Abstract
This new study of Victorian Bristol addresses a neglected period in the city’s history. Often considered England’s western gateway – sometimes even its western metropolis – from the middle ages through to the eighteenth century, Bristol’s subsequent decline in comparison with the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the North has reduced its importance historiographically as well as historically. Peter Malpass demonstrates that this misses some useful opportunities.
As he explains early in the book, Malpass has a long-standing interest in the spatial and environmental contexts of city life, and has also been exploring Bristol’s potential as a case study since he first moved there in the 1970s. He sets out his case in four propositions: that the physical, built environment of a town is not just a backdrop to its history, but needs to be understood in its own right; that amid all the wider patterns and trends of urbanisation, there are very specific local causes and experiences; that those in turn were driven by local people, but particularly by a middle-class commercial and professional elite; and finally that we need to understand the impact on old towns like Bristol of the sheer scale and scope of building, growth and restructuring in the Victorian era, even if many of its patterns were already visible in earlier times.
Malpass structures his material in two broad parts. The early chapters deal with what he calls ‘key quality-of-life issues’. The public health crisis that Bristol suffered along with most British cities in the 1840s, and the sanitary reform that it provoked, leads into discussion of working-class housing as revealed in case-studies of the city’s Newtown and Bedminster districts. Bristol was also important for its middle-class suburbs, with Clifton and Redland considered in detail here. The middle chapter serves as a bridge between that material and the economic geography of the city, exploring industry and commerce and their impacts on the built environment in which Bristolians spent their working days. That townscape was increasingly built to impress as the century went on, with many large warehouses, banks, office buildings and multi-story factories in the city centre. Another trio of chapters then focus on transport, in the form of railways, the port and the roads, charting the intimate and essential connections between and among these elements of the city’s economy, and also the obstacles that always characterised attempts to make them work more seamlessly and efficiently together. The final chapter reflects on the importance of all these nineteenth-century developments in relation to Bristol’s longer history before and since.
As would be hoped, there is much of interest here for maritime historians, and especially for scholars of port cities. Bristol was founded on land between the rivers Avon and Frome, and managing the relationship between land and water over time moulded the developing townscape of its central area. The Victorians inherited a complicated hydraulic environment that included major pioneering infrastructure works that tried to turn Bristol’s rivers into a mix of engineered city centre docks and canalised navigations via the Avon Gorge to the sea. The resulting harbour district attracted new investment and was becoming what Malpass calls a ‘proto-industrial area’ by the 1820s. However, making the most of that restricted flat space for maritime and related purposes would present serious obstacles to bringing the railway into the dock system in mid-century.
In addition, by the 1830s the Bristol Dock Company was still levying high dues to pay for the Floating Harbour. It also faced major problems keeping the docks clear of sewage from the expanding town and maintaining the necessary depth of water for larger vessels. Battles over the management and modernisation of the port are the focus of Chapter 7, where Malpass argues that the Dock Company was a convenient scapegoat for a wider refusal to take responsibility for the real costs of running a major port. This is a well-known issue in port history, with shipowners constantly demanding reductions in their costs for the public good, while port authorities doubt that those discounts ever reach the public. Another point with wider lessons is Bristol’s extended debate over building docks out in deep water at the mouth of the Avon, some seven miles from the city. A great deal of time and capital was wasted while two private docks companies competed with each other and with the city council; ultimately, Bristol owned the whole system but remained far behind the facilities that northern ports had been building steadily for decades.
Comparing this book with recent writing on ports and port towns, it is interesting to ponder that there remains something of a divide between scholars who start from the city and work outwards, and those who start with the port and work inwards. In other hands, the chapter on the port would have been at the beginning, using the town’s most fundamental raison d’être to drive the structure and argument of the book. Indeed, Malpass sets out clearly at the beginning of this chapter how Victorian port developments exemplify the four propositions with which he frames his overall discussion –perhaps, a port cities specialist would argue, at least as well as some of his other material.
The Boydell Press has made a fine job of this book, with high production standards and a useful set of nearly fifty illustrations from a range of local archive and museum collections. Several of these nicely display Victorian Bristol’s continuing ability to bring large ships into the very heart of the town, in a determined if quixotic commitment to a much older and more intimate connection between land and water.