Meet the people who saved Bristol’s cranes from the scrapyard

Bristol could look very different today if it were not for a group of dedicated campaigners in the 1960s and 70s who stopped huge roads from being built and prevented the removal of the cranes that now stand proudly in front of the M Shed.

The four cranes received Grade II-listed status in November but their position on our city’s skyline remains in peril from the continued development of Wapping Wharf.

Two of the campaigners who helped save the cranes from the scrapyard are Jean Macfarlane and John Grimshaw, who on a recent morning met up for a coffee at New Cut cafe with a panoramic view of the Floating Harbour.

This is the poster that campaigners sold to raise funds to save the cranes – courtesy of Jean Macfarlane

Ninety-year-old Jean now lives in Keynsham while John, 77, lives in Cliftonwood.

Jean and her architect husband Stephen, who sadly died earlier this year, were involved in numerous groups and organisations across Bristol, with the Macfarlane Collection at Bristol Archives named in their honour.

John is a civil engineer who founded Sustrans in 1984 and was its chief executive until 2008. He later helped found Greenways and Cycleroutes dedicated to supporting local groups and local activists to deliver walking and cycling routes.

But back to the cranes as Jean and John share their memories, taking us back to the early 1970s when campaigners who had won the fight against the building of the outer circuit road (which saw the demolition of much of Totterdown for a road that was only eventually partly built between the Lawrence Hill roundabout and the M32) morphed into the City Docks Group.

The four cranes are one of the few landmarks on Bristol’s skyline – photo: Martin Booth

Jean
“We came to Bristol in 1955 and were just getting fed up with things happening without any sort of say of the public at all. We decided that we wouldn’t put up with this much longer. They were taking things down on Sundays, a bit like the Germans coming in and bombing on Sundays. It was horrible.”

John
“In the mid-60s, the council realised that the city docks were the largest area of land they owned so they made a proposal which filled it all in, with a number of little pools. That’s when the Civic Society called a town meeting, a very archaic institution. That’s what stopped the docks from being filled in. The first of the great desecrations was the idea by the city council that you could actually fill in the city docks and build office blocks on them. The next desecration was that instead of filling them in, we’ll blast roads through them.”

A plan for the docks from October 1973 – courtesy of Jean Macfarlane (click on the image above to see the map in more detail)

John
“The council basically continued to consider the docks as wasteland and when they got defeated from filling it in, their next plan was to close the locks at Plimsoll Bridge and put a slipway over the top. The Civic Society took that to parliament.”

Jean
“How could they call it a wasteland! They were still building ships and launching them. There were little ships coming in from Scandinavia with timber.”

John
“And we had a fantastic visit by the Russian fleet. They had the mothership down at Avonmouth and they had about 11 guided missile high speed motor boats in the harbour. I remember watching them going and the blue smoke from their jet engines. That was in the days when there was also powerboat racing.”

John
“We were in a position when we had a philistine council who didn’t give a toss about the harbour. What then happened was that a group of us who had been campaigning as the City Docks Group, coming up with a list of ideas.

“There were 26 cranes in the harbour when they closed it… Gradually as these cranes were lost, Jean and I and a few others realised that we were losing this spectacular skyline. So we got down to four cranes here. They sold two at auction on a Friday for £4,000. Jean basically coordinated a whip-round. I got £4,500 in cash and went over to Newport to the scrappy, put it on his desk and I said, ‘I’m buying them back again’. He said, ‘Fine, have them’.”

Jean
“And we embarrassed the city to such an extent that they didn’t do anything with the other two!”

John
“We were debating whether to buy the other two. But then the next big miracle happened. First of all, we wrote to the city and said, ‘Terribly sorry, those two cranes you sold on Friday, we are actually keeping them’. Then the next thing is that there was a contract to paint cranes number 28 and 29 in Avonmouth docks, but by amazing chance the contractors got the wrong address and painted our two cranes for free. I genuinely don’t know how it happened!”

The word ‘iconic’ is banned in the pages of Bristol24/7, but we can almost make an exception for the cranes – photo: Martin Booth

John
“We haven’t won really. There is no skyline policy in Bristol. The current mayor is just interested in destroying our skyline.”

Jean
“Stephen was always building these skylines to present at the planning meetings.”

John
“We have got such a wonderful skyline in Bristol but it’s so easy to wreck it. He (Marvin Rees) is destroying that aspect of Bristol… Jean and Stephen built High Kingsdown. That’s high density housing at a low level.”

Jean
“The thing about Bristol is that it’s wonderful to have so many hills. You really should be able to have the housing and still have a good skyline.”

John
“I despair of Bristol these days. I have made it my rule that I will not get involved in Bristol projects because it is such a nightmare working here.”

Jean
“When he died, Stephen had a double-page spread in the Western Daily Press and they said that he was partly responsible for the Bristol skyline. There were people at the council who would have hated his guts because he was always there at the planning meetings and a number of people had to go back to the drawing board! But he has had an influence…

“The great thing about these docks here is that you can walk around them. You don’t have to have a pass, there are no gates and people love that. It’s a human space.”

Main photo: Martin Booth

Read next:

• M Shed’s historic dockside cranes become Grade II-listed
• A night in a treehouse on a crane
• M Shed cranes lowered in honour of former curator
• Wapping Wharf shipping containers to be replaced by permanent buildings

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