Category: UK

The next brewery I meandered to was Left Handed Giant who are a local Bristol brewery who have been operating since 2014. I’ve had several of their beers before, usually sours such as the rather lovely Early to the Party and the Corporate Conference that was available at the 2025 Norwich Beer Festival (and indeed was my favourite beer on the first day).

I’ve also had some of their beers at their Bristol brewpub, although I haven’t yet made it to their taproom in the city and I hadn’t realised that they also operate Small Bar and Renato’s in Bristol. That all combines to more places to add to my ever growing list of places to go.

Anyway, this beer was the 6.5% ABV Left to Roam which is relatively new out and is suitably hoppy, hazy and with some stonefruit to add to the mix.

Nicholas Pocock (1740–1821) perhaps has exactly the expression one might expect from a man who had spent part of his life at sea and the rest of it painting naval battles. This portrait was painted around 1810 by Isaac Pocock (1782–1835) which is all rather lovely. As an aside, I’m often impressed by artists from this period who painted naval battles, there’s an awful lot of rigging that must have been a bloody nuisance to paint.

At least here Isaac hasn’t had to deal with ships, storms, cannon smoke and the other elements that are usually involved in naval paintings. As evidence of that, here’s one of his father’s paintings.

I thought that he looked more disapproving close-up, but he was probably exhausted by his naval life and perhaps it’s just a look of being rather weary. Isaac Pocock went on to become a dramatist and author as well as a painter, but he died when not especially old.

I’ll work through the breweries that I had beers from at the festival and I’ll note now that the beer was free and it was me that chose how much to have, they weren’t short measuring or being tight with pours. Good Chemistry were one of the most engaging of the breweries and they had an interesting selection of keg beers available.

The first beer I went for was the Peach and Love which is their fruited lager that is inevitably going to be compared to Jubel. I’m not really much one for lager, although I prefer it when cut with fruit, but this one was gentle, soft and had a suitable peach flavour to it.

The second was Loose Change, a 3.4% ABV sessionable IPA which had tastes of stonefruit and was suitably light. These lower ABV IPAs seem a very sensible idea for the summer months.

It reminded me to have a look on Untappd about what I’ve had before from the brewery and I’ve had their beers at the Rose, the Artichoke and the Leopard in Norwich, as well as at Norwich Beer Festival. My favoured beer so far from them has been the Smooth Operator, a 6% ABV porter collab that they did with Abbeydale Brewery.

Anyway, they seemed like really nice people and although I didn’t have time on this trip, I note that they have a reopened taproom in Bristol that I’ll have to get around to visiting in the future. They brew cask and keg beers, but, as so often happens, I only tried the keg ones here.

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.

This is a poster in the museum which sought to oppose plans to stop children being sent up chimneys, which the Master Chimney Sweepers were most annoyed by. The poster reads:

“A BILL now in the HOUSE of LORDS, for regulating the Business of CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS, contains a Clause, prohibiting the Use of Climbing Boys in the Sweeping of Chimneys. The Mischiefs likely to arise from the Adoption of such a Measure, may be estimated from the following Considerations.

First. In a large Number of the Flues of present Construction, it is quite impracticable to Sweep them without Climbing Boys; the Machines hitherto invented being inapplicable. Neither can such Flues be adapted to Machine Sweeping, without an entire Reconstruction of the Chimneys, at a great Inconvenience and Expense, for which no Provision is, or can be, proposed.

Secondly. Because already the Majority of Fires, particularly those of the most frightful Consequence, originate from foul Flues, where Wood is improperly laid into them; and as Machine Sweeping cannot possibly remedy Defects of this Description, and is, in all Cases, far more expensive and offensive than the Old Method, (now to be entirely abolished) the Number of Fires will be much increased, both as it will be impossible to clean many, and as all Persons will become indisposed to the regular cleansing of their Flues, from the excessive Dirt, Inconvenience, and Expense, which attends Machine Sweeping.

It is apprehended, that upon careful enquiry it will be found impracticable to carry the proposed Regulation into Effect; and public Attention is earnestly invited to the Consideration, whether, with a View to alleviate a supposed Evil, the Legislature may not, if the present Bill passes into a Law, introduce a real one, the inevitable Consequence of which must be, an Increase of the Risk of Conflagrations, the Certainty of an Increase of Pauperism, and of Parochial Rates, whilst the Chance of bettering the Condition of the Persons on whose Account the Measure is brought forward, is at best speculative and uncertain.

If such should be the reasonable and true View of the Subject, ought not the different Parishes to call Meetings, as St. George’s, Hanover-Square, and some others have done, to Petition Parliament against the passing of the Bill?

