Bristol Information

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- - - Bristol Information - - -

South and west of Gloucester, the distinctive burr that is typical of West Country speech is immediately audible in BRISTOL . Alongside it, however, you will also hear the more strident tones of fast money and big business which in recent years have combined to re-energize the city's old commercial traditions. New technology, the arts and a vibrant youth culture have also helped to make this one of Britain's most cutting-edge cities, in the process generating some of the best nightlife in the southwest.

Weaving through its centre, the River Avon forms part of a system of waterways that made Bristol a great inland port, in later years booming on the transatlantic trafficking of such goods as rum, tobacco and slaves. In the nineteenth century the illustrious Isambard Kingdom Brunel laid the foundations of a tradition of engineering, creating two of Bristol's greatest monuments - the SS Great Britain and the lofty Clifton Suspension Bridge. More recently, spin-offs from the aerospace industry have given the city a high profile in the fields of communications, computing, design and finance. Beneath the prosperous surface, however, Bristol has its negative aspects - one of England's highest homeless populations, some of the most notorious housing estates and the highest proportion of cars to inhabitants. Nonetheless, it remains an attractive city, predominantly hilly, and surrounded by rolling countryside.

The City

A good place to start exploring, the Centre was once an extension of the port but is now the traffic-ridden nucleus of the city, with cars swirling round the statues of Edmund Burke, MP for Bristol from 1774 to 1780, and local benefactor Edward Colston. The Centre is only a few minutes' walk from the cathedral and the oldest quarter of town, and linked by ferry to the sights around the Floating Harbour, the waterway network that runs through the southern part of town and connects with the River Avon. You could cover Bristol's other central attractions on foot without too much sweat, but it's worth using the bus network for more distant sights, especially in the hilly Clifton district.

- - - Arrival Information - - -

Bristol is an easy place to get to. Twice-hourly trains from London Paddington arrive at either Bristol Parkway or Bristol Temple Meads. The latter, a twenty-minute walk from the centre, is served by frequent buses #8, #9, #508 and #509, which pass through the centre on their way to Cotham and Clifton. Parkway is too far out of town to walk from: take bus #73 (or #82 or #584 on Sun). The bus station , where National Express coaches from London arrive hourly, is in Marlborough Street, right next to Broadmead, the modern shopping centre. For all bus timetables and routes in the Bristol and Bath area, call 0870/608 2608 (8am-8pm). The tourist office is in the at-Bristol complex, on Wildscreen Walk, Harbourside (March-Oct daily 10am-6pm; Nov-Feb Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 11am-4pm; tel 0117/926 0767, ).

- - - Eating, Drinking and Nightlife - - -

Bristol's numerous pubs and restaurants are nearly always buzzing - especially those around King Street. Nightlife is equally lively; if you want to check out the clubs , look for the music that suits your tastes rather than simply turning up at a venue - and be prepared to queue. You can usually find something happening every night - pick up a copy of Venue , the Bristol and Bath fortnightly listings magazine (£1.90) for details of what's on where.

Restaurants

Bell's Diner 1 York Rd tel 0117/924 0357. In the fashionable Montpelier quarter (ten minutes from the bus station up Stokes Croft), this corner bistro offers an inventive menu with good-value, award-winning food. No smoking in dining area. Closed Sat & Mon lunch, plus all day Sun. Moderate.

Browns 38 Queen's Rd tel 0117/930 4777. Spacious and relaxed place for a cocktail, hamburger or delicious fisherman's pie; it's housed in the former university refectory, a Venetian-style structure next to the City Museum. Moderate.

Byzantium 2 Portwall Lane tel 0117/922 1883, . Opposite St Mary Redcliffe, a warehouse that's been transformed into a highly theatrical dining area, themed along the lines of a Beirut hotel circa 1930. The food is superb, with a good-value set-price menu, and there's an equally exotic bar downstairs that stays open late, with magicians and belly-dancers adding to the ambience. Closed Sun. Expensive.

Harvey's 12 Denmark St tel 0117/927 5034. Owned by a famous name in the world of wines and sherries, this is a showcase restaurant in a medieval cellar complex adjoining a museum of wine that's an attraction in itself, and can be visited while waiting for food. The atmosphere is formal, the food French and the wine list both encyclopedic and outstanding. Closed Sat lunch & all Sun. Very Expensive.

One Stop Thali Café 12 York Rd tel 0117/942 6687. Dhaba-style Asian food in soothing surroundings in the heart of Montpelier. There's no menu, but a combination of dishes are served on a steel plate. Closed Mon. Inexpensive.

Riverstation The Grove tel 0117/914 4424. A former river-police station that has been artfully transformed into two great restaurants: downstairs you can chew on deli-type snacks or just have a drink, while the upstairs restaurant offers a bigger range of international dishes. Inexpensive to Moderate.

