A huge piling rig taller than the seven-storey buildings behind it slowly trundled into place on Thursday morning at the site that is slowly being transformed into Redcliff Quarter.

After dignitaries in hi-vis vests gathered for some speeches and a photo call, the drill whirred into action to begin the latest work that by the end of 2021 will see Bristol’s tallest residential building, homes, offices, co-working spaces, a hotel and restaurants built as part of the £250m scheme.

“This is a great responsibility, a great honour and an exciting challenge,” said Change Real Estate director Ron Persaud as work on phase two of Redcliff Quarter began behind him.

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A revised planning application for a new hotel is expected to be lodged in September increasing the number of rooms from 186 to 240, while the tower will be 22 storeys and 82.6m high – responding directly to Bristol mayor Marvin Rees’ call to build higher buildings in the city.

Persaud was particularly pleased with new plans for pop-up restaurants on the ground floor of some of the new buildings while the upper floors are still being constructed.

When Redcliff Quarter is completed, he hopes that the newly created and pedestrianised Cross Street – stretching from Redcliff Street to St Thomas Lane – will be flanked on both sides by independent restaurants, bars and cafes, as well as a food court – with Josh Eggleton of the Pony & Trap in place as a consultant.

“We want to have an area where people can stop, sit outside, have a coffee, have something to eat and drink,” said Persaud, admitting that he has been inspired in part by what has been achieved at Wapping Wharf.

And the sharp-suited developer is also saying all the right things about independent businesses, home to two of Eggleton’s other restaurants, Root and Salt & Malt

“We are not looking for the chains,” he told Bristol24/7. “I think independence is Bristol in my opinion. I get that vibe about the city. Independents fit very well with Bristol and what we are trying to do here.”

While the piling rig continued, so too did a team of archaeologists working on one side of the three-and-a-half acre site, which has laid mostly empty for 25 years but has a history stretching back to the middle ages.

Around a dozen archaeologists from two companies, Cotswold Archaeology and Oxford Archaeology, their boots caked in mud, used spades and trowels to clear off the top level of earth in order to discover what lay beneath.

Above them on a viewing platform, project officer Vix Hughs pulled from out of her pocket a piece of glazed medieval tile with narrow legs painted on that could belong to a bird, or maybe a lion.

“This is a nice posh building going on here,” she explained, saying that in the medieval period people would have carried out their trade in the same building in which they lived.

The home where the tile was found would have been owned by an influential family with a relatively high status for the time.

Originally a marshy bog, the area that will become Redcliff (without an ‘e’ to match Redcliff Street onto which it faces) Quarter sits on land reclaimed in the twelfth century.

It’s the latest chapter for this corner of Bristol in a story dating back 900 years.

An open day at Redcliff Quarter is planned for September 15 when there will be viewings of the archaeological dig and artefacts discovered so far will be put on display