by James Russell with photography by Stephen Morris
Words: Juliette Phillips
To describe writer James Russell as having conducted a long-term affair with Bristol’s harbourside would be an understatement. “You can clearly see the layers of history going back through the centuries,” he says. “If you stand in the middle of the centre and use a bit of imagination, you can easily picture it in the Middle Ages, when Bristol had the most up-to-date port in England. There are details all around the streets nearby, from the plaster crest on the wall of the Merchant’s Almshouse on King Street to the iron mooring posts around the docks, each with its maker’s name or initials on the top. You can walk behind the ss Great Britain and look down into the dry dock used by David Abels for boatbuilding – it’s been there since about 1820, surviving Nazi bombs and the city council’s determined efforts to wreck the harbour back in the 1970s.”
If such lyrical detail whets your appetite for rediscovering an area of Bristol that you may think you’re already familiar with, James’s new book is guaranteed to set your heart a-fluttering.
‘Discovering Harbourside: A Journey into the Heart of Bristol’ hits the shelves in May 2010. The book’s publisher John Sansom – producer of over 200 books about Bristol, a recipient of the 2008 Lord Mayor’s Medal for Services to the City and a man described in the local press as ‘a civic treasure’ – shares James’s enthusiasm for the glorious waterfront at the heart of a thriving contemporary city.
“The docks are where Bristol came from, but I love the way the area has been reinvented for everyone,” says John. “There’s a cosy, small-scale feel to the area that sets it apart from similar regeneration schemes – a wonderful mix of recreation, housing and small-scale industry.”
The idea for the book came about during James’s many walking and cycling trips around the docks. “I would stop and watch the boat builders working on Redcliffe Wharf,” he recalls. “Boats have been built in Bristol for over a thousand years; I love the idea that people have lived and worked in the same place for so long. I started looking more closely at the places I passed every day and reading old books about the port. When I started writing about the area, I tried to make the book reflect my own experiences – it’s a series of small but fascinating journeys of discovery.”
For John, his favourite ‘discoveries’ around the harbourside already include riverstation (“preferably at a table facing Phoenix Wharf and St Mary Redcliffe, with the sun glinting on the water”) and the Museum of Bristol, especially at night.
So where would James’s personal harbourside hotspot be? “Outside the Nova Scotia on a sunny day, watching the old boys tinker about on their boats with a pint of Thatchers in my hand!” he says. Might we suggest that if you follow in either James’s or John’s footsteps, you take a copy of their book with you?
More ‘Discovering Harbourside: A Journey into the Heart of Bristol’ by James Russell, published
May 2010 by Redcliffe Press (£14.99).
Visit www.redcliffepress.co.uk for further information