Teohs 28-34 Lower Ashley Rd. On the edge of the St Paul's area, this oriental bistro is well worth tracking down for its relaxed atmosphere and extremely low prices, offering thirty-odd dishes from Thailand, Malaysia and Japan. Bottled beers and house wine at £11 a carafe. Closed Mon. Inexpensive.

Pubs, Bars and Cafés

Arnolfini Narrow Quay. This art centre serves excellent vegetarian and meat dishes, plus drinks at the bar. There are communal wooden benches, and the crowd spills onto the cobbled quayside.

Avon Gorge Hotel Sion Hill. On the edge of the Gorge in Clifton Village, this mediocre bar has a broad terrace with tables from which to contemplate the magnificent views. Snacks available.

Belgo The Old Granary, Queen Charlotte St. Like its London cousins, this branch of the Belgian-food chain - in part of a restored warehouse near King Street - offers a range of Belgian draught and bottled beers. A good deal for early-evening eating is offered, where you pay according to the time you come in, e.g. £6.45 if you come at 6.45pm (until 7.30pm).

Mud Dock Café 40 The Grove. A winning if unlikely combination of bike shop and café-bar/restaurant by the river. There's good food, a barbecue on the balcony in summer, and DJs most nights.

Nova Scotia Cumberland Basin. Traditional dockside pub with seats by the nineteenth-century lock. Inexpensive food available.

Tantric Jazz Café 39-41 St Nicholas St . Relaxed coffee stop near the Old Markets; there's food too, and live jazz and world music nightly.

Taverna dell' Artista King St. A haunt of theatrical folk as well as a rowdy bunch of regulars, this is a successful Anglo-Italian dive with a late licence. The pizzas, pastas and salads are nothing special, though.

Watershed 1 Canons Rd, St Augustine's Reach . A good bar and café in the arts complex overlooking the boats, with food available until 9pm.

Clubs and Venues

Bierkeller All Saints St, off Broadmead tel 0117/926 8514, . Steamy venue for live music from thrash metal to 60s and 80s revival bands.

Fleece and Firkin 12 St Thomas St tel 0117/929 9008. Stone-flagged ex-wool warehouse, this loud and sweaty pub puts on live rock and comedy six nights a week.

Lakota 6 Upper York St tel 0117/942 6208. Bristol's most celebrated club, attracting the biggest DJs as well as live bands, and often generating queues to get in. There's also a bistro open day and night.

The Rock Frogmore St tel 0117/927 9227. Near the Centre, this big and popular place is open Thurs, Fri and Sat for mainstream and hard-house parties.

Thekla Phoenix Wharf, off Queen Square tel 0117/929 3301. A youthful riverboat venue staging regular club nights Thurs-Sat, and open until 2am or 4am.

- - - Exploring Bristol - - -

Around Bristol's Waterways

At the southern end of the Centre, the River Frome disappears underground at the Quayhead , a spot marked by a statue of Neptune and a memorial plaque to Samuel Plimsoll, inventor of the eponymous line that's painted on the hulls of merchant ships. St Augustine's Reach , the central part of the Floating Harbour, is flanked by the Arnolfini and Watershed arts centres, bastions of Bristol's cultural scene and both housed in refurbished Victorian warehouses. Outside the Arnolfini is a statue of John Cabot , the Genoan-born explorer licensed by Henry VII to sail from Bristol in 1497; his landing at Newfoundland formed the basis of England's later claims on the New World (he disappeared on his second expedition the following year).

Beyond the Watershed, Bristol's newly developed Harbourside is the home of Bristol's highest-profile attraction, at-Bristol (daily 10am-6pm; £6.50 for one attraction; £11 for two; £15.50 for all, valid for a week; ), a large-scale entertainment complex which pivots on three principal sites: Explore-at-Bristol, an interactive science centre; Wildwalk-at-Bristol, a multimedia wildlife complex, including an indoor "tropical forest", and an IMAX cinema (film screenings need to be booked in advance). Although chiefly aimed at families and schoolkids, there's enough here for anyone to occupy a whole day or more. The wildlife displays and scientific wizardry are most impressive, and subsidiary attractions include the Imaginarium (£2), a metal-clad spherical planetarium.

