and what need not have gone, and it always distressing to see an ancient. an,/ once fiercely independent city like anywhere else. But Bristol remains very pleasant city indeed, prosperous; proud and lively. Clifton is still magniricehrie and d there is a wealth of good suburbs on t'' hills surrounding the spoilt city eent!,e; There are leafy Victorian suburbs It'

Redland, full of solid stone houses and very

good places to live. Other are 11;e Hotwells, once destined for destruction, r, now being restored and gentrified. C°115„eic vation is the order of the day. The e)",'e

make itsva

goo. d thing I have ever heard about odious Heath-Walker reorganisation of local government — which ended six ce is tunes of Bristol's civic independence -jh that the planning bureaucrats who sP°the the city have been pushed upstairs into the thing called Avon where they infuse themselves making Structure Plans, t . Bristol District younger city Plantinesnpv of mote better conservation schemes. ma'''ing the Victorian warehouses are now restored and converted, such as that '- occupied by the Arnolfini Arts Centre, 1.d, Unfortunately, much of this 03.115 winning stuff is rather too self-conscl°w and twee, while the standard of "Di buildings remains depressingly triedi°cre.cln Clifton the Roman Catholics have erec,t„ertel centrally-planned cathedral, which reP';',.1 the delightfully eccentric old Pro-Cathew1,5' and which is even worse than LiverP°°the Wigwam. However, back in the centre,i recently completed building for Brisno: West, a whimsical, castle-like b she polygon, does something to atone fo.l. same firm's wrecking of the city's skYlifienill the 1960s. A recent plan to build maMMA"to new law courts across the Avon anuects remove the lawyers from the old 50il.01 around the Guildhall seems to have rno scotched. Those central streets, like,Itie Street and Broad Street, still lined with -01 stone buildings such as John Wood's C°01 Exchange and C.R. Cockerell's England, are very impressive. But °,:the areas badly need attention and much o' legacy of the 1960s needs to be undone' The St Paul's district, whose inhabitants In .1980 attempted to emulate the achievements of the 1831 rioters, is a derelict area full of Georgian houses of high Unfortunately, attempts at restora- tion are prejudiced by Avon County Coun-

cil, which has control over roads in Bristol, and roads are still being planned. Traffic re- mains the chief blight to this old, peculiar city; only when cars cease to roar diagonally across Queen Square will I consider that Bristol has fully come to its senses again.