Two of the 1904 boundary stones returned to their original locations on the west abutment of the bridge.
Something we’ve been eager to protect as part of the iron bridge works are the set of three stone markers that formerly nestled beneath undergrowth on the west abutment. Each stone is carved with the date, 1904, and CB, for City of Bristol. These marked the city boundaries between that date and 1935.
After the opening of Avonmouth Dock in 1877, the gradual development of the village of Avonmouth, and the purchase of the Docks by the Corporation in 1884, there was political impetus to bring the area within the city’s administrative boundary. The city had expanded quickly in the late 19th Century, but growth northwards from the historic boundary along the Downs was limited. Despite a strong argument for bringing everything between there and Avonmouth into the city it was only the Docks themselves that were eventually added in 1897. This left them as an isolated satellite part of the city, disconnected from the main administrative boundary.
Philip Napier Miles of Kings Weston was eager to develop his landholding around Avonmouth and Shirehampton. A plan for “Avonmouth as a city” was well advanced by 1902, with ambitious plans for thousands of acres of land laid out. It was perhaps this prospect that reinvigorated the arguments to bring more of the area within Bristol’s boundary; The 1904 Corporation Act was the mechanism to achieve this.
The city boundary shown shaded on the 1916 Ordnance Survey map, and with boundary markers marked as orange dots. Most of these remain today.
The Act did not go unchallenged, however. There was considerable opposition by residents in Stoke Bishop and Westbury on Trym who did not want to leave Gloucestershire and contribute the more onerous rates of Bristol. Amongst these objectors was Napier Miles himself; his concerns were that Kings Weston house would fall within the new boundary and that his landholding it would be reduced, in value and freedoms to develop it hindered. In the event, the Council changed the proposals to omit Kings Weston’s Home Park, instead taking a line from the iron bridge to The Circle, skirting the Georgian viewing terrace , before following the historic parish boundary through Penpole Wood. This satisfied the Council who’s intention to physically connect Avonmouth and Shirehampton with the rest of the city required only Shirehampton Park to be included. Napier Miles also secured a series of provisions from the Council that satisfied his concerns, and in August 1904 the Act received Royal assent.
The third marker on the corner north of the other two at the west abutment.
It can’t have been long before the city marked its new perimeter with permanent stone markers of the sort found at the iron bridge. Although they project just a couple of feet above ground, they are hefty stones, designed not to be easily moved or damaged, are about 5 feet in height. Another of these stones was spotted in 2016 when we came across it near the white oak. What’s less clear is why the boundary didn’t include Park Lodge and run up the west edge of Kings Weston Road rather than making an odd dog-leg to take it up to the bridge, resulting in the three markers we have today.
As part of the bridge works the contractors have carefully excavated the stones, kept them safe, and have now reinstalled them in their original locations. Whilst they are now little more than relics, their preservation allows new light to be shed on their historic interest.
Four years ago we wrote a piece on the Garden City aspirations of the last private owner of Kings Weston estate, Philip Napier Miles. Now further evidence has come to light that show his enthusiasm for innovations in town planning and promoting the development of his lands for socially progressive housing
Philip Napier Miles and his French Bulldog, Hippo in the library at Kings Weston in 1926
From the moment he inherited the estate from his father in 1881 Napier Miles seems to have been keenly focussed on making the best provision for his tenants and building new homes and facilities for their benefit. Beginning with new streets in Avonmouth he set out some of the best workers housing in the city, before becoming an early adopter of the revolutionary principles of the Garden City movement for new building. The movement promoted the idea that bringing together the best features of the town and countryside would provide the working class with an alternative to farm working or crowded unhealthy cities. All industry, housing, commerce could be provided interspersed with generous greenspace and allotments, and with key facilities to support education and social development.
Miles’s initial project to create a new city around Avonmouth began around 1902 but faltered despite having achieved a lot of high quality new building there. A smaller endeavour was endowed with land at a beneficial rate in Shirehampton in 1910: the Bristol Garden Suburb. Another ambitious plan for development was promoted by Miles in 1917 for the land immediately below Kings Weston house where the Lawrence Weston estate lies today. The main emphasis of the plan was to provide urgently needed housing for labourers at the recently built national Smelting Company zinc works in Avonmouth, and serve the urgent wartime demands. A Public Utility Society was created in partnership with the management of the zinc works, Ernest Bevin of the Dock Worker’s Union, Napier Miles, and other local dignitaries and business owners formed a committee.
A diagram showing the scale and distribution of Napier Miles’s Garden City projects
On the 15th May the committee met to discuss plans. Napier Miles provided a venue for a meeting between interested parties, under one of the giant beech trees in the garden of Kings Weston house. Ewart Culpin of the Garden City & Town Planning Association, a figure of national importance, provided a sketch layout of a 271 acre estate which, it was projected, could accommodate around 2000 homes for up to 150 thousand people. The plan was set out on Garden City principles with emphasis on green spaces totalling around 60 acres, and tree-line avenues, along a central spine road that approximated todays Long Cross. Progressive public and social facilities such as communal kitchens, wash houses, & laundries were designed in, along with land for a Trades Hall, schools and a hospital. On the western part of the estate were planned the social and educational centre, the church, schools, and other public buildings. A theatre, concert hall, Swimming pools gymnasium & allotments were also projected. It was described as having “more of the elements of a real garden city than in any other proposal since Letchworth”
The 1918 published sketch of the plan for Kings Weston Garden City, unfortunately with the house hidden in the fold between pages. The houses that were completed are on the far west side.
Co-operation was an imbedded feature of the organisation. Tenants were to become shareholders in the scheme with a vested interest in the estate. Napier Miles “in alluding to his sympathy with this movement, said he had strongly opposed the erection of buildings of such a nature and would in a few years become slums” and the design of new houses ensured good space, light, and access to generous gardens.
Edwart Culpin, 1877-1946 president of the Town Planning Institute
The following year the first of the new houses had been completed at the far west end of the estate on Kingsweston Avenue. These were built with the financial support of the Ministry of Munitions who had large mustard gas factories and shell production at Chittening, the National Smelting Company having to step-in in 1919 to complete 150 of the dwellings. These dwellings were more utilitarian than most Garden City architecture, possibly through the necessities of the wartime situation, but enjoyed being interspersed between the existing mature trees of the estate, and were well built and spacious. Stone was supplied from a reopened quarry on Penpole Point and brick from sand dug nearby. The quarry was to become a rock garden in the final scheme, and the cavity left by the sand pit a swimming pool.
Kingsweston Avenue photographed during construction in 1918.
After the cessation of hostilities, and the closure of the mustard gas factory, the urgency of the endeavour dissipated. The ambitious plan set out across the whole of the Kings Weston parkland was quietly abandoned only part realised, like Napier Miles’s previous Garden city projects. By this time his interest had already been diverted to Sea Mills where Bristol Corporation sought to develop their own garden suburb on his land, and the development of the Kings Weston Garden City was quietly dropped. What had been built was eventually purchased by the council in 1924.
Looking down on the first houses from Penpole Point, circa 1919. The quarry in the foreground was reopened specifically to provide building material for the Garden City.
As a postscript to the Kings Weston Garden City plan, it’s interesting that after the end of WWII attention focussed again on the area, and new plans drawn up that were not dissimilar from those of 1917. Certainly the outline plan of an elongated estate, covering a similar area to Culpin’s original plan were closely comparable, along with the general alignment of some roads. The ambition to provide high quality workers housing, with generous green space and well-integrated community and social facilities was also fundamental to the Council planner’s proposals, though regrettably without the swimming pool, theatre, and hospital that were intended to augment the original plan!