The Master Chimney Sweepers, Householders of the Cities of London and Westminster, have published an Abstract of the Bill in Question, with a brief Review of its Consequences to the Country if carried into a Law; to which is added, an Outline of a Plan for regulating the Business of Chimney Sweepers, and improving the Condition of their Apprentices and of Climbing Boys in general, which may be had, Price Two Shillings, of all the respectable Master Chimney Sweepers in London.

London: Printed by J. Barfield, 91, Wardour-Street, Soho.”

The museum notes that this campaign started in 1829 and it did get a fair amount of sympathy, all leading to an Act of Parliament in 1834 which limited itself to increasing the minimum age from which kids were sent up chimneys to be fourteen. During the debates, there was furious debate and insurance companies came out on different sides of the argument about what they wanted.

There were numerous pieces of legislation over the next few decades, most of which were ignored, and it wasn’t until 1875 that the police were able to enforce anyone under the age of 16 being sent up a chimney. There are many jobs in Victorian times that I wouldn’t have liked, but climbing up a chimney covered with soot does sound particularly unpleasant. The 1834 legislation reinforced that children shouldn’t be sent up a chimney that was on fire, as if that needed to be made clear. But different times and all that…..

One thing that I hadn’t realised is that the 1662 Hearth Tax led to a lot of this, as builders started to create more complex and joined up flues to minimise the tax that they had to pay. This, over time, meant that adults couldn’t easily clean the chimneys, but children aged about six were perfect. Orphaned children were often apprenticed off to chimney sweeps which saved the local overseers of the poor happy as they didn’t have support them.

I’ve already written about the statue of Colston on display in the museum, but in many ways this felt more interesting. It’s the plaque that was placed by the statue a few months before it was torn down, attempting a compromise between the great deal of good that Colston did for Bristol whilst also highlighting his links to slavery and how many people suffered because of his actions.

I have no view on whether statues stay up or not, it’s not for me to choose. I like statues as they tell a story, but it would be odd for a city like Warsaw to have a statue of a Nazi or similar, some things are just beyond the pale. Either way, it would have perhaps been a travesty for the statue to have been destroyed, so its positioning in a museum tells a story in the way that it should. The story really isn’t just about Colston, it’s about how later generations used his legacy and didn’t take all of it into account.

The element that I think is intriguing is what would Colston himself think of this? He was one of the greatest philanthropists of his age, but he declared that he didn’t want any pomp with regards to his burial. That was ignored and I’m not convinced, not that I’m an expert, that he would have even wanted a statue erected to him anyway. I rather like that the idea that Colston would be comfortable both with his contribution to charity being remembered alongside the horrors of slavery. Perhaps the defining message here is that the whole thing was a correction to how later generations used Colston and how the Victorians didn’t take the slavery links into account when putting the statue up in 1895, even though they lived in a time when slavery had, in theory, been abolished.

Here’s Scott and what the Colston used to look like before it was pulled down in 2020. I wrote in a blog post in June 2020 that it was currently in the river, but would likely be recovered and put in a museum.

And here it is…… I’ll continue this theme in my next thrilling blog instalment….

Banksy is one of Bristol’s most famous cultural exports, which is a slightly odd phrase to use about an artist whose identity remains officially unconfirmed and whose early career depended rather heavily on not asking permission. The museum doesn’t name him, but it gives his date of birth as 1974, which aligns with the long-running claim that Banksy is Robin Gunningham, a Bristol-born figure who has repeatedly been linked with the artist, although the anonymity remains part of the performance and should probably be treated with a little caution. Still, when a museum gives Banksy a birth year rather than leaving him floating entirely in the mist, it feels like a discreet nod towards the most widely accepted theory.

The Grim Reaper is a very Bristol object because it belongs to that awkward middle ground between mischief and heritage. Painted in 2003 on the side of Thekla, the former cargo ship turned nightclub in Bristol Harbour, it shows death rowing along the hull with a pleasingly bleak sense of purpose. It worked because of its setting: a skeleton in a boat, on a boat, in a harbour city. The work was later removed from the vessel because exposure to the elements was damaging it, and it now survives as a conserved object rather than as something glimpsed outside in its original setting.

I know that Banksy blurs the lines between graffiti and art, but his work is intriguing and interesting, usually drawing a crowd who want to see it. And this feels like one of the most appropriate places for one of his artworks to end up, all very lovely.

There is something rather pleasing about a street sign that has survived since 1755 and still does exactly what it was made to do which is to announce, without drama, that this was West Street. It comes from Bedminster, now part of Bristol, but historically a separate place south of the Avon, with its own parish, streets and identity before the city expanded around and into it.

I like random stuff like this because residents walked past this sign on their way to work, to market, to church, to the pub or to whatever little arrangement the eighteenth century had decided to inflict on them that day. Most of them presumably ignored it completely, which is usually the fate of useful things. Now it sits in a museum, looked at by people like me, apparently emotionally invested in carved municipal directions. I probably shouldn’t try and attribute meaning to so many things, but I doubt that very many of these survived.