Bristol Harbourside is home to a number of 18th-century hostelries that have bucked the trend for glitzy makeovers and held on to their colourful maritime heritage. Mark Sayers discovers the secrets of their enduring success and the role they’ve played in the area’s busy past.
“When I started drinking here in the 80s, all the boatie folk drank here – Hywel Price, a brilliant boatbuilder from the MacArthur’s Yard, used to sit in the corner designing boats on the back of a fag packet…” The speaker is Alan Collier, a Bristol pest controller better known to many as Alan the Ratcatcher. Alan knows many of the Harbourside pubs inside out: he and his wife lived on a boat in the harbour for decades, and he’s been a part of Bristol’s boat community since they stepped aboard.
He’s talking to Shipshape about (and, indeed, inside) the Nova Scotia, for decades his haunt of choice. The Nova celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, as testified by an ‘1811’ inscription on stones adjoining its archway. And it’s perhaps Bristol’s most archetypal dockside pub. Maritime cues are everywhere: its walls are plastered with faded maps and sea charts, and photos of the docks in their heyday. The mahogany bar was originally intended for a ship, but was the wrong size. Its name commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), when France ceded Nova Scotia (peninsula and islands off Canada’s Atlantic coast) to England, and its pub sign shows a schooner trading in icy North Atlantic waters.
“It’s always been frequented by people who worked on boats and built boats – especially on a Friday night.” Alan’s been a Nova regular for 30 years, during which he’s seen some changes, but plenty of continuity. “There have been some strange happenings here,” he says from a seat on one of the benches outside on the Nova’s little corner of Spike Island. “20 years ago a company called C&H Inns took it over and took down the green wooden partition dividing the two bars. There was an instant outcry from regulars, until someone popped down and said, ‘You realise this is a listed building: now put that back’, and they did.”
By contrast, current landlord Mark Walter has steered the Nova back on course. “He’s an old-fashioned landlord: nothing fancy, no frills, very good pub food, good beer, knows his customers inside out, looks after people. There’s rarely any trouble apart from very occasional football scuffles outside.”
The Nova is also a barometer of the changes that the Harbourside has experienced, from the 1970s dying days of the busy port via a transitional period in the 1980s when it became a boaties’ paradise, onto today’s thoroughly modern leisure zone.
Les James, an ex-docker and fellow Nova habitué, remembers the pub’s history a little further back, during the busy port days. “It was a proper old dockers’ pub for the people working at Charles Hill [the Bristol shipbuilding company that operated from Albion Dockyard – now Abels Shipbuilders – until 1977] and Underfall Yard. The tables had draughts boards built in – draughts was a real dockers’ game. Friday night was darts night, when they’d clear the bar and put out the dartboard.
“This was a working port back then, completely different to now. There was no leisure – apart from the pubs, of course. Just ships unloading, dockers at work everywhere you looked. And the dockers, if they had no work for the day, would just retire to the pub.”
Another ex-docker, Richard Perrington, grew up in Oldfield Place, Hotwells – next to the Merchants Arms, where he drinks to this day. Richard worked on the docks for four decades, both on the harbour and at Avonmouth. “My young drinking career was mostly spent in Hotwells. I played darts for the Nova for years. It was a very different atmosphere back then: a grown-up, working man’s atmosphere. When you were 18, you were tolerated in pubs – but you did what you were told, kept your mouth shut and drank up quietly in the corner.”
all a-bard
Alan Collier also frequented the Shakespeare on Prince Street. Rejoicing in the title of Bristol’s longest-serving ale house, the Shakey was built in 1725 as a fine townhouse for the timber merchant John Hobbs, and had become a dockside inn by 1775, serving food and drink to shipworkers and warehousemen. Throughout the 19th century, the Shakespeare was used as a meeting place for the Beaufort Lodge of freemasons. Says the Masons’ annals: “It used to be largely frequented by captains and officers of merchant ships. It was kept very select and no common sailor or dock labourer would have presumed to enter without instructions from his superiors.”
Alan remembers the pub from more recent times – the early 1980s, when two fine old ships, a barque called ‘Marques’ (which sank during a 1984 race) and the brig ‘Ciudad de Inca’ (later the ‘Maria Asumpta’, shipwrecked off Padstow in 1995) were moored in St Augustine’s Reach and the pub was frequented by, among others, the crews of the two boats. And many more besides: “The Shakespeare was always used by boat folk from that [eastern] end of the dock, and the Nova for this end. In those days, the Shakespeare had a similar atmosphere to Nova. And it still looks the part today.” Indeed it does, with its wood panel walls, open fireplaces in each bar and maritime cues galore, from chandlers’ signboards to Bristol Channel navigation charts.
there be treasure
At the other end of Prince Street, the Hole in the Wall also has deep roots in Bristol’s seafaring past. For one thing, it’s believed to be the model for the Spyglass Inn in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ (Stevenson is said to have visited the pub). A small ‘spyhole’ on the side of the pub, meanwhile, would probably have been used by lookouts to warn sailors drinking inside of any Customs men searching for smugglers. Or, indeed, for Press Gangs – teams of men sent by the Navy to collect anyone incapacitated by drink, and force them into service.
