Let's begin with a question.
Where else, in an area of less than two square miles, could you find an awe-inspiring gorge, on the sides of which grow plants and trees, unknown elsewhere in the world, spanned by Brunel’s world-famous suspension bridge, under which flows a river with one of the highest rises and falls of tide in the world? Add to this rolling Downs, some superb examples of Georgian and Victorian architecture, an observatory and camera obscura, a grotto, a renowned public school and one of the world’s oldest and most attractive zoos and you begin to get some idea of the richness of Clifton. There is even a Blackboy Hill on top of a Whiteladies Road – and no, they have nothing to do with Bristol’s infamous slave trade!
Bristol is, of course, an historic city but Clifton is much older. Up on Observatory Hill, above the suspension bridge and overlooking the gorge, are the remains of an Iron Age camp of about 350 BC. This faced two other camps on the opposite bank of the river. A causeway, which could be crossed a tlow tide, linked the two sides. The causeway was blown up in 1894 as a danger to shipping. The Iron Age tribes were followed by the Romans guarding their route from Bath to Caerleon in Wales.
After this we know little of Clifton’s history until we come to the Domesday Book, ordered by William the Conqueror to survey his new kingdom and dating from the 1080s. From this we learn that the entire parish of Clifton had a total population of about 30 people, all engaged in agriculture. The boundaries of this large manor stretched from a line drawn half way across the Downs, along the present line of Stoke Road, Whiteladies Road, Triangle West, Jacobs Wells Road, along Hotwells Road and the Portway to Black Rock Quarry.
One hundred and fifty years later the manor of Clifton passed to William de Clifton and then through a series of owners, finally being split into two parts. This quiet Gloucestershire hamlet was probably much the same as hundreds of others in the West Country until it suddenly found itself in the front line of the Civil War.
The Royalists who were defending Bristol set fire to the surrounding countryside to deny shelter and forage to the besieging Roundhead army. The few houses, which Clifton had at that time were all destroyed, but the parish church of St Andrews, first mentioned in 1254, survived.
The villagers of the tiny hamlet on the hill or clustered around the river were no doubt relieved when the war ended and King Charles was restored in 1660. However, the good people of Clifton could have had no idea that its glory days were soon to come and that most of the major names of the following century would soon be paying them a visit.
In 1686 the guild of Bristol merchants, the Society of Merchant Venturers, bought the manor of Clifton. They now became owners of a spring of warm water which bubbled through the mud in the River Avon below where the suspension bridge now stands. It emerged from the mud between the high and low tide marks. This spring had long been drunk by sailors as a cure for scurvy after making long voyages without fresh fruit. King Charles II's Queen, Catherine of Braganza had visited the well in 1677 but the only way to it was down steep steps cut in the side of the cliff. The Merchants saw the spring's potential and granted a 90 year lease to two of its members requiring that a Hotwell House be built with a pump to raise the water. A new road to the well was also built making access much easier.
The new spa soon became part of the annual season for high society. Bristol newspapers began reporting the arrival of aristocracy and gentry including the Duchess of Marlborough and Lady Spencer. Most of the literary and artistic jet set of the 1700s also came to take the waters - Swift, Defoe and Haydn to name just three. The Bristol Hotwell was a summer resort and Bath a winter one, so that many traders moved their shops from Bath to catch the summer trade. The spa was also cheap - lodgings cost just 10 shillings (50 pence) a week, servants half price.
As it increased in popularity two assembly rooms, one boasting a "man cook", the New Vauxhall pleasure gardens and Bristol's first theatre were opened. So many visitors crowded into the pump rooms at the fashionable hours that there was little room for horses to be tethered showing that Clifton had parking problems even then! Terraces of houses were soon built with rooms to let, many of which still survive such as Dowry Square and Albemarle Row. As in Bath, a Master of Ceremonies was appointed to oversee the balls and dances. On fine days visitors could ride up to the hamlet of Clifton and drink milk fresh from the cow or continue on to the Downs to watch horse racing and cricket or, for gentlemen only, wrestling and cock fighting. Trips down the river with a boat load of musicians in attendance with the gorge making a natural echo chamber or strawberry teas at Long Ashton were also popular.
As well as those who came for pleasure there were, of course, invalids and soon there were dozens of rival physicians who claimed that the waters could cure everything from "feeble brains and pimply faces" to "old sores" and from diabetes to tuberculosis, the great scourge of the age. Bristol water was reputed to keep its potency longer than others and was exported around the world, helping support a flourishing local glass making industry. In 1724 Defoe noted that there were more glass houses in Bristol than in London.
All this gaiety could not last and the bubble was soon to burst.
