Se Fire on the Main Stage at the Ashton Court Festival
In summer the grounds of Ashton Court to the west of the city play host to the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta, a major event for hot air ballooning in Britain. The Fiesta draws a substantial crowd even for the early morning lift that typically begins at about 6.30 am. Events and a fairground entertain the crowds during the day. A second mass ascent is then made in the early evening, again taking advantage of lower wind speeds.
From 1974 until 2007, Ashton Court also played host to the Ashton Court festival each summer, an outdoors music festival which used to be known as the Bristol Community Festival. Torrential rain during the 2007 festival and mounting costs incurred as a result of the Licensing Act 2003 led to the dissolution of the not-for-profit company which organised the event.[2]
The Slapstick Festival celebrates silent film comedy every January and the organisation also promotes screenings throughout the year.[4] In November the Encounters Short Film Festival offers a platform for new short films.[5] The biennial Wildscreen Festival showcases wildlife filmmaking in the city that is home to the BBC Natural History Unit.[6]
The Bristol Festival of Ideas is an annual programme of debates and other events, which aims "to stimulate people’s minds and passions with an inspiring programme of discussion and debate".[9] It was first set up in 2005 as part of the city's ultimately unsuccessful bid to become the European Capital of Culture for 2008, and awards an annual book prize, worth £10,000, to a book which "presents new, important and challenging ideas, which is rigorously argued, and which is engaging and accessible".[10][11]
The city's principal theatre company, the Bristol Old Vic, was founded in 1946 as an offshoot of The Old Vic company in London. Its premises on King Street consist of the 1766 Theatre Royal (400 seats), a modern studio theatre (150 seats), and foyer and bar areas in the adjacent Coopers' Hall (built 1743). The Theatre Royal is a grade I listed building and was the oldest continuously operating theatre in England.
The Bristol Hippodrome is a larger theatre (1981 seats) which hosts national touring productions, whilst other theatres include the Tobacco Factory (250 seats), The Brewery (90 seats), Bierkeller Theatre (400 seats), QEH (220 seats), the Redgrave Theatre (at Clifton College) (320 seats) and the Alma Tavern (50 seats). Arnolfini stage a regular programme of experimental, physical and live art theatre and the University of Bristol Drama Department has a regular programme of visiting companies and in-house work at the Wickham Theatre.[13] Other venues which have hosted theatre productions include Hope Chapel (Hotwells) (formerly the Hope Centre), the Hen and Chicken pub (Bedminster) and PACTS (Easton).
Other theatres
Bristol's theatre scene includes a large variety of producing theatre companies, apart from the Bristol Old Vic, including Show of Strength Theatre Company, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, acta community theatre, Myrtle Theatre, Cirque Bijou, Desperate Men, Theatre West and Travelling Light Theatre Company. Theatre Bristol is a partnership between Bristol City Council, Arts Council England and local theatre practitioners which aims to develop the theatre industry in Bristol.[14]
There are also a number of organisations within the city which act to support theatre makers, for example Equity, the actors union, has a General Branch based in the city,[15] and Residence which provides office, social and rehearsal space for several Bristol based theatre and performance companies.[16]
The University of Bristol Drama Department offers undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in performance and screen studies.[17] The University of the West of England offers undergraduate and post-graduate drama and film programmes.[18]Circomedia is a training school for circus and physical theatre skills offering foundation degrees and BTEC courses.[19]
In addition there are around 25 active non-professional theatre companies in the Greater Bristol area listed in Bristol City Council's Leisure and Culture database.[20]Mayfest is an annual contemporary theatre festival that takes place for two weeks in May. It is best known for presenting contemporary theatre but also dance, site specific, experimental, interactive and participatory theatre as well as music events.[21]
Music
The music scene is thriving and significant. In 2010, PRS for Music announced that Bristol is the 'most musical' city in the UK, based on the number of PRS members born in Bristol relative to its population.[22] From the late 1970s onwards it was home to a crop of cultish bands combining punk, funk, dub and political consciousness, including The Pop Group, close friends of The Cortinas, who led the city's punk scene from 1976. Bristol's premier fanzine from this time through until early 1978 was Loaded. It featured all of the Bristol bands as well as those who visited the city, some of whom were promoted by the magazine.
Ten years later, Bristol was the birthplace of a type of English hip-hop music called trip hop or the Bristol Sound, epitomised in the work of artists such as Tricky, Portishead, Smith & Mighty and Massive Attack. It is also a stronghold of drum and bass with notable bands like the Mercury Prize winning Roni Size/Reprazent and Kosheen as well as the pioneering DJ Krust and More Rockers. The progressive house duo Way Out West also hails from Bristol. This music is part of the wider Bristol Urban Culture scene which received international media attention in the 1990s and still thrives today.
