21 things you didn’t know about Stokes Croft

Riots, lewdness and debauchery, pig-faced ladies, highway robbery, a vegan café on the site of a gallows, female pugilists, Bristol’s top freemason, Banksy, and the world’s first parachuting cat. It can only be Stokes Croft.

1. Whose Croft?

That’ll be John Stoke, who lived in Redcliff Street and was mayor of Bristol in 1832. He bagged the croft (or enclosure) from Berewyke of Redelond (that’s Redland). Mind you, it were all fields round here back then. Bristol historian John Latimer records that in the early 18th century, “Stoke’s Croft was a rural promenade, having fields on either side, and was sheltered from the summer sun by rows of trees.” Sounds lovely, eh? Nobody knows when or why it lost its apostrophe.

2. Munchies

Rival takeaways Rita’s and Slix have been meeting the munchies needs of inebriated Bristolians staggering through Stokes Croft on their way home to civilisation since the dawn of recorded history. They will continue to do so until the heat death of the universe.

3. Stand and deliver!

Stokes Croft has always been popular with the criminal classes. Latimer reports that highway robberies were frequent occurrences in the 18th century.  He records that during one evening in the autumn of 1777, “the Birmingham coach was stopped within a hundred yards of Stoke’s Croft by two footpads armed with blunderbusses, who robbed the passengers of about £5.” Meanwhile, continuing that tradition…

4. Bristol’s mugging hotspot

According to a completely unverifiable story told to your correspondent by a local copper, Bristol’s Autumn mugging hotspot is the junction of Moon Street and Stokes Croft. The victims are generally disoriented, drunken freshers. Muggers favour this spot because the sharp crook in the road means that they only have to frogmarch their victims a few metres to get them out of sight. They can then be relieved of as much of their student loans as they’ve been foolhardy enough to carry in cash.

5. Music and masons

Established in 1903, the family-run Mickleburgh’s music shop is one of Stokes Croft’s oldest surviving businesses. It also has another claim to fame. For many years, up until the early 1990s, the Right Worshipful Brother Alfred George John Mickleburgh was Bristol’s most senior freemason. Indeed, he was the Provincial Grand Master of the Bristol Lodge on Park Street, where they get up to all that funny business with trowels and trouser legs.

6. Tally ho!

The earliest recorded Bristol riding school was opened on 2 February 1761 by RC Carter, a “riding master” from London. It occupied the Circular Stables in Backfields, just behind Stokes Croft between City Road and Wilder Street.

7. Cheapest bikes in Bristol

Ever been approached on Stokes Croft by a dishevelled gentleman with an urgent desire to sell his expensive bicycle at a knock-down price? Haven’t we all?  Here’s why. Enterprising members of the local homeless community have been known to a engage in a novel wealth redistribution programme. They saunter up to Hamilton House and use bolt cutters to liberate the trustafarians’ bikes chained up outside.

8. A proud history of lewdness and debauchery

Back at the turn of the 18th century, the country was in the grip of one of its periodic fits of morality. The Society for the Reformation of Manners was the prime mover, and soon began making waves in Bristol. Ever-droll John Latimer reports that the local grand jury had already enjoyed success in campaigning against music rooms, ale-houses and “idle walking on the Lord’s Day”. But their bete noire was “lewdness and debauchery by the acting of stage plays”. They campaigned vigorously to persuade local magistrates of the evils of theatre, warning that if play-acting were permitted within the city it would “corrupt and debauch our youth, and utterly ruin many apprentices and servants, already so unruly and licentious that they are with great difficulty kept under any reasonable order or government by their masters.” All to no avail. In 1705, a group of players set up a theatre in Stoke’s Croft, which was then just a few yards outside the city boundaries and thus beyond the reach of the authorities. Their scandalous productions were Love for Love and The Provoked Husband. Needless to say, the punters loved it and the players made a triumphant return the following year.

9. The least accurately named business in Bristol

Nobody has ever received a massage at The Massage Club. Nor does one need to be a member to gain admission.

10. Stokes Croft Brewery

Image courtesy of Bristol Industrial Archaeological Society www.b-i-a-s.org.uk 

Yep, Stokes Croft once had its own brewery. What’s more, the Stokes Croft Brewery was one of the oldest brewing firms in the country. It was situated at the junction of Stokes Croft and City Road, where the new flats and chemist are now. The brewery had various owners. One of the earliest was Foll and Abbott, who’d sell you a gallon of their FA Pale Bitter Ale for a shilling (5p) back in 1869.

