In August 2010, the Stokes Croft Museum opened: an unfunded venture, established to showcase the diversity of life in an area of Bristol renowned for its music and graffiti, but also its problems of crime, addiction and prostitution. Rose Wallis looks at this new 'single-room' heritage attraction, and how it reflects the many identities of the area.
Year: 2011
Stolen Paradise: Civilian squatters in military camps in and around postwar Bristol
During the summer of 1946, thousands of British families took the law into their own hands to temporarily solve their housing problems by "requisitioning" empty military camps. Eugene Byrne takes a look at the mass-squatting movement that swept the city and surrounding area, which took up almost all of the country's vacant military sites in two weeks from its ignition.
Crewing the Bristol Slave Trade: the Bristol Ships’ Muster Rolls, 1790-1795
In this article, Mike Breward looks at the use of Muster rolls on ships, noting what their purpose was and why they are so important. "Muster Rolls, listing ship's crews by name together with their service details, became a legal requirement on ship owners by an Act of Parliament in 1747. Their original purpose was to record monies paid into the 'hospital fund', a levy from seamen's wages for a relief fund for the injured and the provision of payments to widows and families of deceased sailors".
A History of the Cirencester Brewery, 1798-1949
'In March 1792, the Gloucester Journal advertised the forthcoming sale of 'one of the most complete breweries outside London'. Could this be the earliest known record of Cirencester's most important brewery - a business that would later become the biggest industrial complex in Cirencester and the largest employer in the town? The Brewery played a vital role in the regional economy until closure in 1949, but the date of its foundation is a little more difficult to place. With the Cirencester Brewery's own records dating rather uncertainly from 1798, Joyce Moss examines the evidence for its development'.
The Notorious Case of James Nayler
'James Naylor's entry into Bristol in 1656, seated on an ass in imitation of Christ, together with the severity of his public punishment, has long been regarded as one of the most notorious and colourful episodes of the Civil War era. But was the punitive reaction of the city authorities a response to his political radicalism or to his religious heterodoxy? Flora Menzies takes a fresh look at the evidence'.