Other forms of popular music also thrive on the city's scene. In the 1980s the city gave birth to thrash metal band Onslaught who became the first non-American thrash band to sign to a major label. Other notable rockers from Bristol include folk rock outfit K-Passa, Stackridge, Act of Contrition, Chaos UK, Vice Squad, Wushcatte, The Claytown Troupe, Rita Lynch, Herb Garden, Doreen Doreen, The Seers, Pigbag, and The Blue Aeroplanes. More recently a new wave of Bristol-based bands have been promoting themselves across the UK underground, including New Rhodes, Santa Dog, Tin Pan Gang, The Private Side, Big Joan, You and the Atom Bomb, Riot:Noise, Two Day Rule, Alien Trash Bin, Osmium, Hacksaw, Bronze Age Fox and Legends De Early.
There is also a left field / experimental music scene in Bristol, which has built on the tradition of Bristol bands like The Pop Group, Third Eye Foundation and Crescent. These musicians are supported by record labels such as Invada, Farm Girl, Blood Red Sound and Super Fi, and promoters such as Qu Junktions, Illegal Seagull, Let the Bastards Grind, Noise Annoys and the, now defunct, Choke (music collective). Despite regular performances and the success of many of its members, this scene tends to be passed over in the national press' view of Bristol music which focuses on Trip Hop,[23] which represents only one aspect of the city's musical culture. Active bands include Gravenhurst (Warp), Team Brick (Invada), The Heads (Invada), Gonga (Invada), Joe Volk (Invada), Fuck Buttons (ATP – now moved to London), Hunting Lodge (Yosada), SJ Esau (Anticon, Twisted Nerve), Bronnt Industries Kapital (Static Caravan), Zoon van snooK (Lo Recordings, Mush Records), Aut (Fällt), Geisha (Crucial Blast) and Defibrillators (Gravid Hands).
Bristol was also a home to post-rock music, with bands such as Flying Saucer Attack and Movietone.[24]
Bristol is home to many live music venues including the 2000-seat Bristol Beacon, formerly Colston Hall, named after Colston Street and the Colston School that once occupied the site, which can attract big names, the Trinity Centre (a community-run converted Church in the Old Market area of Bristol), the O2 Academy which is part of the national touring circuit for rock bands, the Anson Rooms (part of the University of Bristol Union), the Mothers Ruin, The Thekla, Fiddler's, the Bristol Folk House, Start the Bus, the Hatchet, the Fleece, the Croft, the Cooler and the Louisiana. The Colston Hall was renamed in 2020, following three years of consultation, after protests regarding Edward Colston's ties to the Atlantic slave trade.[25]
The Bristol Museum & Art Gallery houses collections of natural history, local archaeology, local glassware, Egyptology, Chinese ceramics and art, including the Bristol School. Touring exhibitions from other galleries are regularly hosted.
The City Museum is also responsible for
The Tudor Red Lodge, built in 1580 as the lodge for a 'Great House' which once stood on the site now occupied by the Bristol Beacon. Displays include Tudor and Georgian rooms and a Tudor knot garden.
The Georgian House was built by slave trader and plantation owner John Pinney in 1790 and is preserved in the style of a Georgian-era town house.
The Blaise Castle House and estate on the northern outskirts of the city houses the social history collections. The grounds were designed by 18th century landscape gardener Humphry Repton and John Nash designed the dairy and conservatory.
Arnolfini specialises in contemporary art, live performance and dance and cinema.
Spike Island
Spike Island is an international centre for the development of contemporary art and design, home to a gallery, café and working space for artists, designers and creative businesses.
Other cultural venues
The Watershed Media Centre exhibits digital arts and cinema. The former Industrial Museum, housed in former warehouses at Prince's Wharf has been extensively rebuilt and, now called M Shed opened as a museum of Bristol life in 2011.
Bristol's architecture includes many examples of mediaeval, gothic, modern industrial and post-war architecture. Notable buildings include the gothic revival Wills Memorial Building, and the tallest building in the city, St Mary Redcliffe. The city is noted for its Victorian industrial architecture of the Bristol Byzantine style, characterised by deep red and polychrome brickwork and Byzantine style arches.
The city has examples through the changing styles of British Architecture, mediaeval era onwards. Little remains of the old walled city and castle fortifications while multiple 12th century churches have survived. The Tudor period saw large mansions and estates built for wealthy merchants outside the traditional city centre; in contrast to public houses and old Almshouses. In the eighteenth century, squares were laid out for the prosperous middle classes filling in land between the city and the immediate surrounding villages. A floating harbour developed to provided a focus for industrial development and the local transport infrastructure including the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Temple Meads railway station, the original part of which was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The early and late twentieth century saw further expansion of the city. The University of Bristol was formed. An aircraft industry grew shortly before and during World War II, post-war this led to the creation of Bristol Airport. The city centre and harbour suffered from extensive bombing during the Bristol Blitz; with planned shopping, leisure and office complexes replacing lost parts of the centre while housing and port were displaced onto the city's outskirts.
