See No Evil has been taking over Nelson Street all week, as graffiti artists from across the world converge on the road formally known as Gropecunt Lane to make their mark on the biggest urban art project of its kind in Europe. One of the areas due to be painted is the concrete pedestrian footbridge spanning the road, behind which is a fascinating story.
The Nelson Street footbridge is one of the few reminders of what Bristol could have looked like if 1960s town planners had got their way and created a ‘city in the sky’.
With the inexorable rise of the motor car, plans were made and sometimes executed in the sixties for great concrete routes through the hearts of our cities. In Bristol, plans thankfully never fully came to fruition.
But the footbridges over Nelson Street, Rupert Street and Lewins Mead, and the empty areas above our heads to which they lead, are a stark and brutal visualisation of what might have been if the 1961 Forum Plan for Bristol had gone ahead.
The Fight for Bristol (ed. by Gordon Priest and Pamela Cobb; Redcliffe Press, 1980) explains these plans:
“The group of architects who put (the plan) forward combined super highways with dreaming notions of pedestrian decks to create squares of Venetian splendour where Bristolians would gather in their thousands on election nights six metres above the smoothly uninterrupted flow of traffic.
“The dream seemed so achievable. Perhaps part of it, at least, should have been done. The centre deck might have worked; noise and fumes might not have made it unusable. Often the wrong parts were carried out.
“The major central area civic contribution of the sixties was the complex of pedestrian decks that survive in truncated form above the street at Lewins Mead and beyond and which virtually nobody uses. This was to be the essential link between the Centre – or even Forum’s great piazza above it – and the Broadmead shopping centre and beyond.”
So as the walkway over Nelson Street and the area around it is brightened up this week during See No Evil, spare a thought for the town planners of the 1960s, and praise the lord that only Nelson Street felt the full brunt of their vision to make Bristol a concrete city in the sky.
This post is dedicated to the lovely @ali_slater and her love of 1960s town planning.
Bristol Culture 
The most awful thing I heard was that they wanted to empty out the harbourside, pour concrete into it and make a motorway through the city but under Clifton. Unbelievable.
Oh, good grief. Joanna: is that true? Who can we thank for stopping that?!!
Well, I recently walked on that Nelson Street overhead walkway, taking a route from new the Old Vic to near Broadmead. Not so bad, makes a really interesting walk actually. Overhead walkways aren’t per se disastrous. In Hong Kong, for example, overhead walkways help make the city centre bearable, otherwise the traffic would overwhelm you. In Manila, they’re used (in Greenbelt) in magically attractive pedestrian shopping areas. One problem with overhead walkways can be that when you start on one, it isn’t obvious where its going to bring you out. But well-integrated with mixed use developments, surrounded by shops, and well-signed, they often work very well. Of course they’re only good for densely populated cities, and Bristol just hasn’t got the density to make ’em work. But rather than knocking these ones down, it might be worth adding signage and bringing them to life.
The plans also involved an elevated motorway running a few yards – sorry, metres – from the spire of St Mary Redcliffe, towards Temple Meads and Old Market…