Bristol

Harbour food and neighbourhood choices

At the harbourside there are two rows of converted shipping containers stacked with independent kitchens, and this is as good a place as any to work out what kind of trip you're having. The containers are CARGO, in the Wapping Wharf quarter, and behind the corrugated fronts are Root, which does veg-led small plates — pumpkin caponata, Jerusalem artichokes with quince, hake and trout Kievs, braised Hebridean lamb — and Seven Lucky Gods, from the people behind Ox and Bambalan, where the thing to order is the chicken katsu curry arancini. There's Cargo Cantina doing Yucatan chicken and pork adobo tacos, Gambas for tapas and paella, and Ragù for Italian sharing plates. Wapping Wharf itself is about forty-five independent shops and bars with a thousand or so people living above them, and it sits in the middle of the water, the museums and the wandering, which makes it the obvious first base if you've never been.

Bristol is a neighbourhoods city, and this matters more than it usually does, because where you stay changes the whole trip. The place is hilly, built where the tidal Avon meets the Atlantic trade that made it, and split at Clifton by a gorge. You can walk large parts of it, but you will be walking uphill for some of them.

The Harbourside is the waterfront version of Bristol — lively without being chaotic, is how people put it. The M Shed, the Arnolfini and the Watershed are all on the water's edge, all in old dock buildings that used to hold cargo and now hold art, film and the Museum of Bristol. Ferries run between them. If you want food beyond CARGO, St Nicholas Market is a short walk into the old city, covered, trading since 1743 and run by independent stallholders. Pieminister started here before it became a national pie brand; Eatchu has been doing Japanese-style gyoza on loaded bowls since 2016; Eat A Pitta packs falafel into pitta with tabbouleh, hummus and pickles. There's a night market too.

Clifton is the Georgian version — townhouses, leafy streets, boutique shops and the fine dining, plus the Suspension Bridge and the gorge. It has a village-like feel and is the most expensive place to stay, which are not unrelated facts. The genteel core is Clifton Village, around Princess Victoria Street and The Mall.

Independent streets, theatre and historic pubs

Stokes Croft and Gloucester Road are the independent, counter-cultural version — murals, late bars, Banksy's Mild Mild West on a wall, described by one account as a nice kind of party place and a good budget base. Gloucester Road is reputedly the longest row of independent shops in Europe, about 1.7 miles of delis, cafés, bars and shops running up through Bishopston and Horfield. The Grape & Grind wine merchant is at number 101; Reclaimers, a reclamation yard, at 307.

South of the harbour are Southville and Bedminster, where the spine is North Street. The anchor is the Tobacco Factory, a former W.D. & H.O. Wills building saved from demolition by the ex-mayor George Ferguson, now a café-bar and a theatre that programmes Shakespeare, opera and puppetry, with a Sunday market. This is also the home of Upfest, founded in 2008 by Stephen Hayles and billed as Europe's largest street-art festival, which repaints the walls of North Street each year.

For pubs, King Street is the historic run. The Llandoger Trow is the timber-framed landmark, Grade II listed, dating from 1664, named by a sailor after Llandogo in Wales, where they built the flat-bottomed boats called trows. Daniel Defoe is said to have met the castaway Alexander Selkirk here — the man behind Robinson Crusoe — and the pub is said to have given Robert Louis Stevenson the Admiral Benbow Inn in Treasure Island. It is also reputed to be one of the most haunted spots in the city, and has historically kept up to five changing cask ales and real ciders. A few doors along is The Old Duke, which has been doing live jazz and blues for a long time. Cross to the Harbourside and there's the Ostrich Inn on Lower Guinea Street, a Fuller's pub from the 1740s with a large river terrace, and the Grain Barge, which is exactly what it sounds like — a converted barge moored on the water, run by Bristol Beer Factory.

The cider deserves its own stop. Up near the Suspension Bridge in Clifton is the Coronation Tap, the Cori Tap, which started as a farm and became a cider house around the end of the eighteenth century. It has a claim to being the most famous cider house in the world, and it serves a strong cider brewed to a secret recipe. Traditionally you get it by the half. There is a reason for that.

Brunel, the harbour and the city view

The engineering is unavoidable, and mostly it is Brunel. The Clifton Suspension Bridge was his first major commission, a competition he won at twenty-four, and his original design was Egyptian, with sphinxes. The foundation stone went down in 1831, work stalled after the Bristol riots that same year, and Brunel died in 1859 with only the towers standing. It was finished by others and opened in December 1864, when around 150,000 people turned up to watch. It is one of the few wrought-iron bridges in Europe still carrying its original chains. You can walk across it to Leigh Woods, a National Nature Reserve with ancient trees and viewpoints back across the gorge.

