More than a building

By Professor Guy Orpen, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for New Campus Development

In May I wrote about the experience of seeing the sun rise from Platform 15 at Temple Meads for the first time since the 1920s, following the demolition of the former Royal Mail Sorting Office. This week the University of Bristol has published new plans for that site.

Importantly, alongside two major buildings, these include major public spaces leading to a new Eastern entrance to Temple Meads planned by Network Rail. That entrance will be under the selfsame Platform 15, on the level of both the site and the thoroughfare running under the platforms.

The planned site has plentiful seating and is greened by trees sheltering those walking and cycling across it. The harbourside frontage is envisaged as having many more trees to create a green corridor linking the existing Totterdown basin waterside and neighbouring spaces. The sustainability ambitions of the University are manifested in a building that provides its own energy and links to the city’s district heat network – all while harvesting rainwater and solar energy across its roof.

The designs portray what a day in the life of the new campus at Temple Quarter might look like – from the dawn light through the glazed panels of the interior gardens to the twilight images of the public space passing under and through the main building. This reminds us that this is a part of the city that could and should be lively and used out of hours.

While the consultation is about the physical redevelopment of a site that has lain derelict for a generation, the bigger story is how the city, its enterprises and communities and the University can work together there to develop their futures for the better.

As I write this column, I am attending a conference debating the value of universities to the cities, regions and society they are in. It is a debate that reveals a range of great work going on in cities around the world. There is strong recognition in the room of the merit of engaging with the people and organisations in a place and to do so with respect, to create mutual and sustained benefit. Some at the conference referred to the value created by student and staff volunteering, others to the opportunities created by positive recruitment, living wage and responsible procurement policies – all things we do here in Bristol. In discussions, we sought to define how universities could learn from and discover with their civic partners and be fair, respectful and relevant in so doing. The new campus building offers venues such as the Story Exchange and the Bristol Rooms just for these cooperative activities.

In this consultation with our city, we want to hear what you think of our development plans. We will want to sustain the dialogue over the years to come, because we will not only develop the site, but be there to live, work, play and learn with and for our city over the decades to come.

You can see our plans, share your view and find more details about our consultation events here.

From rubble to research: Share your view

As you can see from Bristol City Council’s timelapse video, demolition of the former Royal Mail Sorting Office building is complete and we’re looking forward to the next stage of development for the Cattle Market site. From 9-25 September, we’ll be sharing our latest plans for the detailed design of the academic buildings and public spaces for the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus as part of the next stage of public consultation.

The new campus will provide inspiring spaces to meet, learn and make new connections and include public spaces for all to enjoy. It will help create a new inclusive city district in Temple Quarter, contribute to economic growth and job creation and join the city centre to the east of Bristol.

From 9 September plans will be published online for comment. In addition, there will be a number of ways for you to see our plans in person and share your views.

Public meeting:

  • Wednesday 18 September, 5-7pm at Hillcrest Primary School, Cemetery Road, Totterdown

Drop-in sessions:

  • Wednesday 11 September, 6-7:30pm at Engine Shed, Station Approach, Bristol BS1 6QH
  • Thursday 12 September, 5-7pm at Barton Hill Settlement, 43 Ducie Road, Bristol BS5 0AX
  • Saturday 21 September, 12-2pm at Windmill Hill City Farm, Philip Street, Bristol BS3 4EA

The plans will also be on display at:

Engine Shed, Station Approach, Bristol BS1 6QH
University of Bristol, Beacon House, Queen’s Road, Bristol BS8 1QU

You can stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter or visiting our website.

Changing landscapes

Asha Sahni, Assistant Governance Officer at University of Bristol, was inspired by Guy Orpen’s article and photograph of sunrise over the demolished Sorting Office. While working with a writing group of adults with Asperger Syndrome Asha co-facilitates, she wrote the haiku below about changing landscapes.

Temple Meads to Tintern

via Bishopston Library and Oxford

 

Platform fifteen sun

rising on city ridden

of concrete wasteland.

 

Rubbish bags wasting

weeds thriving in gleaming heat

order has broken.

 

What are you reading?

I ask for the pleasure of

seeing book not phone.

 

Shadows glamour walls

water wandering through grass

lands of twilight sky.

Looking to the future

By Professor Guy Orpen Deputy Vice-Chancellor, New Campus Development

Sun rise across Temple Quarter from platform 15

I was on Platform 15 at dawn recently, awaiting a train to London and was struck by the sight (see my phone’s take on this above). It must be the best part of 80 years since you could see the sun rise from that point in Bristol.

