Bristol is the major city of south western England, with a population of about three quarters of a million people, making it the eighth largest urban area in the UK.
Bristol has a very unusual location. Between Bristol and the sea is a range of limestone hills. Melting glaciers in the past cut a gorge through these hills, and the River Avon now flows in the gorge, called Clifton Gorge. The whole river to Bristol is tidal, and the race through the gorge has always been difficult for ships except near high tide. Yet Bristol developed as one of the great ports of the world in Medieval times. Why was this?
Bristol actually has a long list of people who lived in the area. Hand axes tell us that Stone Age people lived here, and Iron Age people built forts on the hills. It was the land of the Dobunni.
The Romans chose to develop the seaward side of the gorge, making a small port called Portus Abonae, while the Roman wealthy built countryside villas nearby.
But it was the Saxons who developed the present site as a settlement. They were less interested in overseas trade, and more concerned to find a place that could be protected from seaward raids. The gorge was ideal for this, while the low hill where the Avon and Frome met could be used to keep clear of marshy land.
This point was also the lowest place on the Avon that could be forded easily, and hence the town name in Saxon times as Brycgstow, meaning "the place at the bridge".
Brycgstow was soon a market town and important enough to have a mint and need protecting walls. It was one of the Saxon burhs.
Because it was an established town, the Normans built a motte and bailey castle, whose remains are in Castle Park. William the Conqueror kept the castle as part of his lands. Soon afterwards St Augustine's Abbey was founded.This building dominated the town.
In medieval times wool was the major material traded from Britain to Europe. The main centres of wool were East Anglia in the east and the Cotswold and Mendip Hills in the west, and Bristol came to dominate the western wool-producing area.
Bristol's position as a sheltered harbours but close to the wide waters of the Severn Estuary made it a good choice for merchants wanting to sell wool to Europe, as well as importing wine and olive oil from Mediterranean countries.
So during medieval times the town prospered and grew. It had a stone bridge over the Avon by the 13th century. In the 14th century, Bristol had grown to become the third city in England, after London and York. A small part of the city walls from this time still survive at the Church of John the Baptist.
This early city grew to the north of the Avon and on to the hills leading to Clifton. This medieval heart is still one of attractive steep streets and narrow alleys, of which Christmas Steps is the most famous, paved over from a muddy track in the 17th century.
But no one could have foretold that Bristol was to have a much more important advantage when it came to the Age of Exploration, for Bristol also faced the Atlantic Ocean and what would become the American colonies.
Using the newly developed Portuguese designed and most importantly ocean-worthy ships called carrocks and caravelles, in 1497 John Cabot became the first European to land on mainland North America. He is still remembered in a statue outside Bristol Cathedral as well as in the naming of the Cabot Circus shopping centre. In 1499 William Weston, a Bristol merchant who had probably been on the first exploration of Jon Cabot, and with whom he worked closely, was the first Englishman to lead a proper exploration to North America.
Soon after, and much less well known, other adventurers went across the ocean. But what excited them were the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland. Thus began a fishing industry, whose men lived in shelters along the shores of Canada in the summer, catching cod and smoking it, then returning back with full holds in the winter. These were the people who first got to know the Native Americans, and from whom some Native Americans learned to speak English. In the long run they would begin the fur trade.
During Henry VIII's time all of the ancient abbeys were dissolved as part of breaking from the church in Rome. But Bristol needed a place of worship, and so St Augustine's Abbey was saved from destruction and turned into a cathedral instead.
Then, as England colonised the north eastern part of North America, so Bristol was ideally placed to handle the trade between the fisheries, the fur trade and the products of the colonies being brought back to the homeland.
The colonies needed workers for the sugar and tobacco plantains, and thus began the slave trade between England, Africa and North America. Slaves were bought in Africa for metal goods such as brassware. A leading Bristol brassware maker was Abraham Darby, one of the founders of the Industrial Revolution.
Until the Industrial Revolution, Bristol was the main city on the west coast. Abraham Darby moved north to Shropshire after inventing a way of using coal to smelt iron. Over the years iron and then steel making became concentrated in the Midlands and in south Wales, and the importance of Bristol slipped behind its rising rival city, Liverpool.
Furthermore, as the cotton trade became important, so Liverpool was better placed than Bristol to send cotton to mills on the slopes of the damp Pennines.
But there were other overseas products besides cotton to base trade on. Bristol , quakers, such as Fry's, became famous chocolate makers, while Bristol was also a key port for tobacco.
Some of the wealthy homes date from this period. Royal York Crescent in Clifton was begun in the 1790s and is of the Regency style. Royal York Crescent is the longest crescent in Europe.
But after the slave trade ended, and the industrial revolution took hold, ships became bigger. The sheltered and easily defended harbour of Bristol now became a liability.
Even so, Bristol remained important, and one of its most famous sons was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who helped to develop the Bristol steamship building industry.
But there was no escaping the poor access to Bristol for big ships. This is why, in the 19th century, the main shipping docks began to move to Avonmouth, with its deeper waters and larger amounts of flat land.
Because Bristol was a city of merchants, it did not grow with large factories at its heart as many northern cities did. Nevertheless, up to modern times its tradition of engineering skills were used to develop cutting edge technology such as an aircraft industry including the development of supersonic Concorde. As a port and aircraft making centre, it was a target for German bombers in the Second World War, and bombers destroyed much of the city centre. Broadmead shopping centre and the Cabot Circus mall all are built over part of this bomb damaged area. Skills and an attractive environment are still attracting many new high tech industries. At the same time, the old docks have been converted into a leisure area and marina and many new apartments built with dockside views.
But the experience of merchants and trade and so the handling money down the centuries has also meant that Bristol has developed as a centre connected to insurance and finance.
Bristol, with so much history, is also an import an centre for tourism, and at its heart is the iron Atlantic ship SS Great Britain, now returned to the port where she was built.
