In 1995 permission was granted to change the ground floor and basement of No. 51 from offices to a café, with a security gate across the front. The café that opened was City NetGates, Bristol’s first internet café.
NetGates was more than a café. City NetGates Ltd was also an internet service provider, selling dial-up connections and hosting web pages, and its café on Broad Street was the place where many people in Bristol first sent an email or looked at a website. Its own site called it “The Pit Stop on the Information Superhighway”.
What it was like
The café’s website, preserved by the Internet Archive, offered a full range of hot and cold drinks and light meals “in an interesting and lively café environment at the heart of the city of Bristol”. Internet access came from “fast Pentium PCs running the latest Windows95 software” at £2.50 per half hour. It was open from 9am to 6.30pm on weekdays and until 6pm on Saturdays, and could be hired for private functions and business seminars.
The menu ran from espresso, mochas and barley cup to a long list of herbal teas, sandwiches, jacket potatoes, pizza and cakes, with daily specials on the blackboards. A gallery page listed exhibitions hosted in the café, and there were pages for local news, a Bristol directory and members’ home pages.
News from 1997
From Tuesday 4 March 1997 the café opened at 9am “due to popular demand”, so customers could check their email before work. The café’s news page joked that the internet was “much, much, much faster in the morning” because the American teenagers who usually clogged the bandwidth were still in bed. That summer a prize draw offered a balloon flight over Bristol as its top prize, drawn on 1 July 1997, with café vouchers each week.
The end of the pay-by-the-hour era
The Bristol Post has recalled that by 1999 NetGates had 12 computers at £5 an hour, and that it ran schemes giving unemployed and homeless people experience of using computers. As home connections spread, internet cafés faded, and NetGates went the same way.
Did you use NetGates, or work there? The staff page from 1998 names Ellie, Charlotte, Vanessa, Matt, Sylvan and Barry. We would love to hear from any of them.
