News / Beacon Tower
Colston Tower becomes Beacon Tower
What was originally called the Colston Centre remains – with a new name, Beacon Tower – as a reminder of the vision of Bristol’s town planners of the 1960s.
Designed in 1961 but not completed until 1973, the Colston Centre’s 14-storey tower is raised over a podium curving around the tight Colston Street junction that is now part of Bambalan bar and restaurant.
It takes a leap of imagination to picture the pedestrian walkway that, in the words of Pevsner’s Architectural Guide to Bristol, “was to have launched from its prow across the Centre”.
is needed now More than ever
Part of the aborted ‘city in the sky’ project, the ambition of the 1960s planners was to create a Bristol which would have seen those on foot able to get around on elevated concrete walkways connecting to spacious plazas, as cars travelled below.
The last vestiges of the lofty scheme were footbridges over Nelson Street, Rupert Street and Lewins Mead that were finally demolished in 2015.
Now, the Colston Tower is also officially no more.
On Tuesday afternoon, its signage was finally replaced by its new moniker seven months after its old name was removed in the days after the statue of Edward Colston was toppled from its plinth only a few hundred yards away.
Beacon Tower is on Colston Street, which some local residents want to rename – photo: Martin Booth
Beacon Tower, which shares its name with a block of flats in Fishponds, looks down upon the former Colston Hall, now known as Bristol Beacon.
Twenty businesses based at the tower voted to rename the building, with Beacon Tower being chosen from a shortlist of four which also included Unity Tower, Vantage Point and Century Tower.
This former footbridge above Lewins Mead was one of the last vestige’s of Bristol’s planned ‘city in the sky’ – photo: Martin Booth
Main photo: Martin Booth
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