Sailing to Byzantium
Bristol, an important port for centuries, enjoyed a great expansion in the 19th century, with the arrival of the Great Western Railway and the building of many warehouses, shops, offices, and factories of various kinds. One of the most outstanding buildings from this period is the Welsh Back Granary, built in 1869 to the designs of locally based architects Ponton and Gough. The architects chose a Byzantine revival style, though the multicoloured brickwork (courtesy of the Cattybrook brick pit at Almondsbury) owes a lot to the influence of Venetian architecture too. This is a style, sometimes known as Bristol Byzantine, that may have developed after Ponton and Gough got to know John Addington Symonds, literary critic and historian of the Renaissance, who was born in Bristol. The use of a mix of Venetian and Byzantine elements, though, which recalls the architecture of some other Bristol buildings I’ve posted in the past, also suggests tbat the Bristolians were trying to associate their city with two of the world’s most famous maritime cities, Venice and Istanbul.
Built to store grain, the Welsh Back building was highly functional – all those pierced openings were to ventilate the grain as it was dried by the heat from fires on the lower floors; the round holes close to the ground-floor arches contained chutes through which grain could be released to waiting carts. But what high-octane decoration – polychrome bricks, pointed Venetian battlements, natty pointed arches, restless patterning – cloaks this functionality. Part palace, part silo, this building is designed to dazzle. In the late 1960s and 1970s, there was a jazz club here, which metamorphosed into a rock venue in the 1980s, all of all seems rather appropriate for this loud and colourful structure. There’s a more sedate restaurant in the base of the building now; the dazzling brickwork remains.
10 comments:
I love Bristol and I'm a sucker for fancy brickwork (you can't beat Malborough for that in my somewhat limited view!).
Thank you for your interesting background to this familiar building.
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I love Bristol too, and often feel sorry for the city that was once one of the most important cities in the entire nation. But I am even more impressed that they built the Welsh Back Granary in such an exotic, Byzantine style. Back in the 1860s, the polychrome bricks, pointed arches and battlements would have been a BIG statement.
Bazza, Hels: Thank you both for your comments. Bristol, of course, was still a very important place at the time of World War II, when it took a terrible pounding. There's still so much going on there, though, and so much to admire.
I noticed a few nights ago in Two Years Before the Mast the phrase "shipshape and in Bristol fashion"; Dana puts it in quotation marks and I take that the phrase was current on American ships then, in the middle 1830s.
George: The Oxford English Dictionary cites this instance in Dana as the first appearance of the phrase in print. It seems to have been very much connected to the city's 19th-century maritime heyday.
Phil, I remember you introducing me to this fabulous building, and many others in Bristol- one of my favourite English cities. Thankyou for this reminder.
Thank you, Peter. Bristol is indeed a place rich in brick and stone.
Hels, please don't feel sorry for Bristol. True, it is no longer the most important port outside London, as it was in the 18th century, but in truth the city's glory days ended with the rise of Liverpool in the early 19th century. Bristol's strength always lay in the diversity of its industry and commerce, which has enabled the old place to avoid the post-industrial blight that has affected cities like Manchester. Today this is a small, friendly city and - rather bizarrely - a tourist destination. In this respect the renovation of the Floating Harbour since its closure to commercial shipping in the 1970s has been particularly successful. Architecturally, what is so fascinating about the city is the survival of buildings and streets from so many periods, from the medieval grandeur of St Mary Redcliffe to the Bristol Byzantine warehouses described here.
James: Yes, there's tremendous variety in Bristol's architecture - including, away from the centre but still very much part of the place, Regency Clifton, picturesque Blaise Hamlet, and Brunel's great bridge.
The brickwork on the Granary was designed to cover each and every style of the day. Apprentices would stand outside and sketch them so that they could apply the styles to their own buildings.
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