Tearing down the city in the sky

Photography by Jon Craig

Bristol has had its fair share of grand and bizarre visions of the future, and always will – a symbol of one of the more recent has just been ripped down, writes Chris Brown.

Bristol is a beautiful city: no matter how cynical or one-eyed people can be, there is no doubt that the city has areas that make you feel glad to be part of its energy and making the next chapter of its story.

There are areas though that make you weep.

A few weeks ago, traffic came to a standstill over a weekend as the concrete footbridge over Rupert Street, just a few yards down from the New Bridewell police station and Broadmead, was demolished.

The bridge was a symbol of the new thinking that permeated the planners in Bristol after World War II.

The city had emerged battered and large areas of the city centre in ruins after the war, and new visions of the future were being discussed all over the country.

By the early 1960s though, much of the centre was still undeveloped, and was ripe for the new thinking already put into practice in Germany and the United States.

The Plan for Bristol in 1961 was a city based on the free flow of traffic through the centre, with pedestrians moved onto walkways above the street level. Shops and offices would be accessed from these raised paths in a ‘city in the sky’, leaving more space for the rapidly growing number of cars, vans and lorries on the streets below. 

In a fascinating book published in 1980, The Fight for Bristol – Planning and the growth of public protest, authors Gordon Priest and Pamela Cobb wrote: “The group of architects who put it forward combined super highways with dreaming notions of pedestrian decks to create squares of Venetian splendour.”

These architects were given strength to push forward their ideas by a report in 1963 by Colin Buchanan which warned that Britain’s towns and cities would become paralysed by traffic congestion.

The picture it painted was apocalyptic: “It is impossible to spend any time on the study of the future of traffic in towns,” said the report’s steering group, “without at once being appalled by the magnitude of the emergency that is coming upon us. We are nourishing at immense cost a monster of great potential destructiveness [the motor vehicle], and yet we love him dearly.”

He called for the ‘city in the sky’ model, as well as a series of underground car parks and, in an act that would send a chill down every 21st-century Bristolian driver, called for congestion charging for vehicles coming into a city centre.

The backlash against the full vision meant that Bristol ended up with a fudge. Some of the bridges, including the now former Rupert Street bridge, were built… and were virtually unused. 

The bridge took less than a day to rip down, but the problems of traffic – and its impact on the city centre – will take a lot longer and a lot more strength to deal with.

What were they thinking?

If some of Bristol’s architectural splendour makes you weep and mutter “what were they thinking”, then be grateful that some of the more bizarre and downright disgusting ideas never made it off the drawing board.

Writer Eugene Byrne has written a book that charts the visions of Bristol that never became reality. There are the usual horror plans, such as the idea in the 1960s to fill in the Floating Harbour and turn it into a motorway, but there are other less well celebrated visions. Among the highlights are:

The Bristol Pyramid

Artist-in-residence at the Create Centre, Frank Drake, wanted to build a giant pyramid on top of the building, made out of 320,000 empty wine bottles, and leave it there for a year. It was to be the largest artwork ever made from recycled materials and would be lit – using solar-powered electricity of course – to provide a glowing green beacon that could be seen across the city. Planning permission was indeed granted in the run-up to the year 2000 but, unsurprisingly, Drake never managed to raise the estimated £2.5m cost.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

OK, so the bridge got built and it has become synonymous with the city. But had Brunel’s original proposals come to pass, the bridge would have been elaborately decorated in an Egyptian style, complete with sphinxes.

New Avon bridge

In the late 18th century, William Bridges (yes, a man designing bridges was called Mr Bridges) proposed a structure spanning the Avon which would have included a library, houses, shops and a museum. Needless to say, the cost of creating such a huge structure was a major stumbling block – although had it been built Bristol would be feasting on an increased tourist trade for many years to come.