The decline of the Hotwell was as swift as its rise. The Merchants' lease on the Hotwell House expired in 1785 and they were unable to find a tenant who would pay the large costs of the modernisation that was needed. This included preventing the pollution of the spring by the river which at that time was the city's main sewer. The Merchants then spent £3,000, an enormous sum, on improvements including the colonnade of shops with lodgings above them which still exists. Costs rose steeply and instead of 10 shillings a season for a subscription, visitors were forced to pay 26 shillings (£1.30) a month. Those in search of pleasure were driven away to other cheaper and more modern spas and the Bristol Hotwell soon acquired the sinister reputation of being the last resort of the incurable. Many of these visitors who died in Clifton are buried in the Strangers' Burial Ground at the foot of Lower Clifton Hill.
With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Britons were free to travel abroad again for pleasure and sea bathing was also becoming popular in resorts such as Brighton. New, modern spas such as Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells were also challenging Bristol. Although the glory days of the Hotwells were at an end another door was opening.
The spa may have been in long term decline but Clifton on the hill grew rapidly. A few prosperous merchants had built mansions on the hill in the first half of the eighteenth century and moved out of the pollution and cramped houses of the old city of Bristol to the clearer air on the hill. Some of these mansions still survive such as Clifton Hill House, the Bishop's House, Goldney House and Clifton Court, now the Chesterfield Hospital, standing around the original village green. Other mansions were later built along what is now Clifton Down Road such as Mortimer House, Rodney Lodge and Duncan House. However, most of Clifton on the hill remained grazing land and market gardens with the bulk of the population down by the river.
From about 1780 a building boom took place in Britain. Most of the major terraces of Clifton were laid out in the next few years. These include The Mall, Rodney Place, Richmond Terrace, Prince's Buildings, Cornwallis Crescent, Bellevue, Sion Hill, Royal York Crescent, Cornwallis Crescent, the upper parts of West Mall and Caledonia Place and several others. But when Britain went to war with Revolutionary France in 1793 the boom collapsed and developers and builders were ruined overnight. Hundreds of houses were left half built and without roofs. An observer compared the scene to a city which had suffered from war or the plague. It was not until the early years of the new century that many terraces were finished, often not to the high standards originally planned. A glance at Saville Place or Windsor Terrace shows the 'before and after' effect.
In 1822 the Merchant Venturers tried to recapture the popularity of the failing spa by building a new pump house with baths. A succession of managers tried to make a success of the project but the Hotwells never again achieved the same popularity.
The focus of Clifton was now shifting to the hill above the Hotwell. As economic confidence returned after the long war against France, more and more of the original terraces begun in the 1780s were completed and the first half of the century saw new ones added such as Vyvyan and Worcester Terraces, the lower parts of West Mall and Caledonia Place and Victoria Square.
More and more Clifton began to attract the leisured classes, including a Bristol School of artists who found the Avon Gorge and Leigh Woods attractive subjects. Between 1801 and 1851 the population grew from about 4,500 to 17,500. An Assembly Room and Hotel, now the Clifton Club, were built in The Mall. One of its visitors was the young Princess Victoria being shown off to her future subjects by her mother, the Duchess of Kent. These rooms soon proved too small for the growing population and the much larger Victoria Rooms were opened in 1842.
The old parish church of St Andrew's also proved too small and a new and larger church was built to take the increased population. Most of the pews were privately owned and a journalist of the time says indignantly: "The poor ought not to be kept out of their own parish church - from the pews by the rich and from the free seats by their powdered footmen." To relieve the problem new churches were built across the parish.
One of Clifton's strangest buildings also dates from this period - the Observatory. A burnt out and uninhabited windmill had stood on the site of the Roman camp since the previous century. In 1828 a very successful local artist, William West, leased it from the Merchants and turned it into an observatory with a telescope and the camera obscura, now the only example of a camera obscura left in England. West also created the 200 foot tunnel leading from the Observatory to the cave in the side of the Gorge, claimed to be the home of a mediaeval hermit. West was a pioneer of photography and advertised 'photogenic writing'.
Another addition to Clifton was, to give it its full name, the Bristol, Clifton and West of England Zoological Society which opened in 1836, making it the second oldest Zoo in Britain.
In the second half of the 19th century the population of Clifton again increased greatly and by the 1890s had reached 27,000. There were now no fewer than 10 churches and 12 chapels. This more permanent population also established schools. As well as many small private schools already existing, Clifton College was founded in 1860 and Clifton High School for Girls 17 years later in 1877.
The increasing middle classes continued to settle in Clifton on the hill and the fields which were once market gardens and grazing land soon became covered in Victorian villas and semi-detacheds and Gallows Acre Lane, at the end of which once stood the gibbet, was re-christened Pembroke Road.
Clifton became even more attractive in 1861 when an Act of Parliament stopped the gradual encroachment on to the Downs and created a permanent open space. Brunel's world-famous suspension bridge across the Avon Gorge was finally completed in 1864 and Leigh Woods and Nightingale Valley became more easily accessible.