11. Pig-faced ladies and living skeletons

The area we now call the Bear Pit was once at the centre of one of the largest annual fairs in Europe, which began on July 25, 1238. How come? Well, that’s the feast day of St James, who gives his name to the Priory Church of St. James (now tucked away behind the bus station) and, er, that lovely roundabout. The fifteen-day fair was so popular that merchant ships sailing to Bristol to hawk their wares were often targeted by Barbary pirates. Over the years, the fair became increasingly riotous, with much disgraceful drunkenness and prostitution. One huckster even tried to pass off a shaved bear in coat and trousers as an ‘Ethiopian savage’. But the authorities turned a blind eye because the fair brought in so much loot. By 1837, however, they’d had enough and banned it altogether. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was an incident in 1836 when actor Samuel Bartlett shot his mother-in-law. He was swiftly hanged, but his enterprising fellow thesps promptly wrote and performed a taste-free stage version of the case. Latimer offers a particularly colourful description of the entertainments on offer at the fair: “…menageries, circuses, theatres, puppet shows, waxworks, flying coaches, rope-dancers, acrobats, conjurors, pig-faced ladies, living skeletons, and mummers of all sort who attracted patrons by making a perfect din. It need scarcely be added that the scene attracted a too plentiful supply of pickpockets, thieves, thimble-riggers and swindlers of every genus.” Kind of like a proto-Glastonbury Festival, then. Alas, St. James Barton was bombed heavily during WWII and was subsequently rebuilt. All that remains to remind us of the fairs are the street names Horsefair and Haymarket. Stroll through the bear pit today, however, and you can still see the descendants of those pig-faced ladies and living skeletons.

12. From ugly office to swanky flats

Once dubbed the ugliest building in Bristol, 51:02, which straddles the road at the lower end of Stokes Croft, used to be known as Avon House North. These were the offices of the equally unloved Avon County Council. Today, Avon County Council is no more, as indeed is the County of Avon (though nobody seems to have told the people who design those annoying drop-down menus in online contact forms). And the famously grotty offices have been converted into swanky accommodation. Don’t expect much change from £250,000 for a two bedroom flat if you fancy getting down with the bohemian types on a residential basis.

13. String ’em up

Tuckett’s Buildings, at the north end of Stokes Croft by the junction with Ashley Road, is currently home to the Here Gallery, the Arts House and Café Kino. This was erected in Victorian times on the site of a gallows, which must have been kept busy with Stokes Croft’s seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of ne’er-do-wells. Legend has it that human remains of these wrong ‘uns were unearthed when the foundations were dug.

14. Punch-ups at the Full Moon

The Full Moon Inn in North Street is one of the oldest surviving buildings on Stokes Croft. It was probably built at the beginning of the 18th century, but has undergone several facelifts since then. It was a regular stop for stagecoaches, as it was on the main road to Gloucester and the Midlands. Latimer reports that the Full Moon played host to many a celebrated pugilist too. Two prize fights took place here in June 1727, “one of the competitors in both battles being ‘Mr. Shiney’, the champion of the West.” Feminists may wish to note that fights between ladies were equally popular. Felix Farley’s Journal advertised the following fight in the nearby fields in 1729: ‘Complete Boxing Bout by Moll Buck of this City and Mary Baker from London for seven guineas’.

15. The Battle of the Carriageworks

John Perry opened his coach-making business on Stokes Croft back in 1804. When the building was destroyed by fire, noted local architect E.W. Godwin was commissioned to design a new factory on the site. His grand Bristol Byzantine building opened in 1862. Its open-fronted ground floor arcades were a huge showroom for everything the well-heeled Victorian traveller could require, from luxurious Brougham carriages to one-horse dogcarts. Alas, the bastard motor car did for the carriage trade and the company went bankrupt in 1912. The Grade II-listed building has been empty for the last 30 years, but proposals by developers Fifth Capital to turn it, and adjacent Westmoreland House, into – you guessed it – 118 luxury flats have met with strong local resistance. After Aardman Animations co-founder David Sproxton signed a letter of objection, Fifth Capital director Marc Pennick demonstrated a firm grasp of public relations by telling the BBC: “I don’t need a lecture from someone who makes fictional animations. Maybe his time would be best spent on making another Wallace and Gromit animation which will be hopefully better than the last one.” He’ll be having a pop at that tenth-rate dauber Banksy next, just you see. Speaking of whom…

