13 things you didn’t know about Avonmouth

It’s not just the Clifton Suspension Bridge that is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Also celebrating its sesquicentenary is Avonmouth. We asked David Martyn from Avonmouth150 to share some of his favourite facts about the area.

1. Bevis cross
Avonmouth didn’t exist before the Victorian era. The area then known as River’s Mouth was muddy, wet, exposed and inhospitable. One of the few landmarks was Bewys cross, a 9ft medieval stone cross, a site of veneration by departing mariners, which also acted as a navigation marker for ships entering the Avon heading for Bristol’s docks. After being moved several times the cross eventually ended up as a garden ornament in the walled garden of Kings Weston House.

2. Dumball Island gibbet
At the mouth of the Avon, as a grizzly counterpoint to Bewys cross, there stood the gibbet on Dumball Island. Here the corpses of criminals were regularly displayed as a reminder to seafarers to stay within the law when abroad in Bristol. The site is now lost under the modern docks. 

3. Robert Hooke
Avonmouth has an unusual connection with one of Britain’s greatest early scientists, Robert Hooke. Hooke is most famous for his work Micrographia, a scientific bestseller that was the sensation of the time. Sir Robert Southwell who owned nearby Kings Weston House in 1693 was president of the Royal Society, and got his good friend Hooke to design the elaborate sea walls, sluices and wharfs that defended his estate from the Severn tides. The line of these historic sea walls can still be traced through parts of Avonmouth.

4. SS Great Eastern
Brunel’s first two ships have a famous connection with Bristol, but less well known is that his final ship, the gigantic SS Great Eastern almost ended up calling Bristol home. In 1858 the company directors visited, and seriously considered Avonmouth as a home port. Newspapers reported it was almost a dead certainty and that Bristol had unassailable advantages over the other contender, Milford Haven. Ultimately the vessel sailed from Liverpool. 

5. A muddy bank in the middle of nowhere
Exactly 150 years ago a new railway linking the docks in central Bristol with the tidal estuary of the Severn opened along the east bank of the River Avon. The port and pier railway terminated at a muddy bank in the middle of nowhere; the new station being opened to serve ships avoiding the hazardous bends of the Avon by offloading at a new pontoon pier. The new station, opened in 1865, was christened Avonmouth, the first known use of the name, and became the foundation for the modern district.

6. A new Bournemouth?
The new station was complemented with a commercial hotel to cater for passengers arriving and departing from the new floating pier. Although the hotel developed its own pleasure gardens to attract day trippers from Bristol, the pier was never intended to be a tourist attraction, catering more for offloading cattle than it did pleasure-seekers.

7. Lines for liners
The railway has been as important to the development of Avonmouth as the Docks. In its time the village has had six individual stations including two to exclusively serve the ocean liner trade. Today Avonmouth station serves more than 110,000 passengers a year.

8. The first docks
Kings Weston’s owner Philip Skinner Miles had built the railway with the intention of forming new docks at mouth of the river. Unpopular with the City Council who ran the rival facilities in the city centre the Avonmouth Docks took a further 12 years to get agreed and built. It opened on February 24, 1877. The old basin still forms part of the modern dock.

9. Many Miles
As the owners of all the land around the docks the Miles family of Kings Weston House were responsible for the development of much of Avonmouth village from the original railway through to the twentieth century. There are reminders everywhere today, in street names, the Miles Arms pub, and in an ornate carved family coat of arms, prominently facing the old dock gates high up on the Royal Hotel.  

10. Thwarted ambitions
In the 1890s Napier Square was boldly planned as a grand formal public square lined on four sides with stone-built houses. Unfortunately plans ground to a halt when the Great Western Railway drove their line to Henbury through the part-built square. Only the one side of the square exists today squeezed against the dock boundary.

11. More grandiose plans
In the 1900s Philip Napier Miles developed Avonmouth as “Kings Weston Estate”, an ambitious masterplan to develop a huge new town around the docks. Thousands of acres of new offices, parks, factories and homes were laid out in a lavish promotional booklet, all linked with geometric gridded streets, but only St Andrews Road and the new docks entrance were ever completed as part of the plans.

12. Eccentric architects 
Avonmouth has a wealth of rich Edwardian architecture. Much of it was designed by the Kings Weston Estate architect Frederick Bligh Bond. Bligh Bond went on to archaeologically excavate the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey with the help of a long-dead monk who communicated to him and a spiritualist medium using ‘automatic writing’. What the monk was doing through the architect’s offices in Baldwin Street where the sessions took place is not known.

13. Avonmouth goes bananas
Green Lane in Avonmouth has an odd connection to bent yellow fruit. The dwindling fortunes of the dock were largely saved in 1901 by a £40,000 Government contract for new shipping services to the West Indies. The new shipping company, run by Elder Dempster Lines, based itself at Avonmouth to provide banana boats and the colonial mail service. The houses of Green Lane were part of “Eldertown”, a development created for company staff in the burgeoning banana trade.