18 things you didn’t know about Montpelier

1. What’s in a name?

The truth is that nobody knows for sure why Montpelier is called Montpelier, or what its connection, if any, is with Montpellier in France. There’s even an entire website devoted to all the world’s Montpel(l)iers here. In her excellent book Montpelier: A Bristol Suburb (Phillimore, 2004), Mary Wright theorises that Montpellier’s international reputation as a spa town led to anywhere that was rather nice, with lots of clean water and lovely views, being dubbed “fit to be the local Montpellier”. To confuse matters further, some sources claim that France’s Montpellier was originally named Montpelier.

2. Public baths and rumpy-pumpy

In 1764, impecunious yet canny threadmaker Thomas Rennison single-handedly established Montpelier’s reputation as a fiercely independent, bohemian place of recreation and entertainment. Having noticed that sweaty Bristolians came out of the (then much smaller) city to bathe in local ponds, this entrepreneur staved off bankruptcy by establishing Rennison’s Grand Pleasure Baths on the site currently occupied by the Montpelier Health Centre (above). There was a separate bath for ladies, plus elegant tea gardens and a tavern which he called the Old England. Each year, Rennison held a raucous and parodic civic ceremony at which a mock mayor was elected. Contemporary reports hint at much licentious naughtiness taking place with impunity because the baths were outside the city’s boundaries and thus beyond the jurisdiction of local magistrates.

3. Howzat?

Speaking of the Old England, it’s reputed to be the only pub in England whose garden has its own full-sized cricket nets. These were put up by a former landlord for the benefit of Victorian Gloucestershire and England cricketing great W. G. Grace. Huge crowds would gather to watch him practising on Sunday afternoons.

4. Montpelier’s very own copper

There wasn’t a police force in Bristol until 1836. So with very little street lighting and wrong ‘uns roaming around up to no good, Montpelier employed its own nightwatchman, or ‘Charley’. He had the power to arrest miscreants and detain them overnight in his Charley Box. It’s still standing at the bottom of Picton Street (where the post box is). Inside are two tiny cells, one of which retains a manacle on the wall. It’s a private house today, though.

5. Graffiti

84 per cent of all surfaces in Montpelier are covered in squiggles created by ratty little kids armed with spraycans. 71 per cent of these will be photographed by tourists in the mistaken belief that they are genuine Banksys.

6. Dracula once stalked Picton Street

See that brown plaque on 9 Ashley Road, overlooking Picton Street? ‘Sir Henry Irving, actor, lived here’, it tells us. Largely forgotten now, Irving was a huge stage star in his day and the first actor to be knighted. He was also pompous and insufferable, sucking the life out of all his employees at London’s Lyceum Theatre during the late 19th century. Among these was a chap named Abraham Stoker, who worked as the theatre’s business manager for 27 years. When he wrote Dracula in 1897, Bram reputedly based the character on Irving and wanted the great thesp to play the title role on stage. Alas, Irving pronounced Stoker’s work ‘dreadful’.

7. Cary Grant was expelled from Fairfield Grammar School

Until 1918, young Archibald Leach lived with his father and grandmother at 21 Picton Street (above)and was a tearaway pupil at Fairfield Grammar School. Together with a pal, he decided one day to climb a wall to check out the girls’ toilets, as you do. According to his own account, he was caught and expelled in front of the entire school. But his time at Fairfield did do him some good. A school electrician took him backstage at the Bristol Hippodrome. “That’s when I knew,” he later wrote. “What other life could there be but that of an actor?” In 1942, he changed his name to Cary Grant and become one of Hollywood’s definitive leading men.

8. Other famous Montpelier residents, past and present

Grant Marshall, aka Daddy G from Massive Attack; Victorian architect and stage designer Edward William Godwin (1833-1886), who designed the Carriageworks on Stokes Croft (he lived on Richmond Road, above); Turner Prize-winning artist Richard Long; Aardman Animations co-founder David Sproxton.

9. Cromwell wuz here

Montpelier Farmhouse on Ashley Hill was one of the area’s earliest buildings. It also went down in history as the local HQ of General Fairfax and his underling Lt General Cromwell during the first Civil War. Fairfax and Cromwell holed up here in September 1645 prior to leading the New Model Army’s assault on Royalist-held Bristol. Five regiments were deployed in and around Montpelier, their main target being the heavily fortified Prior’s Hill Fort at the top of Nine Tree Hill. The prolonged attack, which Prince Rupert subsequently cited as having influenced his decision to surrender, changing the course of English history, took place under cover of darkness on September 10. Fairfax got a Bristol street named after him. Because of his subsequent political importance, Cromwell took precedence when it came to naming other local streets 200 years later. Montpelier Farmhouse was demolished in 1872.

10. It’s the 30th coolest place to live in Britain

…according to one of those idiot space-filling list features (not like this one, obviously) in The Times back in 2013, which noted that the place is riddled with “artists, musicians and right on types”. Why’s it so bohemian? “Perhaps because it is near to St. Paul’s, the centre of the city’s drugs trade,” asserted the Murdoch paper boldly.