16. Mild mild splat

Many of the buildings in Stokes Croft are now so old that they are held up only by layers of paint. These have been sprayed on by those public-spirited hordes of wannabe Banksys who now infest the Croft, enveloping the entire area in a fine mist of atomised paint particles. Indeed, it has recently been calculated (by me) that enough paint is sprayed onto walls in Stokes Croft each year to fill three Olympic swimming pools. The area’s most famous artwork was the early Banksy entitled The Mild Mild West. In 2009, an organisation styling itself Appropriate Media set out to create what it described as an “alternative version of this alternative Bristol landmark”. This they achieved by imaginatively splattering it with red paint, vandalising the work of Bristol’s favourite vandal. There’s a rich irony in there somewhere, amid the stupidity.

17. All hail the Mighty Banana!

While not enjoying universal popularity, the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft has certainly succeeded in making the area more colourful. Its supremo is Chris Chalkley, who runs the operation from Jamaica Street. Under a little-known local bye-law, as King of Stokes Croft Mr. Chalkley has the right to park his distinctive Mighty Banana van wherever he damn well pleases, including pavements and cycle lanes.

18. Missionaries and new agers

In 1777, a Baptist College was established on Stokes Croft, “for the education of pious young men for the exercise of the Christian ministry in the Baptist denomination”. Its main aim was to churn out missionaries and its library boasted a collection of “Hindoo idols” snaffled from India. The college’s most famous son was the missionary and explorer George Grenfell, who followed in Livingstone and Stanley’s footsteps, taking Christianity to those lucky folks of the Congo and Cameroons in the late 19th century. The Baptist College building was later taken over by Christian Scientists and eventually demolished in 1972. Two years later, the unlovely office block known as Hamilton House sprung up on the site. One wonders what pious Mr. Grenfell would have made of the hipster hangout’s ‘Spectrum of Ecstasy’ tantric psychology workshop and ‘Tibetan Sound Healing Meditation’. Mind you, the recently rebranded ‘Love Inn’ just up the road used to be a preparatory school for young ladies.

19. Artists, disreputable hacks and Naval reservists

37-39 Jamaica Street, the home of Jamaica Street Artists, was formerly the office of local listings mag Venue, many of whose refugees now work for Bristol24/7. Before that, way back in 1914, it was the Bristol depot of the Royal Naval Reserve, where reservists would be directed when they were called up. The Navy was not short of manpower and many of these blokes ended up in the Royal Naval Division, an infantry formation set up by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who liked the idea of having a private army of his own.

20. The world’s first parachuting cat (possibly)

The first Bristolian to make a parachute descent was a cat, dropped from a balloon above Stokes Croft. Skip down memory lane, if you will, to September 1810. A couple of balloon ascents had been made in Bristol during the late 18th century using Montgolfier’s magical heated air system. But now something even more astonishing was to be demonstrated by a Mr. Sadler: a balloon ascent using hydrogen gas. Now hydrogen was pretty hard to come by in those days, so they used three tons of iron filings and a proportionate amount of sulphuric acid in 25 giant casks to generate enough of it to fill their gasbag. Latimer reports that “almost the whole population, and many thousands from the surrounding villages, flocked to Stokes Croft” to witness the ascent. “The balloon arose at the time appointed, amidst the firing of cannon and the applause of the spectators, not a little astounded at the spectacle.” Mr. Sadler and his fellow ‘acronaut’ then tossed the unfortunate moggie overboard. The presumably somewhat surprised beast parachuted serenely to earth, where it was rescued and adopted by a local doctor, who named it Balloon.

21. “Hey mum, I’m on the telly – that’s me being walloped by a truncheon!”

Stokes Croft made national news in April 2011 with two riots. We could be pedantic and insist that these were actually the Lower Cheltenham Road riots, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring about it. The whole thing kicked off after the rozzers raided a squat named Telepathic Heights opposite the new Tesco Express, which had been the subject of protest by community activists keen to resist corporate takeover of hipsterville. The cops’ actions were criticised as heavy-handed, not least by Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy. Despite being trashed, the Tesco store opened shortly afterwards. One important concession had been won, however: this remains the only convenience store in the entire area that doesn’t sell cheap booze (or any booze whatsoever). And given Tesco’s recent corporate woes, it could yet fall victim to something even more powerful than community activism: market forces. When the ailing corporate giant announced the closure of 43 unprofitable outlets in January 2015, 18 of these were Express stores.

Many thanks, once again, to Bristol’s top local historian Eugene Byrne for additional material.