To explore further afield, take advantage of the ferry service, which connects the various parts of the Floating Harbour every forty minutes or so (April-Sept Mon-Fri 10.50am-5.45pm, Sat & Sun 10.50am-4.50pm; Oct-March Sat & Sun only; £1 single fare; £3 forty-minute round trip; £3.50 one-hour round trip; ). Opposite the Arnolfini, the Industrial Museum , features a diverse collection of vehicles, mostly with Bristol connections, and a display of maritime models and reconstructions (April-Oct Mon-Wed, Sat & Sun 10am-5pm; Nov-March Sat & Sun 10am-5pm; free), and about 500 yards west from here, you can visit the SS Great Britain (daily: April-Oct 10am-5.30pm; Nov-March 10am-4.30pm; £6.25). Built in 1843 by Brunel, this was the first propeller-driven, ocean-going iron ship, used initially between Liverpool and New York, then between Liverpool and Melbourne, circumnavigating the globe 32 times over a period of 26 years. Her ocean-going days ended in 1886 when she was caught in a storm off Cape Horn, and abandoned in the Falkland Islands; she was recovered from there and in 1968 returned to the same dry dock in Bristol where she was constructed. Alongside is docked a much smaller affair: a replica of the Matthew (same times as the Great Britain ; entry covered by that ticket), the vessel in which John Cabot sailed to America in 1497, rebuilt in time for the voyage to be re-enacted on the 500th anniversary. The adjoining Maritime Heritage Centre (same times and ticket) gives the full history of both the Great Britain and the Matthew , and the few facts which are known about Cabot and his exploits. The museum also illustrates the port's long shipbuilding history from the eighteenth century, when it was second only to London, to its decline in the last century.

Clifton

North and west of the Wills Tower extends Clifton , once an aloof spa resort, now Bristol's most elegant quarter. Clifton Village, its select enclave, is centred on the Mall, close to Royal York Crescent , the longest Georgian crescent in the country, offering splendid views over the steep drop to the River Avon below.

A few minutes' walk behind the Crescent is Bristol's most famous symbol, Clifton Suspension Bridge , 702ft long and poised 245ft above high water. Money was first put forward for a bridge to span the Avon Gorge by a Bristol wine merchant in 1753, though it was not until 1829 that a competition was held for a design, won by Isambard Brunel on a second round, and not until 1864 that the bridge was completed, five years after Brunel's death. Hampered by financial difficulties, the bridge never quite matched the engineer's original ambitious design, which included Egyptian-style towers topped by sphinxes on each end. You can see copies of his plans in the Visitor Centre on Sion Place (daily: Easter-Sept 10am-5pm; Oct-Easter Mon-Fri 11am-4pm, Sat & Sun 11am-5pm; £1.90), alongside the other designs proposed by Brunel's rivals, some of them frankly bizarre. The three rooms here give the full background on the various competitions and the vicissitudes which accompanied the bridge's construction.

Just above the bridge in Clifton, a small Observatory sits on an arm of Clifton Downs overlooking the gorge, and contains a working camera obscura (daily: summer 11am-5.30pm; rest of year 11am-4pm; £1). You can also buy a ticket (£1) for the 190-foot tunnel leading from here to the "Giant's Cave" set in the cliffs overlooking the gorge; it housed a Roman Catholic chapel in the fifteenth century. Both attractions may be closed in bad weather. Adjoining the Downs is Bristol Zoo (daily: June-Aug 9am-5.30pm; Sept-May 9am-4.30pm; ; £8.40), renowned for its animal conservation work, and also featuring a collection of rare trees and shrubs.

From The Centre to Broadmead

Almost buried behind modern blocks, one of Bristol's oldest churches, St Stephen's , stands just east of the Centre. It was established in the thirteenth century, rebuilt in the fifteenth and thoroughly restored with plenty of neo-Gothic trimmings in 1875. Nearby Corn Street represents the city's financial centre, where you'll find the Georgian Corn Exchange, designed by John Wood of Bath, which now holds the covered St Nicholas markets . Outside the entrance stand four engraved bronze pillars, dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and transferred from a nearby arcade where they served as trading tables - thought to be the "nails" from which the expression "pay on the nail" is derived.

Beyond the market, and edging Castle Green - where Bristol Castle once stood - extends the Broadmead shopping centre, an uninspiring development laid out on the ruins left by wartime bombing. A couple of relics survive: accessible from both the central strip of Broadmead and the Horsefair, the New Room (Jan & Feb Mon-Sat 11am-2.30pm; rest of year Mon-Sat 10am-4pm; free, tours £2) was the country's first Methodist chapel, established by John Wesley in 1739. Lying very much as Wesley left it, the chapel has a double-deck pulpit beneath a hidden upstairs window, from which the evangelist could observe the progress of his trainee preachers. Nearby lies another testimony to Bristol's close links with nonconformist sects, Quakers' Friars , a thirteenth-century construction whose name derives from the Dominican friars who first used the building, and the Quakers who took it over from the sixteenth century. William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, was married here, as was the Quaker founder George Fox.

