10 things you probably didn’t know about Hartcliffe

1. The riots

Hartcliffe witnessed three days of consecutive rioting in July 1992 after two men riding a stolen police motorbike were killed in collision with an unmarked police car. Rioters smashed and looted the Symes Avenue shops – a strip which had long been neglected. £1m of damage was caused and 80 people arrested. In fact, the whole area was suffering from neglect. The nights of rioting followed years of low investment in the area which had one of the highest unemployment rates not just in Bristol but in the UK. The day the two bike thieves were killed traveling at between 80-100mph happened to be exactly the same day the area discovered it would again be missing out on Government regeneration funding. The funding soon followed of course, once the riots had put Hartcliffe in the national news. The policeman driving the car which the motorbike struck was jailed, but later had his conviction overturned on appeal.

2. Imperial Tobacco

Europe’s largest cigarette manufacturing plant had pride of place in Hartcliffe. Opened in 1974, the WD and HO Wills factory employed thousands of people in the local area. Families in south Bristol without some connection to Wills are still hard to come by, such was its impact. The state-of-the-art plant was designed to churn out cigarettes for decades, but the last pack was sealed in 1990 as awareness about the health implications of smoking hit the market. The site was finally cleared in 1998 to make way for Imperial Park, a shopping centre which still has the Wills Way as an entry. The listed headquarters building still remains, although it has been converted into the trendy Lakeshore flats (See below). Imperial Tobacco, the largest company in the South West with a turnover of almost £14 billion, now has its worldwide HQ on Winterstoke Road in Bedminster.

3. The George Ferguson touch

Lakeshore is an award-winning eco-friendly block of flats built in the frame of the original headquarters of Imperial Tobacco. The HQ was built next to the cigarette factory and was almost knocked down with the rest of the site, save for an 11th hour intervention by English Heritage who helped slap a Grade II listed status on the decaying steel frame. Step in Urban Splash, a development firm, who bought the site in 2003 for £45 million. 422 new homes were designed for the block by Ferguson Mann Architects, former mayor George Ferguson’s practice. The development included full height glazing, underfloor heating and balconies. Other features include an apple orchard, wildflower meadows, country walks, a fishing club, bird and bat boxes, picnic and barbecue areas, a pontoon, table tennis tables, and allotments. The apartments are powered by a ground source heat pump system consists of a network of 100-metre deep boreholes. You can even stay at the flats through Airbnb.

4. The roughest pub in the UK

Well, maybe not. But according to this high-quality and clearly well-researched documentary from 2009, the Hartcliffe Inn, on Brocks Road, is right up there in the top seven. In the words of the landlord at the time: “I’ve been in bike clubs and I’ve been in jail, I’ve been done for assault on police and, you know, ordinary citizens. The previous landlord, they’ll tell you what I was like when I come in here. I was the same. But, don’t do as I do, do as I say; that’s me, you know. I was terrible. I’m ashamed of it. Well, not really.” Watch the video from 8.10 to find out more.

5. A tribute from Massive Attack

In 2008, Massive Attack embarked on a European tour ahead of the long-awaited 2010 album Heligoland. Along the way they tested out all of their new work, including a handful of live airings for Hartcliffe Star. A dark and moody track with typical Massive Attack thudding bass lines, the piece has two vocalists echoing the words “Hart”, “Hart”, “Cliffe”, “Cliffe”, “Star”, “Star”. An interview with Stereogum in 2009 suggested the track was named “for the heat-seeking helicopters that fly over Bristol looking for weed growing operations”. Grant Marshall (Daddy G) adds that Hartcliffe is “quite a down-turned place”. The track was one of a handful from the live tour that never made it into the final album and nothing more than a few rare recordings of live performances have lived to tell the tale. Of course, another tenuous link is that Tricky, one of the original collaborators with Massive Attack, was from just around the corner in Knowle West.

6. A place in Bristol Museum

What a lovely landscape. Oh wait, what’s that car doing there? And what’s that written on its side? How obscene. Well, what does one expect from Banksy? This now famous piece from the world’s most famous anonymous street artist is called Landscape Near Hartcliffe. It first appeared in Bristol Museum as part of the Banksy Versus Bristol Museum summer show in 2009. It could be found in the European Art Gallery room of the museum alongside the likes of Rembrandt no less.

7. Something in the name

Rumour and conjecture dominate theories of where Hartcliffe got its name. Some are convinced it has something to do with deer, the former pub The Red Hart and the slopes of Dundry Hill. In reality the name goes back to the late Anglo-Saxon period when most of south Bristol was part of the conjoined hundred (a historical administrative division) of Hartcliffe and Bedminster. It was land originally owned by the crown which later passed into the ownership of the Berkeley family (who in turn built the new town of Redcliffe on the opposite side of the Avon from the thriving port of Brigstowe – where Bristol gets its name). The hundred of Hartcliffe is first recorded as “Hareclive” and also included Long Ashton and other parts of North Somerset. The “Hare” in Hareclive has nothing to do with rabbits but is related to the Saxon “Heere”, or army; while “Clive” refers to a steep and craggy rock. Taken together they are believed to refer to where the local Anglo-Saxons held their “hundred court” on a craggy rock at the western end of Dundry Hill above the modern A38.

8. A ‘third world country’

The former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown once said of Hartcliffe: “Health indicators on the estate are more like those for a Third World country.” His comments came after the riots of 1992 and were later republished by republished by the Independent in an article with the headline, ‘No-Go Britain’. The newspaper listed the estate as having a population of 11,000 and an unemployment rate of 14.4 per cent. It also listed its problems: “Violence, burglaries, drugs. Fire crews attacked. Unrest after two joyriders died in 1992 left 15 police injured, £1m destruction and 80 arrests.

9. Mud, glorious mud!

Such was the post-war rush to rebuild Britain, back in the 1950s when Hartcliffe was first built, construction of some of the homes preceded basic infrastructure like, erm, roads and pavements. Driving construction vehicles through former fertile farmland led to monumental accumulations of mud which reached such epic proportions that it has gone down as urban legend. Anybody who bought a brand new home on a site still being developed had to deal with the tide of brown sludge. In addition, facilities such as bus services, shops, schools and other community facilities were slow to arrive, with Hartcliffe School not arriving until 1960 – some eight years after construction started on the first homes in 1952.

10. A community gun

Wrapped in bags in a subway in a park in Hartcliffe lay a community gun. The loaded .22 calibre, bolt-action rifle was hidden in bushes for those in the know to use if needed. And use it they did. In 2012, after an altercation with a carpenter in the Fulford House pub, 24-year-old Nathan Sargent and two associates thought it was best to take justice into their own hands. They later ambushed the carpenter and father of three and shot him through the heart. Sargent told Bristol Crown Court: “Everyone knew of this community gun. I was using it as a distraction so the others could teach him a lesson for being a bully.” He added that the gun was there for people to use to shoot rabbits but he had not used it before. “It was a community gun used for rabbitting, everyone knew about it, everyone I knew, associates and friends. It was common knowledge that there was this community gun. I was going to use it as a distraction so the others could teach him a lesson for beating them up.”

Read more: 18 things you didn’t know about Montpelier