All ship shape
BRUNEL'S MASTERPIECE: The SS Great Britain. Below, the New Room the oldest Methodist chapel in the world and centre of operations for John Wesley. Botton, Peros bridge.
BRISTOL: The SS Great Britain was the theme of a weekend away for Paul Kirkwood, who also found another piece of maritime history.
Negotiating traffic on a city centre dual carriageway on a wet Friday evening while trying to find a hotel wasn’t the ideal start to a weekend with my sister in Bristol. But the following day the rain cleared to reveal a fascinating city worthy of far more attention than I paid it on my one previous visit to watch a football match at Bristol City in the ’80s.
We began by visiting the New Room, a magnificently restored Wesleyan chapel that, as a result of Second World War bombing in the vicinity, is now located within a shopping centre. The oldest Methodist chapel in the world, the New Room was the centre of operations for John Wesley in the mid-18th century.
Upstairs is a suite of lodging rooms and a common room for his fellow preachers. Displays include mugs and other memorabilia bearing his name. He was something of a celebrity. During his lifetime he spread the word by riding 250,000 miles on horseback to deliver 40,000 sermons. Not everyone supported his doctrine. The chapel has no windows partly to avoid window tax but also to provide his opponents with fewer to break. Two pulpits on different levels were also designed with potential aggro in mind. The lower one was for bible readings while the upper pulpit was for the more contentious sermons. Speakers were harder to assault from this point and could easily scarper via a gantry back to their private quarters upstairs. The lantern window of the chapel, the pillars of the preachers’ rooms and the panelling all have nautical echoes which led us neatly to the main event.
I could never have believed that the hull of a ship could be so beautiful until I visited the SS Great Britain, the first great ocean liner built by Brunel and launched in 1837. We admired the perfect curves – designed without a single kilobyte of CAD software, of course – and giant propeller from the bottom of the dry dock as the first stage in a tour of the ship. This is an attraction firmly in the premier league: fascinating history, skilfully presented and imaginatively brought to life.
When the SS Great Britain was restored in the 1970s, so little was left of the fixtures and fittings that the ship today is actually more of a recreation than a restoration but no less impactful for it. As you explore the lower decks you hear the constant drone of the engine and clank of chains being winched. Models of horses bray and their hooves scuff the floor as you peer into the stable area. Children love snooping around the cabins, yelping with excitement at the various tableaux.
There’s a monkey, a cat, a rat next to a vomiting passenger, a woman giving birth, a man having his hair cut and two women brawling. In the galley, you can see the remains of meals; on the quayside a goose sticks its head out of a wicker basket. It’s these details that really make the ship come to life in an extraordinarily evocative manner. After a while you wonder if you can actually feel the ship yawing on the ocean swell.
We next visited M Shed housed in a former 1950s transit shed. Having only opened in June and with free admission, the £27m museum is tremendously popular. It tells the story of Bristol life, people and places in a very contemporary manner with displays arranged according to theme as opposed to epoch.
That means, for instance, in a glass cabinet titled Music and Performance a Mass book from the year 1500 sits next to CDs by Tricky while among the Misbehaviour displays are a pewter flagon from the 1400s and a pink tweed teddy boy’s jacket from the early 1960s. Flagging after an intensive day of reading displays, we opted for the open-top bus tour which would drop us practically at the door. It was a relief to sit back and let the attractions come to us for a change. We saw the block of flats where Only Fools and Horses was filmed and the home of cricketer WG Grace. On Clifton Downs, we passed grand houses built on the profits of the slave trade. As a sign of repentance, a city centre footbridge is named after Pero Jones, the slave of an 18th century Bristol merchant.
On Sunday, we headed into the country. First stop was Tyntesfield, a gothic Victorian pile redeveloped in the 1860s by William Gibbs, largely from money he’d made importing guano from Peru for use as fertiliser.
The National Trust acquired the house nine years ago and they’re still restoring it and sorting through box loads of possessions left behind by subsequent generations and the final resident, George Gibbs, who died in 2001. The house has a lived in, frozen-in-time feel that my sister and I really liked.
We concluded our weekend with a tour of a boat graveyard in the village of Purton. In 1909, the banks of the River Severn partially gave way from tidal erosion and the narrow strip of land separating the river from the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal was breached. The bank was shored up by deliberately ramming five redundant boats into it and infilling with rubble and other material. The boats slowed the waterflow causing the river to silt. This effect together with the subsequent beaching – or hulking – of boats over several decades (there are now 36) further strengthened the river bank. Some of the boats are completely buried while others are discernable only from the top part of their bow nosing above the long swaying grasses. A few are still largely above ground, their gaunt hulls looking like the carcases of beached whales.
In July 1970, the SS Great Britain completed her final journey back from where she’d been abandoned in the Falklands to Bristol for restoration. Fast forward, 41 years and she is now Bristol’s foremost tourist attraction while the hulks disappear further into silt, continuing to wage war against arsonists and firewood seekers.
The Friends of Purton think the hulks should be recognised and protected as an ancient monument. The two pieces of maritime history neatly bookended the weekend, which gave me food for thought on the drive home.
GETTING THERE
* Recommended accommodation: The Mint Hotel. www.minthotel.com, 0117 925 1001. Very chic and modern hotel which includes the two AA rosette City Café and an alfresco dining terrace opposite Temple Gardens.
* Visitor information: See visitbristol.co.uk. Includes details of all the places in Bristol mentioned.
* Purton Hulks tours: www.friendsofpurton.org.uk, 07833 143231. Run on some Sunday afternoons from March to October.
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