City Histories: The Lost Docks

As we enter a period when the future of Bristol’s harbourside will be under the spotlight, Andrew Swift explores the area’s history, uncovering the story of long lost docks, which were once a thriving hub of the city’s maritime history

Bristol City Council is currently working with stakeholders to produce a Place Shaping Strategy for the transformation of Bristol Harbour over the next 20 years. The part of the harbour which was the hub of Bristol’s maritime activity for over 500 years, as the city grew to become the second busiest port in the country, is not included, however.

This is hardly surprising, for it no longer exists. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the docks which had fuelled Bristol’s rise to prominence were covered over.

Today the area is known as the Centre, and, while you can still walk the old quays, past buildings where merchants and mariners lived and traded, there is precious little to remind you of their illustrious past. It is hard to overestimate how close to the city centre the docks were.

As you took a short stroll down Small Street, turning the corner at the end, you would have been greeted by a view of the docks stretching away into the distance. When Alexander Pope visited in 1732, he described the docks as being lined with ‘houses on both sides, and in the middle of the street, as far as you can see, hundreds of Ships, their masts as thick as they can stand by one another’.

No such stirring spectacle greets us today. The wide open space that stretches into the distance is bounded and bisected by busy roads, criss-crossed by cycleways, interspersed with statues and monuments, food vans, occasional changes of level and a whimsical, shortly to be removed, fountain installation. The Cascades dropping down at the end to what remains of the old docks has a sense of vision and presence, but for the most part the Centre seems characterised by an abiding uncertainty over what to do with it.


Glimpses of the past
But, although the transformation seems total, links with the past can be found if you look hard enough. Standing at the bottom of Small Street 300 years ago, you would have seen, ahead of you, a stone bridge across the River Frome. The bridge has long gone and the river now flows underground, but an office block on the far side – Stonebridge House – provides a tenuous link with the past. Quay Head, on your left, carries more potent reminders. It was here that ships first docked over 750 years ago, and where the Customs House and Fish Market stood. Some 18th-century buildings survive, and the White Lion, sole survivor of the dozens of dockside boozers that once lined the quays, has been going for over two centuries.

Heading south along the Centre, modern buildings predominate on either side, but the name of the church on the right – St Mary on the Quay – recalls the days when ships moored in front of it. Crossing ahead at the pedestrian lights, you come to the statue of Burke, to the left of which a large transit shed was built as late as the mid-19th century. Over to your right are buildings which looked out across the docks in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The road you cross at the next pedestrian lights lies on the site of a drawbridge which crossed the docks here. To your left, a short stretch of the old Broad Quay survives. This row was once much longer, and home to scores of businesses. Among those listed in a directory from 1851 were ship agents, marine stores, ship brokers, ship’s biscuit makers, a shipping office, chandlers and seven pubs.

A little further on, past the doomed fountains, we come to the Cascades and the only surviving stretch of the old docks – which seems an appropriate place to consider their unlikely history.
When Bristol was founded, the River Frome ran along the valley where the Centre stands today, before curving east near the Cascades to flow into the Avon just below Bristol Bridge. It was too shallow to be navigable, and, for the first 200 years or so, ships that sailed up to Bristol moored near where the Grove is today. The Avon not only had a high tidal range but this stretch of it also had a rocky bottom – a combination which could spell disaster if ships beached on the rocks. By the mid-14th century, Bristol’s maritime trade was growing fast, but this hazard threatened to scupper its prospects.


It was decided that the only way the future of the port could be secured was by building a trench, half a mile long, through marshy ground north of the river, deep and wide enough to take the largest ships afloat. And in 1240 that is what they did.

The River Frome flowed into the trench from the north, and the trench followed its course for the first quarter of a mile. When the river curved east, however, the trench ploughed straight on through marshy ground to join the Avon. It took eight years to build, cost £5,000 (equivalent to around £7 million today) and set the city on course to become one of Europe’s busiest ports.

That dealt with the rocky bottom, but the problem with the tides had to wait over 550 years before being sorted out by the opening of the Floating Harbour in 1809. This, however, created a new and far more lethal problem. North of the stone bridge at the head of the docks, the Frome ran through one of the most populous parts of the city, where 34 sewers discharged 20,000 tons of sewage a year into the river. When the tide carried it away twice a day, this was, if far from desirable, at least containable. When the tides stopped flowing, the little river and the docks it ran through became an open cesspool.

The long hot summer of 1825 brought matters to a head, prompting the authorities to build a culvert to carry the sullied waters away to the New Cut. This failed to resolve the issue, though, and when cholera struck in 1849, the decision was finally taken to build proper sewers.


Losing its shine
By now, the old docks, once the jewel in the city’s crown, were fast becoming a shabby backwater. Ships were getting bigger all the time, and the number unable to sail into the old docks started to rise. New docks were built along the Avon, the docks that had served the city for over 500 years slowly dwindled, and, little by little, they started to disappear, covered over as the city turned its back on them.

The stretch above Stone Bridge was culverted in 1857, creating Rupert Street. In 1893 the section between Stone Bridge and the drawbridge was covered over. Finally, in 1938, the section in front of the Hippodrome went, leaving only what became known as St Augustine’s Reach, below the Cascades.

Since then, the Centre has been remodelled many times. There have been occasional calls for the docks to be opened up again, but, alluring though this prospect may seem, it would be vastly expensive, vastly controversial and vastly risky. It is also hard to see how such a change could accommodate the constant flow of cars, buses, cycles and pedestrians through one of the city’s major pinch points.

One day, perhaps, the trench, built at such enormous cost almost 800 years ago, will be reinstated, letting the waters flow into the heart of the city once again. Until then, tracing the lineaments and legacy of Bristol’s first major engineering project provides a fascinating glimpse into the back story of a part of the city it is too easy to take for granted.

For more of Andrew Swift’s work, visit akemanpress.com