100th issue:Layout 1
27/9/12
19:07
Page 27
100issues
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A familiar Bristol skyline of pastel coloured terrace houses climbing up the hill at Totterdown. This work, Sunny Day is by Bristol artist Fiona Willis
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A watersid e scene, Bikes and Pero’s Bridge, captured by Bristol artist Gabrielle Voller
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Ask Bristolians where the gallery the Arnolfini got its name and many will be hard-pushed to tell you. In 1960 modern art enthusiast Jeremy Rees and some friends decided that the city needed a modern gallery. He remembered a favourite picture, Dutch artist Jan Van Eyck’s The Marriage of the Arnolfini painted in 1434. It is a portrait of an Italian merchant with his bride and it now hangs in the National Gallery, London.
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Bristol is one of the country’s leaders when it comes to partying, with its year-round calendar of festivals and celebrations. There’s a festival for all tastes, from film, folk and food to the avant-garde Mayfest, the waterside fun of the Harbour Fest and the soaring heights of the world famous International Balloon Fiesta.
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Bristol Zoo, which celebrated its 175th birthday last year, is the sixth oldest zoo in the world and a pioneer in successfully breeding many endangered animals in captivity, including the first chimpanzee to be conceived and born in Europe, in 1934.
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He may have accidentally given his name to a type of casual canvas shoe, but Bristolian Samuel Plimsoll is remembered around the world for campaigning to introduce safety regulations for the maintenance and loading of ships. Until this Victorian MP fought this battle thousands of lives were being lost at sea, having been sent out in unseaworthy vessels, known as ‘coffin ships.’
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Community groups and other small projects across the west of England have been given grants amounting to in excess of £25m since 1986, from the Quartet Community Foundation, formerly the Greater Bristol Trust. The charity helps all kinds of local good causes, from nursery age children on playschemes to elderly people trapped in fuel poverty.
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The perfectly round lead shot that could be fired from a musket was developed just a few hundred yards from St Mary Redcliffe, where an enterprising plumber called William Watts dug down to make cellars in his house and popped a tower on the roof in order to create a big enough drop for the molten lead to form into balls. His tower was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the road bridge.
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If anyone asks you what Bristol is famous for, try throwing a few of the following household names at them – Harveys Bristol Cream, Berni Inns and
Concorde.
The Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Clifton is the most recently consecrated city cathedral in the country, having been consecrated as recently as 1973.
English poet John Betjeman dedicated a poem to Bristol which begins: ‘Green upon the flooded Avon shone the after-storm-wet-sky Quick the struggling withy branches let the leaves of autumn fly And a star shone over Bristol, wonderfully far and high.’
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At the M Shed, the people’s museum of Bristol, visitors can get close to the Flying Flea, a vestige from a hobby once enjoyed in the city in the 1920s and 30s. In Bristol, where so much aeronautical history was made, DIY pilots were building aircraft kits at home and Bristol 800 launching themselves from has been set their gardens and lanes. up to Nervous onlookers, in fear celebrate the signing of of their lives, got the craze the Magna Carta in 1215 for unauthorised flight by Bristol’s King John banned by 1937.
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Runners, dog walkers, kite flyers and others who love the wide open spaces of Clifton Downs need never worry that they will lose this green space to development. An Act of Parliament, the Clifton and Durdham Downs Act of 1861 ensured that the land will be protected in perpetuity. October 2012
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