The Royal Mail Sorting Office has been reduced to rubble, now below the height of the platform, and the sun flooded in on a glorious May morning. Times are moving on at last, and the derelict eyesore is no more.

The past months have seen public consultation on the student residential village development to come on Temple Island as well as the masterplan for the University campus at Temple Quarter. This is the forerunner to the full planning applications which will go to the City Council in the months ahead.

The consultations were as ever a mix of the challenging and the heartening. While not everyone yet likes the designs, others strongly welcomed their quality and ambition – and the University clearly wants our students to enjoy living in them and thrive while doing so.

Also of interest is the development of the public spaces on the campus. They will be particularly important to those who want to go to and from Temple Meads from the east.

Network Rail is planning an eastern entrance to the station to support the growing number of people using it. To do so without adding disruption to rail traffic is no small matter – but they have a plan!

While this entrance will be a key asset for the university community in Temple Quarter, it will be even more important for the city’s communities to the east in St Phillips, Barton Hill and along Feeder Rd.

The public spaces around the buildings on the campus are substantial. Overall, they will be similar in size to those in nearby Queen Square – albeit with more waterside and less open grass. They are intended to be both welcoming and practical – and enhance both the biodiversity and safety of the area.

That adds up to a challenge to the design team – but they have come up with some interesting approaches. The detail of the buildings is still to come, but they too are intended to present a welcoming face, contribute to our city’s sustainability, as well as marking the entrance to the city.

Another point of debate in the consultation was the public-facing services on the campus from shops to surgeries. The intent from the University side is that we align our interests with those of local communities and do not seek to provide everything on the University-owned land.

We want to ensure there is child care provision, a local supermarket, sports facilities, GP and dental surgeries etc, nearby but not on the campus. I hope that demand for these facilities from local residents, coupled with that from University staff and students, can be harnessed to make them available for the good of all involved. Let’s see if we can work together to make it so!

Remembering Temple Quarter’s first innovators and entrepreneurs

By Professor Tim Cole, Professor of Social History and Director of Brigstow Institute

John Anthony Hare visits the Temple Island site

Responsible innovation will be at the heart of Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus and although it’s currently a levelled building site, the land has a rich history of innovation and entrepreneurship.

One example of this is John Hare and Company. Founded in 1782, it manufactured floor-cloths which were highly sought after and exported around the world. Records show that its prized floor-cloths were sent to five continents.

John Hare and Company was a 19th-century innovator. It was the only company to own the whole manufacturing process, weaving the cloth from flax and hemp, making the paint and printing the intricate patterns on to the stretched canvases – all within a mile radius of the Temple Island site.

I was lucky enough to meet a direct descendent of the first John Hare recently, 83-year old John Anthony Hare. He got in touch after reading the work of some of our history students, who have been researching the history of site that will be home to our new campus.

John Anthony Hare and his son Rupert visit the Temple Island site with Tim Cole

I invited John and his son Rupert to visit the site to see where his ancestor started the family floor-cloth business. Visiting this site that was once home to the Hare Colour Works and will become the site of the new University of Bristol campus, John told me: “It’s quite emotional to be standing here actually. It makes me really proud of my family for building such a successful business here in Bristol. It’s exciting to think it could produce the next generation of businessmen and women too.”

John and Rupert plan to follow the campus as work develops and a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs make this place their home. You can find out more about our plans here.

Next steps for the new campus

Former Royal Mail Sorting Office during the demolition process

With demolition of the former Royal Mail Sorting Office well underway, we’re ready to progress with the next stages of the planning process. 

Since we secured outline planning permission in July 2018, we have continued to work with communities, businesses, the West of England Combined Authority and Bristol City Council to shape our plans. Phase one of the public consultation will run from 11 April to 1 May 2019 and will include the detailed design of the student residential accommodation. Well also take the opportunity to show an update on the proposed layout of the entire site. 

There are a number of ways for you to share your views. All information will be available online from 11 April and you can come along to one of the following meetings or drop-in sessions. 

Public meetings: 

  • Tuesday 16 April, 5-7.30pm at Barton Hill Settlement, 43 Ducie Road, Bristol BS5 0AX 

Drop-in sessions: 

  • Tuesday 16 April, 12-2pm & Thursday 25 April, 1-3pm at Engine Shed, Station Approach, Bristol BS1 6QH 
  • Wednesday 17 April, 5-7.30pm & Thursday 25 April, 5-7pm at Hannah More School, New Kingsley Road, Bristol BS2 0LT 
  • Saturday 27 April, 2-4pm at Windmill Hill City Farm, Philip Street, Bristol BS3 4EA 

In the meantime, take a look at how much the site has changed since demolition began two months ago:

This first phase of public consultation will be followed by a second phase in the summer—this will focus on the academic buildings and public spaces. 