Bristol has 15 Michelin-starred restaurants as of August 2022,[31] including Casamia, winner of Ramsay's Best Restaurant in 2010. Bristol also hosts the UK's largest restaurant, Za Za Bazaar. In close proximity to the orchards of Somerset, Bristol has acquired a reputation as "England's most cider-friendly city",[32] and is also home to Harveys Bristol Cream sherry. Other foodstuffs claiming Bristolian heritage include the Clark's Pie, and Mothering Buns.[33] Bristol was named the top city in the world for vegans in 2020 according to a Google Trends analysis,[34][35] and the world's best culinary destination in 2019.[36]
The oldest pub in Bristol is claimed to be the Hatchett Inn, situated on Frogmore street since 1606, although The Bowl Inn and The Rummer descend from even earlier pubs on their sites.[37]
Bristolians speak a distinctive dialect of English. Uniquely for a large city in England, this is a rhotic dialect, in which the r in words like car and park is pronounced, usually nowadays as a postalveolar approximant but more traditionally as a retroflex approximant.[38] Once common across England, this feature has now receded to Bristol and the rural West Country, as well as parts of Lancashire.
The most unusual feature of this dialect, unique to Bristol, is the Bristol L (or Terminal L), in which an L sound is appended to words that end in the letter a: a common illustration of this is the sentence "Africal is a malarial areal". Additionally, -al is drawn out as -awl, and an l may be added within a word with an aw, or an aw, in a word with al. Thus "area" becomes "areawl", and "drawing" becomes "drawling" etc. This may lead to confusions between expressions like area engineer and aerial engineer which in Bristolian sound identical. Another example is when unsure of the answer "I have no ideal" is the response. In the same way, the Swedish IKEA is known by some as "Ikeawl", and Asda supermarket as "Asdawl". The city's own name may have evolved in the same manner, as it transformed from Anglo-SaxonBrycgstow to modern "Bristol."[39]
Another feature is the addition of S to verbs in the first and third person. Just as he goes, in Bristol I goes and they goes. As with other west country accents, H is often dropped from the start of words, th may become f, and -ing become -en.[39] Bristolians often add "mind", "look" or "see" to the end of sentences: "I'm not doing that, mind." Another Bristolian linguistic feature is the addition of "to" in questions relating to direction or orientation. For example, "Where's that?" would be phrased as "Where's that to?" and "Where's the park?" would become "Where's the park to?" This speech feature is predominant in Newfoundland English, where many of that island's early European inhabitants originated from Bristol and other West Country ports. They lived on the island in relative isolation in the centuries to follow, maintaining this feature. These linguistic features can also be heard in Cardiff.
The linguist John C Wells codified the differences between a Bristol accent and Received Pronunciation in his Accents of English series in the following way,[40] which resembles General American much more most other accents in Britain:
Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja was the first strongly active graffiti artist in Bristol in the early 1980s, with the nicknames of "3D" and "Delge".[42] He appeared in the UK documentary called "Bombin'" alongside Wolverhampton artist and later DJ and producer Goldie.[43]
Children of the Can: 25 Years of Bristol Graffiti by Felix Braun (FLX) and Steve Wright, is a book illustrating and documenting the street art scene in the city.[44]
900,000 people visited an exhibition of Banksy's work at the Bristol Museum in 2009. In August 2011 Bristol City Council finally recognised the importance of graffiti to the city's culture by allowing an entire street to be painted by various international street artists. In August 2011 the See No Evil public art event was installed in Nelson Street, transforming it into a walk-through graffiti gallery. Among other works, it includes a 20-metre-tall (66 ft) mural.[41]
^ abHarry Stoke & Vinny Green, 2003. A Dictionary of Bristle. Bristol: Broadcast Books.
^p. 348-349, Accents of English 2 John C Wells, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992
^ abCullen, Miguel (26 August 2011). "Graffiti gets the star treatment in Bristol". The Independent. London. Retrieved 10 November 2011. Nick Walker was author of perhaps the most striking piece at the event, a 20-metre mural on the front of a tower block, of a sinister man in a black bowler hat dripping a bucket of red paint over the cement.
^Braun, Felix; Wright, Steve; Jones, Richard Foster (November 2008). Children of the Can: 25 Years of Bristol Graffiti. Bristol: Tangent Books. p. 288. ISBN978-1-906477-07-3.
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