Bristol fashioned

To Bristol, along Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great West Railway, calling at Reading, Swindon, Chippenham and Bath, the journey fast and pleasant. A business trip to see a prospective client, four hours’ spare time to have a look around. I’ve not been to Bristol before – certainly not to the city centre, so I made the Most of the chance to see another great British city, historically and economically. As a port, it shares much with Liverpool; built on the transatlantic trade in cotton and slaves. A university city too, the fine buildings located in the centre.

My exploration of Bristol began and finished at Temple Meads station, built in 1843 as (at the time) the western terminal of the GWR. It’s a large station with 15 platforms and an iron and glass roof. The cry of seagulls greeted me as I stepped off the train. Of for my meeting, then a chance to explore the city centre, after which I walked right across town to see the famous Clifton suspension bridge. I must have seen it in early childhood around the time we lived in South Wales. My mother drew a picture of it in pencil on a wooden brick I played with. Along the way, impressive architectural heritage. Unlike Liverpool, there’s no waterfront focal point; the Avon is a much narrower river than the Mersey. And unlike Liverpool, the city is built on steep hills overlooking the river, creating a geography of streets sloping steeply towards the waterfront.

Across the Avon I could see the SS Great Britain, technological marvel of its time, an iron-hulled steamship powered by screws (although the sails were still there). For 1845, a breakthrough. The world's longest passenger ship at the time. Further on, abandoned wooden wharves stand rotting in the shadow of the suspension bridge, a picture of decaying Victorian infrastructure that’s quite unusual in modern Britain.

A massive day’s walking (total over 21,000 paces of which 15,000 were in Bristol). My ticket was purchased via the TrainLine app; this was my very first rail journey in the UK without a piece of paper or card to show to the guard. I’ve been using my phone for plane and train tickets (in Poland) for some time so it’s good to see an alternative to buying online and having to collect the tickets from a machine at the station before departure in the UK.

Below: Temple Meads station. Opened in 1843. That's 175 years ago. Since then, trains have been bringing people here continuously. That's amazing. Gothic Revival, the magnificent roof over the platforms to the right, the main building set at an angle.

Below: the SS Great Britain, along with HMS Victory (Portsmouth), the Cutty Sark and HMS Belfast (London), is one of the famous museum ships that present Britain's glorious maritime past.

Park Street goes up a steep hill from the Cathedral to the Wills Memorial Building, which despite its medieval appearance was opened in 1925 - the last major piece of Gothic  Revival built in Britain. Today it's part of the university . The street itself is testament to the decline of  British retail, with many charity shops and used clothing stores on either side.

The university buildings remind me of Harrow School, but are late-19th century (University College Bristol opened in 1872, the University of Bristol - with royal charter - as late as 1909. Established with money made by selling cigarettes (the Wills family) and chocolate (the Fry family), Bristol is one of the UK's nine 'redbrick' universities, set up at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Below: the School of Geographical Sciences.

Below: Bristol's very own Wallace Collection - in the 1940s, Bristol was home to the aviation industry (the Blenheim, Beaufighter and Brabazon); today, Bristol is famous for its claymation movies, made by local company, Aardman. Here is Wallace, dressed as a gnome, outside the city's cathedral, established in 1140, though with plenty of Victorian add-ons, including the towers.

Below: I had to wait a few minutes to get this shot of the Foster's Almshouses, there were so many foreign tourists snapping away at it (from France, the US and China). A Victorian building standing on the site of a poorhouse dating back to the 15th century, funded by merchant John Foster.

Below: this waterfront building dates back to 1823; Purifier House was a former gasworks converted into flats. A ground-up rebuild took place (photos on Google Earth Street View show only the left-hand wing standing in 2016).

Below: the Clifton Suspension Bridge, completed in 1864 can rightly be said to be iconic, its image being used so often to promote Bristol and indeed the UK.

South of the bridge, a stretch of waterfront abandoned to the elements; rotting wharves that should have been preserved or demolished, very attractive to the photographer and urban explorer.

The old wharves stretch on and on along Hotwell Road... It's a real surprise to see such dereliction in such a prime location today.

Bristol requires a revisit. A bustling, dynamic city of half a million people, I'd rank it as one of the UK's must-see cities (though Liverpool appeals to me more somehow). Four hours is not enough to explore it. Architecturally, there are many gems to be seen, but the city attracted too many Luftwaffe bombs, losing over 3,000 buildings during WW2. The gaps were filled by much mundane '60s and '70s stuff that creates an overall sense of loss; how the city might have looked with far more of its original architecture intact.

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