Artist-in-residence – Vanessa Kisuule

 

Vanessa Kisuule

Vanessa Kisuule is one of three Artists-in-Residence working with local communities on projects to celebrate the regeneration of the Temple Quarter area and document its heritage.

Vanessa is an award winning spoken word artist, recently appointed as Bristol’s city poet. She’ll be sharing her reflections and writing poems which explore the stories of the local area and its inhabitants, collecting memories from the past and hopes for the future. 

 

Click here to share your stories with Vanessa or call 0117 428 2322.

The Sorting Office Site: A Halfway House of Ghost Stories  

It takes a considerable leap of the imagination to walk through the cavity of the former Royal Mail sorting office and envisage a gleaming new university campus in its place. Despite its crumbling frame, there is something irrevocably sturdy about the structure. I can’t quite imagine it giving up without a fight. Even the way it will be demolished speaks of architectural stubbornness: rather than blowing up the structure in one cathartic motion, the contractors must ‘nibble’ away at the site with an extractor that will reduce the building to rubble over several weeks. Though initially disappointed that the building wouldn’t meet its end with a literal bang, I now appreciate the subtle poignancy in this death by slow mastication. It’s fitting that parts be taken away gradually, much in the way the building has decayed of its own accord in the twenty-two years since the sorting office was shut down. It’s the perpetual affliction of a poet to see metaphor in the most arbitrary of happenstance, but I like to hope this idea is striking for others to contemplate as well. 

The archival responsibilities we have to a space, even when we are radically changing it, are fascinating to ponder. As we were escorted around the site, stories of varying plausibility were relayed to us. Some were mostly true with the inevitable garnish of hyperbole, others seemed to be mere urban myths. But don’t the myths we make up become a part of our historical truth in their own way?

As I walked along the pitted floors scattered with pigeon feathers, desiccated carpet squares and endless mountains of debris, I couldn’t help but marvel at the playfulness of the space and how much of an inadvertent playground it has become. To speak of its ‘aesthetic’ would be suggestive of a deliberate curation that is not at play, but there does seem to be an incidental beauty here. I found myself charmed by the asymmetric chunks of tiles making scrambled mosaics on the floor, the walls that boasted meticulous murals and graffiti tags that would not look out of place in parts of Stokes Croft. It’s the sort of environment that media agencies spend thousands artificially creating for edgy networking events and pop up vintage stalls. If the university hadn’t bought this site, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a young tattooed micro-brewer specialising in niche IPAs had instead.  

But this space is not the all too common facsimile of counter culture we’re so used to seeing these days. There is a genuine spikiness here, an authentic deviance that is both bleak and thrilling. One of the old safes is reimagined as the locked entrance to a gay bar, an ominous political commentary if ever I saw one. The tags ‘Le Peng’ and ‘SHN’ recur frequently, the monikers of artists who have flaunted their stealth in getting into the building undetected. I fell a little bit in love with the swaggering aggression of this towering, majestic eyesore, the simultaneous fragility and belligerence of this not-quite-place. As an artist and as a human, I have learnt how to feel at home in the belly of a contradiction, so it stands to reason that this site speaks to me on a guttural level. It’s hard to imagine a time when it was an orderly place of work where things were filed and organised into neat piles and people dutifully clocked in and out. I am interested in these stories of the postal workers, how their regimented schedules may compare and contrast with the street artists who, decades later, scrambled into the husk of this once functioning business to reappropriate it in their own names.  

These stories may not be the remarkable kind that traditional history is so enamoured with. They are not the narratives on which instrumental change hinges. But they are the stories that have character and spunk, that perhaps relate to the communities we are trying so hard to retain as our cities become increasingly modern. The only hope for the survival of these stories is to ask probing questions and seek out those who may have answers, however partial. 

There will be a lot of conflicting opinions about this campus and what it means for the landscape of Bristol. Pertinent and uncomfortable discussions must be had as to who benefits from these changes and who potentially suffers or gets left behind. Whilst emphasising the exciting potential of developments like the Temple Quarter, we must also give space for uncertainty, for fear, for lament and respectful commemoration of what has been.  