From The Cathedral to The City Museum

A short walk west of the Centre lies College Green, dominated by the crescent-shaped Council House and by Bristol Cathedral (daily 8am-6pm). Founded around 1140 as an abbey on the supposed spot of St Augustine's convocation with Celtic Christians in 603, it became a cathedral church with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The two towers on the west front were erected in the nineteenth century in a faithful act of homage to Edmund Knowle, architect and abbot at the start of the fourteenth century. Inside the cathedral, Abbot Knowle's choir offers one of the country's most exquisite examples of the early Decorated style of Gothic, while the adjoining Elder Lady Chapel , dating from the early thirteenth century, contains some fine tombs and some eccentric carvings of animals, including a monkey playing the bagpipes accompanied by a ram on the violin. The ornate Eastern Lady Chapel has some of England's finest examples of heraldic glass. From the south transept, a door leads through to the Chapter House , a richly carved piece of late Norman architecture.

Climbing steeply up from College Green, the shop-lined Park Street has some elegant Georgian streets leading off it - for instance Great George Street and Berkeley Square, from either of which you can enter Brandon Hill Park , site of the landmark Cabot Tower , built at the end of the last century to commemorate the 400th anniversary of John Cabot's voyage to America. You can climb up the 105-foot tower for the city's best panorama. At the top of Park Street stands central Bristol's other chief landmark, the Wills Memorial Tower , erected in the 1920s to lend some stature to the newly opened university. One of the last great neo-Gothic buildings in England, the tower was the gift of the local Wills tobacco dynasty, the university's main benefactors.

Next to the tower, on Queen's Road, the City Museum and Art Gallery (daily 10am-5pm; free) occupies another building donated by the Wills clan. The sections on local archeology, geology and natural history are pretty well what you'd expect, but the scope of the museum is occasionally surprising - it has the largest collection of Chinese glass on show outside China itself, and some magnificent Assyrian reliefs, carved in the eighth century BC. The second-floor gallery of paintings and sculptures includes work by English Pre-Raphaelites and French Impressionists, as well as a few choice older pieces, among them a portrait of Martin Luther by Cranach and Giovanni Bellini's Descent into Limbo.

King Street to St Mary Redcliffe

South of the Centre, King Street was laid out in 1633 and still holds a cluster of historic buildings, among them the Theatre Royal , the oldest working theatre in the country, opened in 1766 and preserving many of its original Georgian features. The theatre hosted most of the famous names of its time, including Sarah Siddons, whose ghost is said to stalk the building. Further down, and in a very different architectural style, stands the timber-framed Llandoger Trow pub, its name taken from the flat-bottomed boats that traded between Bristol and the Welsh coast. Traditionally the haunt of seafarers, it is reputed to have been the meeting place of Daniel Defoe and Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe. This and the other bars and cafés around here, where King Street meets the Floating Harbour, are the hub of lively evening activity.

Behind King Street spreads Queen Square , an elegant grassy area focused on a statue of William III by Rysbrack, reckoned to be the best equestrian statue in the country. The square was the site of some of the worst civil disturbances ever seen in England when Bristolians rioted in support of the Reform Bill of 1832, burning houses on two sides of the square; among the survivors was no. 37, where the first American consulate was established in 1792.

The southeast corner of the square leads to Redcliffe Bridge and on to the area of Redcliffe, where the spire of St Mary Redcliffe (daily 8.30am-5pm) provides one of the distinctive features of the city's skyline. Described by Elizabeth I as "the goodliest, fairest, and most famous parish church in England", the church was largely paid for and used by merchants and mariners who prayed here for a safe voyage. The present building was begun at the end of the thirteenth century, though it was added to in subsequent centuries and the spire was constructed in 1872. Inside, memorials and tombs recall some of the figures associated with the building, including the arms and armour of Sir William Penn, admiral and father of the founder of Pennsylvania, on the north wall of the nave, and the Handel Window in the North Choir aisle, installed in 1859 on the centenary of the death of Handel, who composed on the organ here. The whale bone above the entrance to the Chapel of St John the Baptist is thought to have been brought back from Newfoundland by John Cabot. Above the church's north porch is the muniment room, where Thomas Chatterton claimed to have found a trove of medieval manuscripts; the poems, distributed as the work of a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley, were in fact dazzling fakes. The young poet committed suicide when his forgery was exposed, thereby supplying English literature with one of its most glamorous stories of self-destructive genius. The "Marvellous Boy" is remembered by a memorial stone in the south transept.

A few minutes' walk away, Bristol's Old Station stands outside Temple Meads station, the original terminus of the Great Western Railway linking London and Bristol. The terminus, like the line itself, was designed by Brunel in 1840, and was the first great piece of railway architecture. Part of the original building now houses the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (Tues-Sun 9am-5pm;), which focuses on the history of the empire and Commonwealth.

The above information are taken from Rough Guides
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