Section: Broad Street
Broad Street on screen
Victorian London, Sherlock Holmes’s student days and the Doctor’s sixtieth anniversary: Broad Street has played them all.
The Guildhall and the 1788 meeting
Bristol’s Guildhall has stood on Broad Street since the Middle Ages. In 1788 it hosted the city’s first public meeting against the slave trade.
Banks and business
Bristol’s first banking partnership opened in Broad Street in 1750. A century later the Bank of England followed.
Victorian Broad Street
In a few years in the 1860s Broad Street gained a grand hotel and a Gothic bar, and in 1901 one of the most extraordinary shop fronts in Britain.
Blitz, towers and listing
War damage, a twelve-storey office block on the line of the town wall, and the listing that protected the rest of the street.
Taking back the street
After centuries of carts, carriages and cars, Broad Street became a street for people on foot.
One of Bristol’s four first streets
Broad Street, High Street, Wine Street and Corn Street met at a cross in the middle of the Saxon town of Brycgstow. Everything else grew from there.
St John’s Gate and the town wall
At the bottom of Broad Street stands the last surviving gate of medieval Bristol, with a church built over it.
The inns of Broad Street
Oxenford’s Inn, the White Lion, the White Hart, the Saracen’s Head, the Ragged Staff, the Cyder House and the Brandy Cask: for seven hundred years this was a street to stay and drink in.