I had a free ticket for Bristol Craft Beer Festival, of which much more soon, and this is the view from M Shed of them setting up. There’s something quite pleasing about watching a beer festival take shape, it adds to the anticipation.
It was being held at the Ampitheatre which is now something of a performance venue used in the space that was once Canon’s Marsh. The map above is what that looked like in the 1880s, it wasn’t the most used part of the docks and certainly not as polish as today. As an aside, Canon’s House today, behind the Ampitheatre in my photo was built as a regional headquarters for Lloyds Bank between 1988 and 1991, with the building now seen as an excellent example of post-modernist construction. They built the Ampitheatre at this time for the people of Bristol to use it and what better use than a beer festival? Some cities build monuments to kings, generals and statesmen. Bristol, quite sensibly, created a space where people can stand by the harbour with a third of something hazy and wonder whether they are detecting mango.