We’re all familiar with the widescreen charms of Bristol’s Harbourside. But have you ever wondered what goes on behind those half-hidden gates and down those gloomy, forgotten waterways? Mark Sayers charges up the company torch, jumps in a dinghy and heads off-piste to get the history behind the mystery
The sensation was a curious mix of excitement and faint nausea. We were in near pitch darkness, aided only slightly by the trusty Shipshape torch, and were paddling along a black stretch of water just yards underneath one of Bristol’s busiest roundabouts.
It was a bright autumnal day and your writer, the Shipshape photographer and our guide, sailor and author Thom Axon, were in a small dinghy a few metres inside the moat of Bristol Castle.
Though not a structure known to many Bristolians, the castle was one of the grandest in the kingdom in its pomp and stood, from the 11th century to its destruction in 1656, in Castle Park. In order to build its moat, William the Conqueror’s associate Robert of Gloucester diverted the waters of the Frome around the castle walls via a series of weirs (today’s Broad Weir, Wine Street’s eastern extension, would have formed part of the castle’s northern moat).
Most of this moat has now been covered over by the streets surrounding Castle Park, but a small inlet of the Floating Harbour on the park’s southern edge – you’ll see it as you walk eastwards through the park – leads into the moat complex. It is theoretically possible – though certainly not advisable, and we didn’t do so – to continue by rowing boat and then on foot underneath the park, via the moat and then the Frome, coming up for air by way of a staircase and a small wooden door (kept locked) opening onto Broad Weir’s southern pavement, underneath the Castle Park walls and opposite Piccolino’s restaurant. The Frome then runs upstream towards junction two of the M32, by IKEA, with the last stretch being over ground: downstream, it travels underneath Rupert Street towards the Centre.
Our short dinghy journey was fascinating but, er, dingy: there’s a damp, airless smell in there, coupled with the distinct scent of dead pigeon. For many decades dead animals pitched up in the Frome. So much so, in fact, that allegedly there was once a dedicated ‘Dead Dog Boat’ to patrol its waters.
Free the Frome
The hidden Frome is responsible for many of the harbour’s most fascinating stories and secrets. The river runs unseen for well over a mile beneath the streets of central Bristol: down the centuries, it has had its course altered and blocked, has been used for defence and, for centuries, as an open sewer.
In the 1240s, a little after Bristol Castle was built, the river was once again diverted from its original course, with Bristol’s port growing ever busier. The Frome was channelled into what is now the Centre, joining the Avon at Watershed. Bristol’s new harbour featured quays and loading bays galore, and St Augustine’s Trench (today’s St Augustine’s Parade or ‘The Centre’) became the heart of it. To this day, the road sign at the Centre’s northern limit reads both ‘Colston Avenue’ and ‘Quay Head’, an eloquent reminder of the Centre’s very maritime past.
For centuries thereafter, Bristol was England’s second busiest port behind London. The poet Alexander Pope, visiting in 1739, commented of St Augustine’s Trench that: “In the middle of the street as far as you can see are hundreds of ships, their masts thick as they stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising thing imaginable.”
Harbour mastery
There was a problem, though. The river Avon, on its six-mile stretch from the Bristol Channel into town, has a huge tidal range – the entrance to the Floating Harbour can regularly experience ranges of 11.6 metres between low and high tide (and 16 metres at its mouth, at Avonmouth), making Bristol’s the third biggest tidal range in the world, after the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia and Quebec’s Ungava Bay.
This vast tidal range brought with it one major advantage and one major drawback. On the plus side, it meant that ships – in the days before engines – could be swept up the Avon into Bristol’s docks at a decent lick. The downside was that at low tide ships would sink down into the mud, making it an inconvenient, often dangerous place to moor. Eighteenth-century Bristol may have been a busy port but it was not popular with ship owners forced to watch their boats sinking into the mud at low tide, with valuable cargoes lost. Bristol’s trade seemed to be ebbing away with the tide.
With other cities like Liverpool catching up fast, from 1804-1809 the Floating Harbour was completed, cutting off a stretch of the Avon from Rownham (near Hotwells) to Netham. It became the largest ‘impounded’ dock (ie. cut off from tides) in the world – a vast artificial lake.