Another pub with ‘Treasure Island’ associations is, of course, King Street’s Llandoger Trow. Tradition has it that Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk, his inspiration for ‘Robinson Crusoe’, here (Selkirk was a Scottish sailor who spent four years marooned on an uninhabited island, before being rescued and brought back to Bristol) and it was also Stevenson’s inspiration for the Admiral Benbow inn in ‘Treasure Island’.
Built in 1664, the Llandoger was one of the last timber-framed buildings built in Bristol – before 1666’s Great Fire of London changed building regulations forever. And the name? Neighbouring Welsh Back was the launch point for boats (or trows) heading across the Bristol Channel to trade with Wales, bringing back slate, stone, timber and coal: Llandogo is a village just 20 miles over the Channel, where trows were built in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The first customers over at the Ostrich, built in 1745, were probably the ships’ captains who built their handsome houses in nearby Guinea Street. The Ostrich has always been connected with the water: for much of the 20th century it was known as a cider house (and furnished inside with bus seats), a spit-and-sawdust joint popular with dock workers, especially crews of the sand dredgers who came up through the harbour to Bathurst Basin, depositing sand at the Holms Sand & Gravel depot near where the John Sebastian Lightship now sits.
Three theories circulate about the pub’s name. It may have been named after a ship from the era, which may have docked in Bristol; sailors may have brought ostrich feathers to the Ostrich from their travels, selling them to the pub as a curio in return for free board and lodging; or, indeed, ladies of the night may have visited the pub, wearing ostrich feathers in their hair. Legend also has it that smugglers used the pub, escaping from waiting Customs officers via the neighbouring Redcliffe Caves – one of the pub’s walls has been partly demolished to reveal the interior of one of the many caves, probably used as a cold store in the early-18th century, perhaps as a hiding place for contraband goods. The cave was subsequently blocked up, then re-discovered in 1866 when the harbour’s new railway lines were laid out.
in cider trading
Rob Merchant runs River City, the pub just along Cumberland Road from the Spike Island arts complex. This place was formerly the Albion, a well-known docker’s pub, until Rob’s arrival in 2007. He has plenty of dockside heritage himself, and not only because he worked on the docks – as a docker and crane driver – throughout the 1970s. Rob’s parents ran the White Horse (then the Orchard) just up the street from 1960 to 1979, at which point Rob himself took over until his move down the street in 2007.
There was, Rob recalls, a friendly rivalry between the Orchard and Albion. Both pubs were popular with the huge Charles Hill workforce just yards away, as well as workers at the Baltic Wharf timber yards. “Both pubs had their own clientele. They’d have the pints lined up along the bar ready for the workers coming in – ‘that’s yours, that one’s got orange, that one’s got a dash of lime’… The siren would go, you’d have five minutes to clean up and then you’d go and get lunch down the pub – bread and cheese, and a couple of pints.
“The Albion was always a beer pub, and the Orchard a cider pub. Lunchtimes were very busy, with people trying to get in as much as they could before going back to work – two, three, four pints in their lunch hour. The pubs shut at 2.30pm, but we were allowed to open on Launch Days – when a ship was launched, in the water, wasn’t leaking, and was made fast alongside with all her new mooring ropes. Everyone would have the day off to celebrate. Then some of those same people would come back on Friday and Saturday nights, dressed up to the nines. This was long before bowling alleys and multiplex cinemas so this was their night out.
“There were so many characters – like Bert Monks, a tall, thin chap who worked in the Charles Hill Yard as a blacksmith’s mate. He always used to carry £1,000 in old blue fivers, bound together with an elastic band in his pocket. And when he got pissed he used to pull ’em out and say, ‘That’s £1,000 there, brother, and that’s to make sure I get a decent burial when I’m dead’.”
Did trade die off when the Charles Hill Yard shut down in ’77? “It was a big blow for my Mum and Dad, because that was their bread and butter trade. There were 1,000 people at Charles Hill – 240 boiler-makers at any one time, for example. But things didn’t change all that drastically. For a while, a lot of the dockers just kept coming back, because they were used to it. And it shut down over a period, not overnight. As always happens, once the docks shut down, workers were coming in to clear the site, and then came the building contractors and the property developers. There’s always been something going on here.”
Long may that continue.
WITH THANKS TO
Brizzle Born and Bred flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/
Old Inns of Bristol (CFW Dening / preface by Maurice Fells / Tempus Publishing, £12.99)