A potted history of Fishponds

Getting to know your surroundings can be as surprising as it is rewarding

Fishponds didn’t really become a part of Bristol until 1897, by which time electric trams were providing a link between the city centre and what had become an industrial suburb. At the time the area was still part of the county of Gloucestershire within the ancient Parish of Stapleton, but it was beginning to emerge as a hub of heavy industry. 

It had much humbler origins. According to the Domesday Book of 1086, it was an insignificant part of Barton Manor in the Swinesherd Hundred, an administrative division of Gloucestershire around Swineford on the Avon. On the edges of the Kings Wood Forest, it was Crown land known as Barton Regis. One of its functions was to supply the fuel and food needs of Bristol Castle, whose Constable was Chief Ranger of the forest and the monarch’s representative.

The Saxon hamlet of Stapledon to the northeast of the city had a church that could date back to 1000. It flourished from 1174 under the patronage of Tewkesbury Abbey and its adjunct, the Benedictine Priory of St. James (still there by Bristol bus station) whose Prior was Lord of the Manor of Stapleton. In 1438 the Abbot of Tewkesbury permitted an overflow graveyard in Stapleton as the St. James’s churchyard was full. By 1806 Stapleton graveyard was over-populated and land would be purchased in Fishponds to accommodate a new graveyard. Beside it what is now St Mary’s Church, was built in 1820 as an extension of the Stapleton parish.

By the late 17th century a village was forming around what were still called the New Pooles. They were remnants of quarries fed by the Bully/Bally Brook (now culverted beneath the dell that separates two cul-de-sacs that now form Brook Road). The ponds had provided fish for the monks of St. James Priory.

For hundreds of years there had been mills on the river Frome, which runs into the city centre, dissecting Stapleton from modern Fishponds. The dominant source of work in the area were the many coal mines and  quarries which had eaten away at the Kingswood Forest as avaricious mine owners took charge of what had previously been in the gift of the monarch. Celestine, iron, lead and ochre were also extracted from the de-afforested land. 

Life was tough and squalid, with workers living in wretched makeshift shelters and mud huts on common land. Although their labours provided a more comfortable life-style for their wealthier neighbours, it was a long while before their homes were built of stone. There would not have been much work for them in the area’s big houses like Stapleton (Bishop’s) Palace, Oldbury Court, the Dower House on Purdown, Ridgway House, and even Kingswood House, a royal hunting lodge since the 13th century set on the area’s high point (now the site of Cossham Hospital) from which you can still see the hills of Wales.

By 1734, 700 people inhabited 160 dwellings, yet in 1739 the evangelist George Whitfield claimed to have preached in Fishponds to some 2,000 miners. And John Wesley, founder of Methodism, also preached to them beside the New Pooles.

Yet the parish was still sufficiently remote from the city to allow the building of a prison to house captives first from the American War of Independence and later the Napoleonic Wars. II would also boast the first of several private ‘madhouses’ to grace the area, and by the 19th century, two enormous Workhouses, at 100 Fishponds Road and on the site of the old prison in Manor Road.

In 1740 a Doctor Joseph Mason from the village of Wickwar opened his first ‘madhouse’ in the rural setting of Tovey’s corner, at the junction of what is now Glaisdale and College Roads. He would expand to build  Fishponds House, a substantial asylum at the junction of Manor Road and Fishponds Road. His family business would run for almost 120 years, closing down in 1859 under new management after a scandalous public inquiry. [For a detailed account of Mason’s madhouses, see my book No Cure, No Fee; Boarding excepted, ISBN 978-1-911522-70-6, published by Bristol Radical History Group, https://www.brh.org.uk/site/]

At about that time Bristol Corporation conceded reluctantly to fund a municipal asylum by the banks of the Frome, on nearby Blackberry Hill. Opened in 1861 its ground-breaking design in a park setting survives as a listed building which houses the University of the West of England Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences. This asylum had several changes of name and from 1915 to 1919 served as the Beaufort Military Hospital.

Its story is told at the Glenside Hospital Museum, https://glensidemuseum.org.uk along with that of the Stoke Park Colony for the neurodiverse, based around the Dower House that still sits above the M32 but is now private flats.

In 1781 the Stapleton Enclosures Act did away with much of the common land. Big landowners like the Duke of Beaufort extended his control over the area. The Duchess had the Lower Fish Pond (behind what opened as a Unionist, then a Conservative now called the Fishponds Club) filled in after a young girl fell from a weir and drowned. The pond filled the depression behind what opened as a Unionist, then a Conservative Club, now calling itself the Fishponds Club.

The area around Royate Hill (originally Deer Gate or Roe-yate, a toll road into the Forest) and what is now Eastville Park, would become the Ruggeway then the Ridgway Estate, whose big house would later serve as a private ‘madhouse’ from 1820 to 1853. Ridgway Road, the main thoroughfare, would would eventually become a toll road and later still the Fishponds Road, its name relegated to a back route to the industrial Lodge Causeway, originally the route to the hunting lodge.

By 1790 shops on the main road included bakers, cobblers,  drapers, ironmongers, and several grocers and greengrocers. And there were private schools. At the back of Fishponds Park, once the village green, there is the one the poet and social reformer Hannah More (1745-1833) grew up in, run by her father. From 1816 to 1837 Upper Fishponds House, near what is now Beechwood Road, was a boys’ school run by Cornish Quaker and engineer Joel Lean. He would have the Upper Fish Pond, below what is now a health centre, filled in to form a withy bed. It was later turned into an orchard.

