Bristol was originally founded as a medieval trading centre on an area of land eight winding miles up the river Avon. It was perfectly situated in a well-drained and easily defended spot on a navigable waterway. It was then known by the Saxon name of Brigstowe or 'Place of the Bridge'. The first major extension to the town took place around 1248 when the existing bridge across the Avon was replaced with a stronger stone one and the area south of the river became incorporated into the town.



Bristol c 1200.



Bristol c 1248.

The new Bristol Bridge, an impressive structure lined with merchants' houses, became the 'old bridge' when it was dismantled in 1761 and replaced with a wider one.



Old and new Bristol bridge (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).

Bristol, which became an independent city and county in 1373, slowly grew, achieving a particularly dramatic surge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coinciding with its lucrative involvement in the West Indian trade, and again in the late nineteenth century with increasing industrialisation. The following three maps show its expanding boundary from 1250, when the population was around 3,000, to 1895, when the population had reached over 300,000. Note how the course of the rivers Frome and Avon have been changed over the years to meet the commercial needs of the city.



Bristol 1250.



Bristol 1373-1835.



Bristol 1835-1895.

The map below shows changes in the city boundaries and built up areas between 1200 and 1939. The city had now begun to sprawl far out beyond its original centre, first spreading along the main communication hubs (initially the waterways and later the roads and railway) then filling in the gaps in between to make concentrated, built-up areas. Formerly rural villages and hamlets were caught up in the sprawl to form new city suburbs.



Bristol 1939.

This aerial photograph taken just before World War Two shows the area of the city near Bristol Bridge, the site of the old city walls marked in red.



Aerial photograph of city centre c 1939.

Much of this area suffered heavy bombing during the Bristol Blitz. (Read about the Blitz in the Bristol at War story on The Siege website.) The following drawing by J D M Harvey is an artist's impression of how the area might have been reconstructed in the post-war period.



Drawing for proposed reconstruction of area around Bristol Bridge.

Although this particular plan did not come to fruition, Bristol was rebuilt and redeveloped after the war and the expansion of the city continued. By the end of the twentieth century urbanisation had stretched out from the centre to embrace the areas of Hartcliffe and Whitchurch to the south, and Mangotsfield and Filton in South Gloucestershire. These two maps show the areas covered by the city and by Greater Bristol in 2001.



Bristol 2001 © Crown copyright Ordnance Survey.



Greater Bristol 2001 © Crown copyright Ordnance Survey.

The Office for National Statistics' census figures show that the Bristol population fell steadily between 1951 and 2001, from nearly 443,000 to just over 380,000. However, it is anticipated that there will be a need for 150,000 new homes in the wider West of England city-region – which includes North Somerset and South Gloucestershire – in the next decade. Therefore, further large-scale changes seem inevitable with green-field development expected to take place to the north and east of Bristol, between Bristol and Keynsham, and in the area between the A370 and A38.

Most of the maps and photographs in the section above are taken from the 1945 book English City: the growth and the future of Bristol published by J S Fry and Sons Ltd.

To read more about the growth of the city and its maps, download the section on Mapping the City from the illustrated guide here.

Open full-screen versions of the maps referred to in the guide and other historic maps of the city by clicking on the links below. Click the thumbnails to view them larger.



Robert Ricart's The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar (1480-1508) (Bristol Record Office).



Georgius Hoefnalge's plan of Brightstowe (1581) (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).



James Millerd's 'delineation of the cittie of Bristoll' (1673), based on his plan of 1671 (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).



Scaled-down version of John Rocque's 1742 plan (1750) (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).



Benjamin Donn's Bristol map (1769) (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).



Mathews' new correct plan of the city and suburbs of Bristol (1815) (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).



William Lander's map of Bristol (1840) (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).



G W Bacon and Co Ltd's map of Bristol (1900) (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).



Special-edition 1930 Ordnance Survey map of Bristol (Bristol's Museums, Galleries and Archives).



Bristol Legible City on-street map at College Green (Jamie Shaw).