Bristol

Bristol is England’s sixth provincial city, our largest city west of London or south of Birmingham, with almost half a million people against 200,000 in Plymouth, her nearest western rival; yet there have been moments during the last century and a half when she has strangely slipped out of public notice. The cities that have come to the forefront have been the new giants and heroes of the Industrial Revolution—Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds; but by comparison with, say, Birmingham, Bristol can point to four times as long a period of civic eminence. Geography helps to explain the position she has occupied; for Bristow, or Bristol, means the “place of the bridge”; and it was as a river-crossing from Wessex into Mercia, not primarily as a port, that the Saxon settlement came into being. But it was as a port that she subsequently prospered. Here the Avon joins the Severn, not within the territory of one province but of two. Bristol is not too far up Channel to serve the south-west, nor is it too far down to be of use to the Severn basin, a crucial district in medieval England.