Under the designs of William Jessop, a major engineer of Britain’s canal age who had also engineered the Caledonian Canal, the River Trent navigation system and many others, the beds of the rivers Avon and Frome were sealed off so that water could remain at a constant level, meaning no more mud larks for the ship owners.
The Avon was diverted through Bedminster via the New Cut, and the Floating Harbour – so called because the boats in it were able to float on a constant water level – was created. Jessop’s original western dam, the Overfall, is now underground near Underfall Yard, and the Avon now drains through sluices or underfalls. The point where the New Cut met the original tidal Avon is now marked by an unobtrusive steel hut on the Chocolate Path, running alongside Cumberland Road towards the Create Centre.
This frenzy of engineering, and the subsequent slow decline of the harbour from working port to leisure amenity, means that there is plenty of historic, superseded or ‘ghost’ dockside architecture on view around the docks. For example, there were originally two entrances to the harbour by Spike Island’s Nova Scotia pub – since shipping has declined dramatically, though, the southern entrance (Jessop’s original lock from the harbour’s 1809 construction, right by the Nova’s outside seating) has now been closed off, with Merchants Road constructed over it. There are also two further blocked-up locks further west into the Cumberland Basin and, at low tide, you can see the gridiron, where ships could dry out and undergo repairs.
The locks at Bathurst Basin and Totterdown have also been blocked up, with the latter, in particular, very well hidden. The fixed swing bridge at the end of Commercial Road, by the Louisiana pub, spans the former lock entrance into Bathurst Basin. The lock was blocked at the beginning of the Second World War, with fears that a German bomb there could drain the harbour: it was then permanently sealed in 1952. Further upstream, among the bushes by Cattle Market Road, you can see the remains of Totterdown Lock, which allowed barges and smaller vessels to lock in and out of the New Cut and was also decommissioned during World War II for fear of bombing.
Going underground
One unfortunate side-effect of Jessop’s brilliant scheme was that the Frome, which had always been used as a sewage and rubbish dumping-ground along its passage through east Bristol, now had no tide to sweep all this refuse away. The Frome soon became a festering sewer and by 1825 it was time to divert it again – this time away from St Augustine’s Trench and down Mylne’s Culvert, a new channel which led the river from its existing course at the northern end of the Trench, underneath Prince Street to join the Avon/New Cut near Southville’s Gaol Ferry Bridge.
So, contrary to popular belief, the Frome mostly flows not into the harbour at Watershed, but beneath Prince Street and into the Avon. The exception to this is when the river is in flood, when overflow will pass over the concrete dam under the Centre’s northern edge to join the Floating Harbour outside Watershed.
This section can be visited, by authorised personnel only, via an entrance down from the pavement on the northern edge of the Centre, by the large building known as Electricity House. For decades, access was via a green pillar box, now housed in the M Shed museum. A ladder descends from the spot (now simple metal grilles in the pavement) for several feet, allowing access to a large area of underground riverside.
The area beneath Cascade Steps at the Centre’s southern end, meanwhile, is the headwaters of the harbour, as well as being an overflow option for the Frome – but this space is also inaccessible to the public, being full of electrical panels and other hazards. From here you can see approximately 20 metres up the culvert – after that, though, it’s pitch darkness.
Although the Frome was diverted several times, it wasn’t finally covered over until 1858: its inner-city stretch, from the Centre to St Pauls, was then covered over in stages over the next few decades, with modern streets like Rupert and Fairfax Streets built over the culverted river. St Augustine’s Trench was the last stretch of the Frome to be covered, with the northern half (from Electricity House down as far as Baldwin Street) covered over for the 1893 Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition. The rest (including the Hippodrome and down as far as Watershed) remained open, and busy with shipping, until 1938.
Bristol’s harbour, as team Shipshape learned on our chug around it in Thom’s dinghy, has many secrets to give up. Blocked-up channels, in-filled locks and covered waterways, gateways, inlets and unassuming doorways give plenty of clues to the eventful lives of the rivers Frome and Avon – and of one of the most impressive feats of civil engineering in the world.
thanks to
Thom Axon of ‘Devil and the Deep’ – deckheads.blogspot.com,
Sally Watson, ‘Secret Underground Bristol’ (Bristol Junior Chamber),
Andy King at M Shed, Bristol and bristolfloatingharbour.org.uk. For more on the Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition and to see what the Centre looked like at the time, visit http://brisray.com/bristol/bexhib1.htm