1970 - On April 12, more than 100,000 people line the banks of the River Avon to watch the ss Great Britain being towed home on the last leg of her journey from the Falkland Islands.
1972 - Theatre Royal and Coopers’ Hall restored and re-opened.
1974 - It is 7.30 in the evening on Wednesday December 18, 1974 and Park Street is still busy with Christmas shoppers. Police receive a phone call from a man with an Irish accent telling them that a bomb will go off on Park Street in half an hour. A frantic search begins of shop doorways and litter bins, but before the Police have reached half-way, the windows of Dixons are blown out, shattering just about every other glass shopfront on the street in the process. Ten minutes later, another deafening roar splits the early evening silence. Altogether 15 people are injured but amazingly there are no fatalities.
1974 - Royce Creasey organises the first Ashton Court Festival, a series of four Sunday events at Ashton Court. Fred Wedlock plays one of the days, as does a band called Pussy Spasm.
1975 - The Arnolfini moves from the Triangle to its current site, Bush House, a former tea warehouse on Narrow Quay, and becomes a catalyst for harbourside redevelopment
1977 - Royal Portbury Dock opens at Avonmouth.
1978 - Bristol Industrial Museum opens.
1978 - Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby is born on July 25 to Lesley and John Brown of Hassell Drive, Easton.
1980 - Rioting breaks out in St Paul’s following a police raid on the Black and White cafe in Grosvenor Road. It is the first of the inner city riots of the early Eighties.
1982 - The Watershed, Britain’s first ‘media centre’, opens across the water from the Arnolfini.To this day nobody in Bristol is quite sure what makes two cinemas, a bar and a gallery a ‘media centre’.
1982 - Bristol City FC goes bust and is reformed as Bristol City (1982). Eight of the club’s highest earners from the Division One days agree to tear up their contracts so the club can survive. They become known as the Ashton Gate Eight.
1983 - The Wild Bunch, later to become Massive Attack, become resident Wednesday night DJs at the Dug Out club on Park Row.
1986 - The Dug Out closes following a campaign by police that culminates with police solicitor Richard Crowley telling the city council’s Public Protection Committee that the club is like a ‘Fagin’s kitchen’.
1986 - On April 26, Bristol Rovers play their last ever game at their spiritual home, Eastville. it’s a 1-1 draw with Chesterfield.
1990 - Massive Attack’s first single, Daydreaming, released on October 15th.
1991 - Blue Lines, the first Massive Attack album is released on January 6th.
1991 - New shopping centre the Galleries opens in Broadmead. It’s a ‘totally enclosed mall with three levels of shopping and eateries and a 950 space car park’ and replaces the old concrete montrosity, Fairfax House with a new brick monstrosity.
1995 - Portishead win the Mercury Music Prize with their debut album Dummy.
1996 - The second Severn crossing opens. It cost about £300 million.
1997 - Roni Size wins the Mercury Music Prize with his album New Forms.
1999 - Pero’s Bridge opens linking the Watershed with the Arnolfini. Designed by Irish artist Eilis O’Connell and named after a slave brought back to Bristol by John Pinney, the bridge is generally regarded as one of the better things to have been built in Bristol in recent years.
1999 - The new-look City Centre opens to the public on Millennium Eve.The mixture of concrete, cobbles and fountains that don’t work properly and even more traffic than before fails to capture the popular imagination. By 2004 the City Council is still fiddling around with the design of the Centre and the fountains still don’t work properly.
2000 - The £97 million @Bristol project opens, comprising Explore,Wildwalk and the max cinema.The project is the first stage of a £450 million urban rejuvenation scheme, covering 11 acres of Bristol’s Harbourside. By the summer of 2003 @Bristol was losing money and had to ask the City Council for a loan of £500,000 to continue trading.
2001 - The population of Bristol is 380,000.
2001 - Prime Minister Tony Blair is hit by a tomato during a protest against sanctions against Iraq when he visits Bristol to open the City of Bristol College.
2001 - PJ Harvey wins the Mercury Music Prize with her album Stories From The City~ Stories From The Sea.
2002 - In October. Bristol is short-isted as a candidate for European City of Culture 2008.
2002 - Downing Street insists there was nothing wrong in Cherie Blair’s purchase of two Bristol flats with the help of a convicted fraudater. She has faced much criticism in December after confirming Peter Foster had helped her, despite earlier denials from the Number 10 press office. The flats are in the Old AA building opposite the nice Victorian toilets on Park Row.
2003 - The Labour Party is swept from power in the May local elections after the best part of 30 years in power. No party has an overall majority and it takes the local politicians a couple of weeks to come to agreement about how to share power. Strangely, the city seems to run itself perfectly efficiently without anybody being in control.
2003 - Liverpool is chosen ahead of Bristol as European City of Culture for 2008. According to the judging panel. Bristol was the most European of the nominated cities, but its road system counted against it. - The judges felt that the districts were ‘divided by motorways’.
2003 - Massive Attack make a triumphant homecoming in August with a huge gig in Queen Square. 'Keep Bristol music progressive!' is Robert Del Naja’s message to his home-town crowd. He dedicates Teardrop from the Mezzanine album to Bristol.