Amongst the many famous residents of 19th century Clifton were Dr W G Grace who lived in Victoria Square and the historian Thomas Macaulay in Caledonia Place. The future Empress Eugenie of France was a schoolgirl in Royal York Crescent for a short time. Many of the famous residents of the area have green plaques on their houses erected by the Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society and more are planned.
The cultural life of the area greatly increased with visits to the Victoria Rooms from 'stars' such as Charles Dickens, Jenny Lind, 'the Swedish nightingale' and Oscar Wilde and societies for all the arts and sporting clubs became firmly established. A bequest by the artistic Sharples family enabled the the Royal West of England Academy to be established in Queen's Road. Clifton formed a cultured counterbalance to the commercial city of Bristol.
To the north and south of Clifton the scene was not one of prosperity. Around Blackboy Hill were a number of poor quarrymen and lime burners scraping a living while the Hotwells area declined rapidly and the buildings which had once housed the famous became overcrowded tenements for the poor. The death rate in lower Clifton was twice that of Clifton on the hill. The Hotwell House was finally demolished in 1867 and the water was piped to a pump in a cavern at the foot of the cliff. Up to 300 people a day drank it until it was finally closed on health grounds in 1913. Many Bristolians continued to swear by its beneficial effects.
The Merchants made one last attempt to revive the spa in the 1890s when the Hotwell spring was piped up to the Clifton Grand Spa and Hydropathic Institution, now the Avon Gorge Hotel, but the popularity of hydropathic treatments waned after about 1914. At the same time the Rocks Railway was tunnelled through the rocks of the gorge alongside the hotel. Hydraulic cars brought passengers up from the tramways terminus at the foot of the tunnel to Clifton.
The end of the 19th century and the years before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 saw Clifton on the hill at the height of its prosperity. Large families with servants lived in the terraces and villas and additional servants walked up from the poor area of Hotwells on a daily basis.
After the end of the war in 1918 things began to change. The arrival of the motor car meant that better-off people could now live in the country and commute to their work in the city. Families were becoming smaller and large houses began to be too expensive to run. Many were divided into flats and let out by absentee landlords. Women found that there were other careers open to them rather than ‘going into service’ and throughout the 1920s and 30s the ‘servant problem’ became one of the most frequent topics of conversation for the middle classes.
All this was to change with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Soon the unemployed of Hotwells found that there was work in the docks and factories as Britain geared up for war. Before the Germans overran the continent in 1940 Bristol was considered a safe area and the BBC sent several of its departments including the BBC Symphony Orchestra to Bristol. The popular comedy programme ‘Itma’ was broadcast from various Clifton parish halls and the Rocks Railway was converted into bomb proof studios for use in case London was put out of action.
Bristol was a prime target in the blitz and Hotwells especially, being near the docks, suffered greatly. As well as private and public buildings bombed, St Andrew’s, the parish church, Holy Trinity, Hotwells, All Saints, Pembroke Road and St Anselm’s in Whatley Road were damaged or destroyed. Scars from the blitz are still to be seen. Hundreds took refuge in the former Port and Pier railway tunnels in the side of the Avon Gorge because there were not enough official shelters.
Clifton and Hotwells were a sorry sight at the end of the war in 1945. For several years after there was a shortage of building materials to repair the damage and several of the older premises degenerated almost to the point of being slums. Properties today changing hands at £750,000 then changed hands for £500, less than they had cost to build 150 years previously. Neglect by the City Council and planners’ blight also took their toll.
Despite this Clifton retained its appeal, especially for artistic and creative people and students. In the 1950s and 60s Clifton was home to actor Peter O’Toole, playwrights Tom Stoppard and Peter Nichols and restaurateur Keith Floyd. Future novelists Deborah Moggach and Angela Carter and broadcaster Sue Lawley lived here as students.
Gradually as economic conditions improved and awareness of our Victorian and Georgian heritage increased a new life was breathed into the area. In 1968 the Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society was formed, now by far Bristol’s largest amenity society with over 1,200 paid-up members. The flats formerly owned by landlords were bought by caring owners and original features restored. The attractiveness of Clifton again became widely recognised. This in itself brought its own problems. As in many places elsewhere, small family-run service shops disappeared to be replaced by restaurants, chic boutiques, estate agents and wine bars resulting in an increase in noise, refuse, traffic and vandalism.
More recently, Hotwells has also seen a change, much of it in the form of intensive, multi-occupancy blocks.
But above all Clifton and Hotwells are survivors. They have overcome three centuries of economic boom and bust, enemy action, planners’ blight and official neglect. Who knows what this century will bring?
Copyright Michael Pascoe 2002