Blog City Bristol England's Ancient Port

During the Middle Ages the picturesque town of Bristol was the third largest in the entire British Isles. In these distant centuries, during the Viking and Saxon Era, the town was an inland port that thrived on the trade of wool, fish and slaves captured in Wales and the north of England. Bristol reached the height of its prosperity and importance from the 15th to the 18th Centuries. In 1497, five years after Columbus sailed for the New World, John Cabot sailed from Bristol in search of a new route to the Orient. He found Newfoundland, the first European in the modern age of Exploration to lay eyes on North America. The cod off the the Canadian coast, he wrote, were "so thick they stayed the progress of our ship," a historic event remembered in Canada to this day. In the centuries to follow Bristol-based merchantmen and warships plied the Atlantic while the port itself became a central hub in Britain's rapidly growing and globalizing trade networks. Much of Bristol's wealth came from the slave trade and Bristolean merchants are thought to have ferried over a half million Africans across the Atlantic and into slavery in the Americas — over 2,000 voyages in total. Today tourism brochures focus less on this seedy past and more on how it ended, and the Seven Stars Pub, whose owner harboured the famous abolitionist Thomas Clarkson at great personal risk, is a major attraction. Abolition of the slave trade in 1806 pulled out the main prop of the city's prosperity, and over the course of the 19th Century the city declined in relative importance to that rising port in the north, Liverpool, which was so much closer to the great industrializing regions in the Midlands and Lancashire. Bristol again began to hit its stride in the 20th Century when it became an early centre of British aircraft innovation and design. In 1910 the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company (later the Bristol Aeroplane Company) was founded here and soon became one of the country's primary aircraft manufacturers. The company's descendant today is BAE Systems. Bristol's maritime past has contributed to its open and diverse culture and today trendy neighbourhoods like Stoke's Croft are known throughout the U.K. for their underground music and art scenes and thriving youth culture. Bristol is a wonderfully beautiful city, my favourite when visiting the whole British Isles, and I should hope to return again soon.

Then and Now Photos