2003 - Tens of thousands of people stare into the Bristol skies on November 27 as Concorde returns to the city for the last time. For many it’s an emotional moment as the beak-nosed supersonic jet appears out of the clouds and zooms over the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
2003 - Plans for a major expansion of Broadmead are approved by Bristol City Council on December 10. Retailers and developers are delighted; residents and businesses in St Paul’s are less enthused because, they claim, the expansion will destroy a community that has already been split in two by the M32. According to Bristol Alliance, the group behind the plans, three new shopping streets are planned including 15 major stores and more than 100 new shops plus bars and restaurants. A landmark four-storey department store will anchor the development and create a new gateway to Bristol,’ they enthuse.
2004 - The Advertising Standards Authority criticises Bristol City Council for a poster campaign discouraging the public from giving money to beggars.The campaign suggests that people who help the homeless may be funding lethal drug habits.
SUN DRIED UP OUR LAKES DURING THE SIZZLER OF '76
With the sunny weather here at last, We turn back the clock to the now legendary summer of 1976 - a year when the heat was really on Rationed: With water supplies running dry, many families had to rely on standpipes Heatwave: During the long, dry summer of 1976, even the mighty Chew Valley Reservoir virtually dried up AFTER basking in the sun for the last couple of weeks, let's hope we can look forward, with the help of a little global warming, to some long, hot summer days.
We're certainly due them after a dismal winter and cold spring. But how many readers, I wonder, recall the record-breaking long, hot summer of 1976, now an unbelievable 30 years ago? If you do, you'll have memories of what a summer should really be like, with day after day of unbroken sunshine and temperatures in the 80s and 90s. Weathermen said that it was the hottest year overall since 1826, though it was just a little cooler in the West. But Bristol certainly had the hottest June on record. Readers of the Post were asked to 'cool it' as ice cream was rationed, kids stripped off and jumped into the pool in front of the Council House and tempers became frayed. The outdoor swimming pools, like Portishead and the old Clifton Lido, came into their own and shops reported shortages of suntan oil and sunglasses.
Wildlife had a field day, with a plague of ladybirds descending on the seafronts at Clevedon and Weston-super-Mare. The local authorities started spreading sand on the roads to stop the tar from melting (which didn't work) and the water authorities became so stretched that they considered bringing in extra supplies to Avonmouth from Norway. Pupils at Winterbourne school were forced to attend lessons as the temperature topped 37.8 degrees in the classroom. But in more sensible Somerset, some children started school at 8am and finished at 1pm - missing at least some of the heat of the day. Despite constant warnings, youngsters just couldn't be stopped from diving into the area's many rivers and watercourses to cool off. More dangerously, many Bristol people started jumping into the icy, deep waters of the docks.
By the end of June it was official - Bristol was England's hottest spot, with a temperature of 91F (33C). By this time many people had had enough of the heat - but amazingly it just went on and on, right throughout July and August. With temperatures at night remaining very high (63 degrees) people found that they couldn't sleep. In fact, you could still feel the heat wafting off the pavements at midnight. The weathermen tell us that it did rain, but amounts were very small, and soon drought conditions set in.
Then, after over a month without rain, the brewery draymen went on strike - so we soon had beer rationing as well as water rationing to add to our misery. A hosepipe ban was implemented and the washing of cars was outlawed. There was much goverment advice on water-use, including the suggestion that only five inches of water was to be used in a bath, and that baths, it was daringly suggested, should be shared). A minister for drought, Denis Howell, was appointed. Just to prove he meant business a hastily conceived Drought Bill, implemented on July 14, allowed for fines of up to £400 for water misuse.
On June 28, the record for the hottest June day was broken when 32.8C (91F) was recorded. August was a record month with an amazing 264 hours of sunshine - more than eight hours a day. But not everyone lapped up the sun. There were casualties. In July, a local woman died from hyperpyrexia - caused by not drinking enough water or having enough salt in hot weather. It was something usually restricted to countries with very hot climates. Wildlife suffered, too. Thousands of salmon and trout died in the region's rivers as the water became starved of oxygen. Many trees, especially those which had just started to recover from Dutch elm disease - started to wilt and die. Dust clouds covered the land as firemen strugled to cope with up to 20 grass-fires a day. In the Cotswolds, so-called dust-devils were reported.
These were small whirlwinds which only occur on fine, hot days. Brooks and springs which had never been known to dry up, even in the hottest weather, did just that and bowling greens and golf courses closed their doors to members as their 'greens' turned to 'browns'. Water was being lost by evaporation from the Mendip reservoirs at an alarming rate - nearly six million litres a day throughout August. The level in the vast Chew Valley reservoir fell so low that visitors could actually walk on the exposed baked earth and make out the old road bridges and skeletal remains of long-since drowned farms.
As temperatures stayed in the 90s, many country areas came to rely on standpipes and buckets of water. Some, with very limited supply, or even none at all, had water delivered by tanker. Finally, on August 28, the worst drought since 1921 came to an end with violent storms and flooding. Strangely, many people stood at their back doors and welcomed the rain back with open arms.
What memories do you have? please contact me with your story.
