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City GENT Issue 121.BRISTOLFor much of England’s history Bristol was Britain’s second city, because of its harbour. Much of its wealth came from wool, then slaving, and then fag making. It was rich when rich people spent their money in the town they made it in. Bristol has the marvellous Cathedral and the world class church of St. Mary Redcliffe: as well as the later Georgian developments in the centre, and away from the port in Clifton. Bristol could have turned into a twee tourist trap like York. One reason it did not was that Bath is next door, and draws off most of the bus tours, but more important was Bristol’s size. It is a big city, 10th largest in the UK, and it had profitable industries through most of the 20th Century, and industries need workers. Tony Benn was not an MP in Bristol because it was a hotbed of conservative thinking. Benn was largely responsible for the Government paying for Concorde to be partly built locally: although he had nothing to do with the Anglo French hostility that kept both countries funding the mach 2 money eater because they both wanted the other country to chicken out first. Bristol city centre is, in parts, very pretty: although the area around Temple Meads Station was vile and bits of the inner city ring road were as bad as any in Britain. On the whole it is a good place to go, but having praised Bristol we also would sound a note of cautiion. We never found Bristol City’s Aston Gate to be welcoming, and twenty years ago it was nasty. Bristol City hooligans were not as well know as those of Oxford United, probably because Oxford had far more post-grad students researching terrace violence, but both were working class clubs in places that tried to ignore the lower orders. We do not know how things are in Oxford now, but there seems to be a growing divide in Bristol between those that follow football and those that do not even know the town has soccer teams. If you do spend time in Bristol just listen to the accents. We would expect mockney, estuary, and Oxbridge accents in Clifton and the centre. With more of Somerset’s long l’s and r’s being heard as you get closer to the ground. Bristol was also one of the first, if not the first, city’s in Britain that had many free houses selling beers from many breweries. In the late Seventies Dudley, Manchester and other towns had lots of beer choice because they still had lots of surviving old breweries; Bristol seemed to have the choice because of lots of stubborn folk bought pubs to sell what they liked. Clifton Suspension Bridge and the S S Great Britain Built by Brunel, look grand, bring the tourists, never made money, made people bankrupt, took immense trouble to finish, catastrophic failures by any sane measure. The bridge took 28 years to build and was finished with second hand chains. The ship was built as an Atlantic liner, failed and then did an increasingly lowly series of jobs before being abandoned in the Falklands like a Nissan Sunny that no scrap yard will take being left in a field behind a council estate. Bristol Zoo On Clifton Down. It is a really nice zoo, varied but not over big. We mention it especially because we think there should be a Johnny Morris revival. He filmed Animal Magic here, and it was magic: but his best work was on radio. We were told that he always went into the studio with a briefcase, which turned out to be full of beer rather than scripts. What a star! |
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Web services Roger Beaumont