With a growing population there was a need for more schools and in 1840 a Dr. Bells National School for boys opened, then another for girls at nearby St Matthias, where in 1853 the Anglican Diocesan Training College for Schoolmistresses opened. The site later became a campus for the University of the West of England, and is now home to the Avanti Garden school and a housing estate.

Systems of public transport were transforming life. In 1866 Fishponds got its own station on the Bristol & Gloucester Railway line, formed initially to transport coal. The Stapleton Road station in Easton, opened three years earlier, offered GWR services to London. By 1869 a regular bus service from the city centre to Downend improved communications and there was a housebuilding boom led by John Yelland and John Monks with materials from local quarries. 

The 1871 census showed that almost 7,000 people were living in less than 1,000 dwellings. During the last decades of the 19th century the number of homes in Fishponds grew at a rate of knots, with the population close behind. By the 1901 census the residential population was 21,236 accommodated in 3,755 housing units. 

The establishment of Bristol’s horse-drawn tram service in 1875 assisted ribbon development from the city, but the horses struggled with the hilly route to Eastville. When the Bristol Tramways and Carriage Company went electric in 1895, Fishponds got two routes, Nos. 7 and 14. A Luftwaffe bomb put paid to the trams in 1941.

Non-conformist churches were now well established including a Bethel chapel, a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, Trinity Baptist Chapel and Fishponds Baptist Church. All Saints Anglican Church in Grove Road and St John’s on Lodge Causeway catered for the growing population of workers. The Salvation Army would also open a premises for worship on Channon’s Hill, and in 1925 St Joseph’s Catholic church opened on Forest Road. 

Fishponds has a dynamic industrial history which has shown itself adaptable to changing market conditions, and had an impact on international trade. When Alfred Robinson bought Upper Fishponds House in 1861 and changed its name to Beechwood House, he and his brother Elisha were producing brown paper bags from a printworks in Bedminster. They would shift production to Fishponds and grow an international packaging business with more than 13,500 employees, before becoming the DRG Group. The two brick chimneys towering over Forest Road and its environs are all that remain of their waxed paper factory in Filwood Road.

In 1904 The Avonside Engine Company Ltd (Locomotive Engineers, Boilermakers, Iron & Brass Founders. Telegrams: ‘Loco, Bristol’; Telephone: 30, Fishponds) opened its new factory in Filwood Road Road, close to the railway station. This was the latest version of a company first founded in 1837 to make steam engines for the Great Western Railway and the British Empire. One of its proudest products in Fishponds was the Portbury engine ordered by the War Office in 1916. Four of the nine first made were shipped to France but the Portbury was to become the workhorse of the Bristol docks for the almost 40 years. Latterly the tough, no-nonsense engine had a tendency to ‘go off on her own’ if left unattended. It was replaced by diesel engines in the 1950s.

For a time Fishponds was famous for its pottery-ware. When Pountney and Company Ltd. set up their state-of-the-art factory in Lodge Causeway back in 1905 they were continuing a tradition in Bristol dating back to the 17th century. The firm moved to Cornwall in the 1970s before going out of business. However, since 2019 a new Fishponds Pottery has opened up on the Ridgeway Road. A very different enterprise, run by Finola and Max Thomas, it is an open access pottery studio providing workshops, workspace for potters, and a ceramics firing service.

When car manufacturers the Brazil-Straker Company moved from St Philips to Lodge Causeway in 1907 it was producing London buses and sports cars. During the first World War it switched to aero-engines. Taken over at the war’s end by Cosmo Engineering which soon went bust, the aero-engine department moved to Filton as part of the British Aerospace Company, where air-cooled radial engines designed in Fishponds became standard on aircraft worldwide.

Parnall and Sons Ltd took over the Cosmo factory. City shop-fitters since the end of the 19th century, they had a foundry in Parnall Road where they produced scales and weighing machines. They had turned to aircraft production during the first World War, but now reverted to making prestigious shopfronts and outfitting luxury liners. During World War II they again produced major components for military aircraft, but by the 1960s they were back in the luxury international fittings market until being bought out by GEC. 

Several of these industrial sites are now scheduled for redevelopment, with a massive increase in housing the main component linked to the popular Bristol to Bath cycle path which follows the old, railway track.

Fishponds boasted one of the first suburban cinemas. The Fishponds Picture House opened in 1911 showing silent movies. It closed when the talkies came in, and punters crossed the road to the Van Dyke Cinema, built in 1926. The original cinema became the Old Library, the new one became first a Bingo hall and then a Wetherspoons pub.

For almost 40 years Fishponds was represented in Parliament by Liberal MPs, in the East Bristol constituency created in 1885. Cossham Hospital is a lasting memorial to the first MP, colliery owner and teetotaller Handel Cossham, who decreed it should be built with funds from his estate. 

Next Labour dominated the political scene. Left-wingers Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Atlee’s post-war Cabinet, and Tony Benn, both represented Fishponds when it became part of the South East Bristol constituency. The Conservatives held the seat for two years in the 1960s, and for almost 10 years after the 1983 election, by which time it was again East Bristol. It has remained a safe Labour seat ever since with Jean Corston, Kerry McCarthy and Damien Egan, now MP for the new Bristol North East constituency.

In his 1847 Rural Rides or Calls at Country Churches, Joseph Leach, owner of the Bristol Times, wrote: ’Fishponds is a most miserable-looking place, so cold and cheerless, indeed, that a man instinctively buttons his coat and quickens his pace as he passes through it.’ 

How things have changed. As Dr. Kate Brooks founder of the People’s University of Fishponds put it on some mugs ‘Fishponds is quite nice’.

Gleaned from sources too numerous to mention but including Bristol Archives, Bristol & Avon Family History Society, Fishponds Library, and Fishponds Local History Society.