11. Montpelier used to be very stinky

As Bristol grew, it became increasingly insanitary. After a cholera outbreak killed 444 people in the city in 1849, government inspector GT Clark was dispatched to assess the pong. Clark observed that Upper Montpelier “though covered with superior houses is without drainage, except into cesspools.” These discharged their effluent into the open gutter, contaminating local wells. Clark concluded that the whiff was “unsupportable”. His report led to the establishment in 1851 of a city-wide Board of Health. As a consequence, a new branch sewer was constructed to whisk Montpelier’s poop downriver directly into the Avon.

12. Montpelier Health Centre’s homely park bench

Back in 2000, local newspapers claimed that there was a park bench in Portland Square that had its own postcode so homeless people could be delivered their mail. The truth turned out to be slightly less colourful. The bench had been registered as the official home of six people by Montpelier Health Centre because everyone needed an identifiable address in order to access NHS care. Staff at the clinic came up with the idea of registering six homeless people as ‘residents’ of the park bench in order to get round the NHS bureaucracy. Homeless campaigners said the whole thing was totally offensive. The local health authority later changed the rules so that patients could be listed as having no fixed abode, and then register using the address of their GP’s surgery.

13. Our very own loony cult

Montpelier has always been a magnet for the, ahem, spiritually adventurous. In the early ’80s, the Exegesis cult was big round here. And it’s not so long ago that you could have seen orange-clad followers of the Bhagwan (Randy Bogwash to his detractors) wandering about. But none of them can hold a (votive) candle to Brother Cyprian’s monastic order. Back in 1863, a bloke who called himself Father Ignatius (above, caricatured in later life by Vanity Fair) visited Bristol on a mission to found an English Benedictine order. His followers, led by Brother Cyprian (real name Charles Dundas – a toff and scion of the Zetland landowning family), used to process through the streets wearing monks’ robes, causing crowds to gather and taunt them. After falling out with Ignatius, Cyprian retreated to Montpelier Court in Richmond Road (now demolished) to set up his own breakaway Augustine Brotherhood. According to Latimer’s Annals of Bristol, services in the chapel which Cyprian built in his garden attracted “a great number of profligate young people of both sexes” leading to sadly unspecified “unedifying scenes”.

14. The area was badly Blitzed

Montpelier escaped early bombing raids during WWII but was badly hit in March and April 1941, presumably because the Nazis were targeting the railway line to Avonmouth. Buildings were damaged and destroyed in Bath Buildings (above), Cheltenham Road, Ashley Road, Wellington Avenue, York Road, Richmond Road and Fairlawn Road. The Montpelier Stationmaster’s house was razed to the ground as was the Mission Church in York Road. Take a careful look round the streets and you can track the extent of the bombing from the position of new buildings in Georgian terraces.

15. The Great Divide

The most fun one can have in Montpelier on a warm summer’s evening is watching the well-heeled patrons of Bell’s Diner trying not to meet the eyes of colourful members of the local street drinking community through those unfortunately large windows.

16. Montpelier station used to be really, really busy

When it opened in 1874, Montpelier Station had its own resident stationmaster who lived above the waiting room. Even though the line only served Clifton initially, there were 46 trains a day. The Montpelier Hotel in St. Andrews Road was built specifically to serve passengers. So many punters used the line to get to the 1886 Bath and Wells Show on the Downs that the station had to take on four extra porters, one clerk and 12 ticket collectors. Running through the tunnel was also a popular initiation rite among small boys and street urchins back when kids were allowed to play outdoors unsupervised. The challenge is that there’s a bend in the tunnel, so you could get hit by a train.

17. It’s full of foreigners!

Yep, Montpelier is never going to be fertile recruiting ground for UKIP. Poles and Italians were among the earliest wave of post-WWII immigrants. The former purchased the Arley Chapel on Cheltenham Road from the Congregationalists and had it consecrated as a Catholic Church. The Italian community was originally centred on a number of shops and restaurants, notably ace delicatessen C&T Licata & Son (below) on Picton Street (Bristol’s only intact Georgian shopping street, fact fans), which was opened by Sicilian immigrants Carmelo and Teresa Licata back in 1959 and has since expanded into a wholesale import business. Today, Montpelier remains refreshingly cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse. Except for all those damn trustafarians, obviously.

18. Beards, hipsters and trustafarians

According to statistics I have just made up, 42.7 per cent of those who now live in Montpelier are hipsters. This makes Montpelier Bristol’s beard capital. If these beards were laid end-to-end, they would stretch all the way to Clevedon and back. Twice. 87 per cent of these hipsters are also trustafarians. Despite being self-styled bohemians and community activists, they are all vehemently opposed to the Residents’ Parking Scheme because they each own two cars and a beat-up old van to take them to Shambala each year and transport their bongos to Hamilton bloody House for their weekly drumming workshop. Parking permits could cost them as much as 0.0001 per cent of their annual trust fund income.

With grateful acknowledgement to Mary Wright’s Montpelier: A Bristol Suburb (Phillimore, 2004). Additional material by Bristol’s greatest living local historian, Eugene Byrne, whose Tuesday Bristol Times supplement is the only conceivable reason for buying the Post.