I don’t want to be a vessel for glib evangelising for the campus, as brilliant as I think it has the potential to be. This residency, for me, is a chance to think deeply about the stories we tell ourselves about the cities we hope to inhabit. It’s nigh on impossible to disentangle truth from myth, hope from delusion, blue sky thinking from bottom line economics. With the help of my fellow Bristol citizens, I hope to make work that holds this dissonance with humour and care, that understands the trauma that comes with change and also the hopeful progression. Rather than forcing neat conclusions, I hope to make work as messy, provocative, angry, complex, beautiful and compelling as the site itself.

Student, Chelsie Bailey, on the rich heritage of the Old Bristol Cattle Market

As a History student at the University of Bristol I’ve had the privilege of looking into the heritage of the University’s new Enterprise campus and the history of the old Bristol Cattle Market, operating from 1830 until the 1960s. I’ve discovered a rich and extensive body of archival material, both locally in Bristol, and nationally and I was really excited to be part of the film celebrating the history of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus.

I looked at changes in both legislation and public opinion around cattle markets in the nineteenth century, spurred by protests against the treatment of animals at Smithfield market in London. Working with members of the History and Veterinary departments at the University, an interdisciplinary approach has helped to uncover fascinating details of the experience of animals in the market and their treatment on journeys to and from the Temple Meads site.

Bristol Cattle Market initially held market day on Thursdays, with an additional opening on Mondays added later due to high demand. With numbers in the thousands at full capacity, the market held a range of livestock, including cows, calves, sheep, pigs and horses. The establishment of the Great Western Railway station at Temple Meads in 1840 increased the ease of access to the market, both for consumers and animals. Cattle travelled to the market on foot from local farms, by rail from the surrounding areas, and by boat from Ireland and Canada. The journey by boat in particular was reported to have been long and strenuous for the animals, with the minimum amount of food, water and physical space provided in efforts to keep costs low.

Bristol Cattle Market was nevertheless seen by many as the model of good practice in animal welfare, particularly in comparison to Smithfield. In Bristol, drovers – who walked the animals into the city – did not use the sharpened sticks commonly known as ‘goads’ to herd the cows. The location of the Market itself also ensured that the pens were of regulation size and there was less overcrowding in Bristol than at other major city markets, especially Smithfield. However the extent of animal welfare provision in the market should not be exaggerated. Butchers’ reports noted bruising and cuts on slaughtered animals, and a number of contemporaries observed unnecessary cruelty to cattle on the part of the drovers. One resident of St Phillip’s Marsh recalled her terror of market day as a child:

It was terrifying to hear the herdsmen shouting and hitting those maddened cows, and the Bulls had rings through their noses with men pulling them along on huge ropes. Blood would be running down from their faces where the rings had cut into their nostrils. Sometimes men would put a sack over the Bulls heads to quieten them down. Once a Bull put his backside against my Aunties front door and broke it down, and then one of the cows ran into the house.
Source: St Philips Marsh, The Story of an Island and its People, BRO Pamphlet/2054. P39

Through the nineteenth century, public awareness of animal cruelty was on the increase , exemplified by the establishment of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (now the RSPCA) in 1824. The Bristol branch of the society was established in 1842, and funded regular inspections of the market, increasing the number of cruelty cases brought to court. Contemporary newspapers frequently reported the details of such cases, with cases commonly involving the binding of calves mouths with twine, which became ‘quite sunk into the flesh’, to prevent the calves from suckling and the exposure of diseased animals in the market.
Source: The Bristol Daily Post, Monday February 11 1861

The Market allowed the city to grow, putting Bristol on the map as having a good market for space for the animals and closeness to a train line. The significance of the market, and it’s long history, should be reflected in the new development of the University to commemorate the lives of the people and animals who dedicated their lives to it. We hope the essence of the market can be understood for the importance it held for Bristol, and for feeding all those who benefited from it. I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this project, and would like to thank the Brigstow Institute and the Temple Quarter group for their help and support. I hope you enjoy this film about our project and the history of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus.

Goodbye to the Cattle Market Tavern

In May Bristol City Council demolished the Cattle Market Tavern to help make way for the university’s new Temple Quarter campus. Built in 1910, this is not the first time the Tavern was pulled down as it was rebuilt in 1915 when G.W.R. extended Temple Meads over most of the old cattle market. The Cattle Market Tavern won’t be forgotten though. A group of students are currently researching the history of the site and our artists- in-residence will start work soon to help capture stories of the area including those that used to drink at the Cattle Market Tavern.