Growing up in a port, you look outward. The low elephant grief of ships’ horns was the soundtrack of my Bristolian childhood. We were proud of our seafaring roots: my parents named my brother Mathew after the ship in which John Cabot sailed away from our city to discover the North American mainland (or so it was said: we weren’t having any of that Viking explorer nonsense).
Early morning heavy fog settles over Bristol. (Adam Gasson/Camera Press/Redux)
Saxon settlers founded Bristol 1,000 years ago on the banks of the Avon in the southwest of England, although Romans had been there before them, as today’s arrow-straight roads reveal. The modern city is a riot of stone, unlike London, which is brick built. On either side of the gleaming cobbles of King Street, half-timber Tudor trows (inns) shoulder up to multistory car parks, the kind of historical overlap typical of this most organic of urban centers. On the elegant 19th-century streets of the Clifton neighborhood, neoclassical mansions exude the confidence of mercantile wealth built on sugar and slavery, as do the names of the streets—Whiteladies Road, Blackboy Hill—while around the Hotwells Spa, where slavers’ wives once enjoyed the waters, developers have moved in to renovate the Georgian townhouses.
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