The town of Brycgstow (Old English, “the place at the bridge”) was in existence by the beginning of the 11th century, and under Norman rule acquired one of the strongest castles in southern England. The River Avon in the city centre has slowly evolved into Bristol Harbour, and since the 12th century the harbour has been an important port, handling much of England’s trade with Ireland.

In 1247 a new bridge was built and the town was extended to incorporate neighbouring suburbs, becoming in 1373 a county in its own right. During this period Bristol also became a centre of shipbuilding and manufacturing. Bristol was the starting point for many important voyages, notably John Cabot’s 1497 voyage of exploration to North America.

By the 14th century Bristol was England’s third-largest town (after London and York), with perhaps 15-20,000 inhabitants on the eve of the Black Death of 1348-49. The plague inflicted a prolonged pause in the population growth of Bristol, with numbers remaining at 10-12,000 through most of the 15th and 16th centuries. Bristol was made a city in 1542, with the former Abbey of St Augustine becoming Bristol Cathedral. During the 1640s Civil War the city suffered through Royalist military occupation and plague.

Renewed growth came with the 17th-century rise of England’s American colonies and the rapid 18th-century expansion of England’s part in the Atlantic trade in Africans taken for slavery in the Americas. Bristol, along with Liverpool, became a significant centre for the slave trade although few slaves were brought to Britain. During the height of the slave trade, from 1700 to 1807, more than 2000 slaving ships were fitted out at Bristol, carrying a (conservatively) estimated half a million people from Africa to the Americas and slavery.

Fishermen who left Bristol were long part of the migratory fishery to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and began settling that island permanently in larger numbers around this time. Bristol’s strong nautical ties meant that maritime safety was an important issue in the city, In the 19th century Samuel Plimsoll, “the Sailor’s friend”, campaigned fearlessly to make the seas safer. He was shocked by the scandal of overloaded cargoes and successfully fought for a compulsory loadline on ships.

Competition from Liverpool from c.1760, the disruption of maritime commerce through war with France (1793) and the abolition of the slave trade (1807) contributed to the city’s failure to keep pace with the newer manufacturing centres of the North and Midlands. The long passage up the heavily tidal Avon Gorge, which had made the port highly secure during the middle ages, had become a liability which the construction of a new “Floating Harbour” (designed by William Jessop) in 1804-9 failed to overcome. Nevertheless, Bristol’s population (66,000 in 1801) quintupled during the 19th Century, supported by new industries and growing commerce. (more…)

Bristol (IPA: bris’t?l) is a city, unitary authority and ceremonial county in South West England. It is situated 115 miles (185 km) west of London at 51°27′14?N, 2°35′48?W. With a population of 400,000, and metropolitan area of 550,000, Bristol is England’s sixth, and the United Kingdom’s ninth, most populous city. As such, it is one of England’s core cities. It was chartered as a city in 1155 and county in 1373. For half a millennium Bristol was the second or third largest English city, until the rapid rise of Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, in the Industrial Revolution of the 1780s. The city borders on the unitary districts of Bath and North East Somerset, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, and has a short coastline on the Bristol Channel.

Bristol is one of the main centres of culture, employment and education in the region. From its earliest days, its prosperity has been linked to that of the Port of Bristol, the commercial port, which was in the city centre but has now moved to the Bristol Channel coast at Avonmouth and Portbury. In more recent years the economy has been built on the aeronautic industry, and the city centre docks have been regenerated as a centre of heritage and culture. The city is famous for its unique music and film industries, and was a finalist for the 2008 European Capital of Culture.

Bristol has been a trading center since the 12th cent. First chartered as a city in 1155, it became a separate county by order of Edward III in 1373, the first provincial town to receive this honor. During the reign of Edward III the manufacture of woolen cloth was developed. The cloth was exported chiefly to Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. From Bristol the explorers John Cabot and his son Sebastian (to whom there is a monument on Brandon Hill) sailed to Newfoundland and America. In the 18th cent. Bristol was active in the colonial triangular trade: English goods went to Africa; African slaves to the West Indies; and West Indian sugar, rum, and tobacco to Bristol. The Great Western (1838), one of the first transatlantic steamships, and the Great Britain (1845) the first ocean steamship with a screw propeller, were launched from Bristol.

The port declined during the late 18th and early 19th cent. because of competition from Liverpool, the end of slave trading, and the decline of the West Indian trade. It revived in the mid-19th cent. The city was heavily damaged during World War II. The poets Thomas Chatterton and Robert Southey were born there.