local History Study Day City, Village: Suburb?

President Roger Angerson and Peter Fleming welcomed an audience of some hundred to this Study Day, the fourteenth to be hosted by the University of the West of England. We are yet again grateful for the fine facilities of the St Matthias campus, not least the Traders refectory, which have contributed so much to the success of these events.

Mike Manson, erstwhile historian of Bristol south of the river, spoke of his engagement with his new home at St Andrew’s. Starting with the view from his window of the end of an intriguing lane, and touching on many local worthies and landmarks, Mike blended his own explorations and photos with preliminary archival research to illustrate the development of an urban from a pastoral landscape. The main lines of the development were set by early tracks and boundaries, by rail- and tramways, and by the vision of the late Victorian developers. If that vision included a deal of ‘horrifically primitive’ and dysfunctional Gothic styling, it also secured for posterity the fine St Andrew’s Park..

Lesley Ross and the Harptrees History Society have been working on the story of Chew Valley before the lake for some time and she was able to take us around the old landscape and its major building with a comprehensive graphic display. Her talk well brought out the underlying economic logic of a waterway. From of old the Chew supported a chain of mills. In the mid 19^th century it was already being tapped for Bristol’s water supply. The great reservoir development, so far from destroying an old way of life, may have come as a welcome exit route for a small scale agriculture which would never have survived in the post-war world, and brought about the re-invention of the valley as a water-based leisure complex. History gained too: the associated archaeological work (involving the neophyte Philip Rahtz) uncovered more and older history than anyone had known of. Myth also gained: folk-memory already resonates to the sound of bells from the church that would have been drowned – if it had ever stood there.

Jackie Sims and Jane Tozer have been working on the history of Filton for many years. Theirs was very much a social history, with residential censuses from earlier years overlapping with an oral archive for the twentieth century. As Filton became urbanised, the population exploded: forty times greater in 1940 than in 1890, with a great deal of almost unimaginable overcrowding on the way. Transport played a double role here. Not only did the railway branch line to the ferry bring the usual suburban development, but the employment it provided was succeeded Sir George White’s transport empire. But the overwhelming presence of aerospace today (see Notices & Opportunities BAC 100) should not completely obscure an intermediate stage when this once rural area was doing the laundry for the middle classes of half Bristol.

At the lunch break, there was an opportunity to look at the various displays, including those of the Fishponds LHS (video!), Bristol & Avon FHS, Bristol & Gloucestershire AS, Somerset Archives, Central Library, and Weston LHS

Joy Burt traced the evolution of Oldfield Park, eight respectable if monotonous terraces built 1886-1892 by local landowner, banker, and brick and tile maker Thomas May. Such speculative building was prompted by building byelaw control introduced by the Public Health Act 1875; and marketed at increasingly prosperous and aspiring skilled workers moving out of the city (23%), and at farm workers from Somerset (34%) rendered unemployed by the agricultural recession. For, as well as the spa trade boosted by the rediscovery of the Roman baths, Bath was expanding as a manufacturing city, with jobs that gave regular pay in the sawmills, railways, printing and engineering works and factories - thirty five percent of them in the building and allied trades. Using manufacturers’ pattern books and adverts and her own photographs of exteriors and interiors of houses, Joy presented a fascinating study of how the enclave came about, who built it, how it was financed, and the sort of people who came to live there and why.

Denis Wright sketched the development of Horfield, but his main concern was with a stream - more narrowly yet, with the spring from which it arose. The stream had been a boundary for hundreds of years – and there was a real satisfaction in linking the brook mentioned in a charter of the Kingdom of Wessex (883AD) with one of the feeder streams utilised by Wessex Water today. But though the source remained hidden, the tale of searching for it, by inference from old maps and place names and OS not-yet-quite-conventional signs, was a reminder that it is questions which give all historical work its starting point and its allure.

Finally Michael Rockey and Michael McCarthy traced the development of Weston, for centuries a Cotswold town in its own right and far enough from Bath to make an agreeable rural outing for visitors like Jane Austen. But the 17th century was its golden age. Links to Bath grew, whether by Poor Law union or by laundry work; by ribbon housing development for people who commuters (lower Weston for employees, upper for managers and professionals); then by Hospitals wanting space to rebuild themselves. Yet it was not incorporated into Bath till 1951, was still termed a village by Pevsner in 1958 and is still cherished as a community in its own right by its inhabitants to this day.

There was no time for summary on the day but some themes did emerge, especially for the last decades of the nineteenth century. Railway and tram links of course, but also the demands of large scale industries and services for space; industrial development and employment accompanied by an agricultural depression which made land acquisition easy; speculative building for a growing market but also an increasing concern for public health and housing standards. But the most important message, as all our speakers had demonstrated so well, was the fascination of investigating and documenting a landscape, that most physical of all local histories.

(report by Bill Evans and Jonathan Harlow)