How Bristol Harbour Festival was born and the docks were saved

The summer Harbour Festival is an important diary date for Bristolians each year, pulling in crowds of around 250,000. It also continues a long tradition along the city's harbourside - the forerunner of the Harbour Festival, the Bristol Water Festival, which first took place in 1971.

The origins of the event, though, date back to the dark days when the council wanted to pave over and fill in bits of the City Docks. By 1971, the docks were no longer a working port in any meaningful sense. Bristol’s historic function as a port was now all focused on Avonmouth.

Aside from sand dredgers and the sewerage ship Glen Avon there wasn’t much traffic left. The area was starting to look very run-down, with the old transit sheds quietly falling apart, and almost all the old dockside cranes were being taken down and sold for scrap. One historic dock, Merchant’s, had already been filled in and would later become the site of one of the earliest major housing developments, Rownham Mead.

Read more:Bristol Harbour Festival 2023: Travel info, stage times, weather forecast and more

The SS Great Britain was back in her birthplace, but her future there was far from assured. She was lying directly on the line of a planned road bridge over the water. Those who had worked hard to bring her home complained that local councillors and officials were less than supportive, and there was serious talk of her going to a dedicated berth in London.

Other new roads and bridges covering over other parts of the Floating Harbour near the Bush warehouse (now the Arnolfini) were just waiting for the finance to become available. On top of this were also plans to fill in the Feeder canal, which would have stopped vessels navigating upstream towards Bath.

Under the council plans there would still be plenty of water in the middle of Bristol, but nobody would be able to bring ships and boats in and out anymore. There were several groups objecting, notably the Clifton & Hotwells Improvement Society and the Bristol Civic Society, who believed that all the roads and building would ruin central Bristol.

Other opponents, such as the Cabot Cruising Club and the Inland Waterways Association (IWA), wanted to preserve all the water for navigation. It was the South West branch of the IWA, in the form of its chairman, Fred Blampied, which took the leading role in creating what we now call the Harbour Festival.

Mr Blampied had been living in Bristol since 1940 and suggested that a “rally of boats” would be a good way of demonstrating the Floating Harbour’s potential as an amenity. With help from the Cabot Cruising Club and other Bristol boat owners, the first Bristol Water Festival – it was opened by the Lord Mayor, Helen Bloom – was held over the weekend of June 26-27, 1971.

Despite the council’s ambitions, its own Docks Committee was fully on board for the event. It couldn’t have happened if they were not. So the organising committee included people from the IWA and the Cabot Cruising Club, backed by 50 or 60 volunteers who worked very hard to make the event a success.