The Bristol printA Bristol print in a walnut frame, on a soft green wall, in bright western light.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Bristol print, drawn from the real map

51.4545°N / 2.5879°W · United Kingdom

Bristol has neither a grid nor a simple river: two channels where you would expect one. The whole city plan follows from that, and from the fact that both were dug.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Bristol print

What the map shows

Two lines of water, and only one of them moves with the tide

The wide one is the Floating Harbour: a river shut behind gates and held at a constant level, so that ships stopped sitting on mud twice a day. The narrower one south of it is the New Cut, which carries the tidal river away around the outside. They were made in the same works, they separate around a long tongue of land, and they meet again at the western end in a basin with locks. Everything here is engineering. The banks, the levels, the depth of the channel, even the line the river takes.

Read on

Two things sit at the edges of this framing and are worth knowing about. To the west the ground tears open into the Avon gorge, and Brunel’s suspension bridge crosses it in a single line with nothing else near it, but the bridge is just beyond this frame; centring on it pushes the harbour’s S into a corner. To the east, the railway fan of Temple Meads spreads over what was once a marsh, though the rails themselves are drawn too faintly to hold. What carries this print is the double water line down the middle.

Compose your own

What suits Bristol

The palette

Water leads everything here, so give the two channels different treatments rather than one: a broad settled tone for the Floating Harbour, something quicker and more restless for the New Cut and the tidal river. The gorge to the west wants to go deep and dark, a recess rather than a feature. The centre is a dense grey with no regular weave to fall back on, which means your water has to do the organising. If you mark the motorway at all, let it be a single point stopping dead at the edge of the centre.

The framing

Vertical, with the centre pushed west of the obvious one. The two channels then run the full width and stay separate, which is the whole subject, and the locks come in at the western end. Push further west and you can have the gorge and the suspension bridge, but the S of the harbour ends up crushed into a corner and the print becomes a picture of a bridge instead. Do not centre on the shopping streets: the subject here is water that was made to behave.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. The name of a dock, a lock, a date: that line is what turns a plan of Bristol into your plan of Bristol.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1809A river was shut behind gates

The Floating Harbour was created in 1809 to the designs of the engineer William Jessop: dam the river, cut a new channel for the tide, and the water in the middle of the city stays level all day. It silted up almost at once. It was the young Brunel who solved it, proposing in a report of 31 August 1832 to turn the overflow into a scouring underfall, and launching a winch-drawn dredger, Bristol Dredger No. 6, which stayed in service until 1961. The calm water on this map is therefore not a lake and not a river: it is a machine that has to be maintained.

1843The biggest ship in the world could not get out

The SS Great Britain, the first iron-hulled ocean liner driven by a propeller and the largest ship in the world when she was launched on 19 July 1843, was built here in the Great Western Dockyard. She was too wide for the lock at Cumberland Basin, and only left the city after masonry was cut away to let her through. On 19 July 1970, one hundred and twenty-seven years to the day after her launch, she came back into that same dock, where she remains. The lock that would not let her out is at the western end of this print.

1877In the end the port left the city

Ships kept growing, and the winding tidal approach did not. The first dock at Avonmouth opened in 1877, Portishead followed in 1879, then the Royal Edward Dock in 1908, enlarged in 1929. The deep-water basins at the river mouth took over from the ones in the centre. That is why the water running through the middle of this map is a harbour without a port: the shape of a working dock, kept, after the work moved eight miles downstream.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.

How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Bristol

The side of the water you walked, the bridge you crossed without thinking, the hill you were always at the bottom of. The harbour is the same for everyone. Which bank you belonged to is not.

Compose my Bristol print