Where Banksy grew up, Brunel built the world's first propeller-driven ocean liner and a suspension bridge over a 75-metre gorge, and a waterfront that traded in tobacco and slaves became the UK's most art-saturated creative quarter
Bristol is a city of 470,000 in southwest England on the Avon Gorge, consistently ranked among Britain's happiest and most creatively independent major cities. The Clifton Suspension Bridge (1864, Isambard Kingdom Brunel) spans the gorge at 75m — a wrought-iron landmark visible for miles across the city. The SS Great Britain (1843, also Brunel) — the world's first iron-hulled, propeller-driven, steam-powered ocean-going ship — is dry-docked in the Great Western Dockyard as a museum. Banksy was born in Bristol and dozens of original murals survive across the city; the city produces more street…
Bristow (Old English: 'place of the bridge') was an Anglo-Saxon trading port that by the 12th century was England's second-largest city after London. John Cabot sailed from Bristol in 1497 and made landfall in North America — five years after Columbus — under a commission from Henry VII; a full-scale replica of his ship the Matthew is moored in the harbour. Bristol's 18th-century wealth derived substantially from the Transatlantic Slave Trade (the 'Bristol Triangle': manufactured goods to West Africa, enslaved Africans to the Americas, tobacco and sugar back to Bristol) — a history now explic…