Down in the harbour is the SS Great Britain, launched in 1843 as the largest ship in the world, the first to put an iron hull and a screw propeller together on an ocean-going scale, and the first iron steamer across the Atlantic, which it managed in fourteen days. Prince Albert came from London on Brunel's own Great Western Railway for the launch, and the tickets were advertised with the line "Prince Albert – To be seen alive!" The ship was salvaged from the Falkland Islands and towed home in 1970, back into the exact dry dock where she was built, passing under the Suspension Bridge on the way in. It is now a museum, and one of the better ones. The station you arrive at, Temple Meads, opened in 1840 as the western end of the Great Western Railway and was the first railway station Brunel designed.

None of this floats without the Floating Harbour, built between 1804 and 1809 to a plan by William Jessop, a system of locks that stopped ships grounding on Bristol's enormous tidal range. The commercial docks closed to traffic in 1975 and the whole thing was slowly turned over to leisure — the transit sheds and warehouses becoming the galleries and flats you now walk past. Ferries run the length of it. Behind Temple Meads there's a landing; up at Hotwells there's another.

For a view, climb Brandon Hill, the oldest public park in the city, to Cabot Tower, which commemorates John Cabot's 1497 voyage from Bristol to Newfoundland. It is a steep climb and a 360-degree reward. A replica of Cabot's ship, the Matthew, is often moored down by the M Shed, and sometimes it sails.

Street art, green space and family Bristol

The street art is a genre in itself here, because Bristol is Banksy's home city. Beyond the Mild Mild West in Stokes Croft — a teddy bear lobbing a petrol bomb at riot police — there's Well Hung Lover on Frogmore Street, a naked man dangling from a window opposite the old council house, and The Girl with the Pierced Eardrum near the Marina, the Vermeer girl given an alarm box for an earring.

If you want space, there is plenty of it. Ashton Court is the biggest park at around 850 acres, with a resident deer herd, woodland, mountain-bike trails and, each August, the Balloon Fiesta. The Downs, Clifton Down and Durdham Down together, are 441 acres of open grass above the gorge. The classic self-guided walk is the harbourside loop — M Shed to the SS Great Britain, round Cumberland Basin and back — then up through Clifton to the bridge.

With children, the harbourside does most of the work. We The Curious is the science museum, with hands-on exhibits, the UK's only 3D digital planetarium, an under-fives space and a sensory Tinker Lab. The Bristol Aquarium next door has an underwater tunnel and the only botanical house in a UK aquarium. Out towards the M5 is the Bristol Zoo Project, 136 acres of outdoor conservation zoo — giraffes, zebras, cheetahs, lemurs — with an adventure playground called the Fun Fort, a Butterfly Maze and a three-storey climbing and zip-line tower. The M Shed is free and buggy-friendly, and on some days it runs the harbour cranes and steam engines.

Some of what made Bristol has vanished on purpose. Bristol Zoo Gardens in Clifton, opened in 1836 and the world's oldest provincial zoo, closed in 2022 after 186 years, its animals moved out to the new site and its walled Victorian grounds handed over to housing. The docks that built the city are gone as working docks and survive as museums and bars.

Legacies, creative lives and staying longer

And some of what made Bristol it is still arguing about. The wealth came through Atlantic trade, and a great deal of it came through slavery — by the 1730s this was Britain's premier slaving port, and the sugar, tobacco and chocolate fortunes grew directly out of it. The Fry family built the first mass-produced chocolate bar here; the Wills family built the tobacco fortune behind the Wills Memorial Building and much of the university. Edward Colston, a Royal African Company investor, had his statue toppled and thrown into the harbour during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. It now lies flat in the M Shed with its placards, and the question of his name on streets and halls across the city has not been settled.

The city birthed trip-hop in the late eighties and nineties out of its club and sound-system scene — Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky. Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach in Horfield and started out at the Bristol Hippodrome; there's a statue of him in Millennium Square. Aardman, the studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, is based here. Sir John Betjeman called Bristol "the most beautiful, interesting and distinguished city in England," which for a poet who noticed everything is quite a thing to commit to.

If you tire of the city, Bath is fifteen minutes away by train, Cheddar Gorge and Wells thirty or forty south, and the Victorian pier at Clevedon a short run out to the Bristol Channel. But the honest advice is to stay put a day longer than you planned, pick a neighbourhood, and let it be the only one you get to know. On the Downs on a clear evening, with the balloons sometimes going up over the gorge, it is hard to be in a hurry about anything.