Cabot Circus

England is Roman in so many of its distant origins, and so Italian in many more “recent” ones, considering that here, 600 years ago counts as “recent”.

Hence the name for one of Bristol’s most interesting shopping precincts, right in the centre of the city: “Circus” from the Roman word for circle, and used in England for centuries to denote a central or focal point, and “Cabot” from the name of Giovanni Caboti, the Italian explorer who, rechristened  with the staunch-sounding English-sounding name of “John Cabot”,  sailed from Bristol in 1497 on a  tiny little wooden ship outfitted by Bristol nobility and gentry, promising he’d find inestimable wealth and unimaginable riches and instead found………..Newfoundland! And Canada, in a manner of speaking.

Cabot’s name is everywhere here in Bristol, as he created the shipping link between Bristol and the true riches that he did discover, the massive, teeming, seemingly inexhaustible cod fisheries of the Grand Banks which, for centuries, fed so much of England and Europe. It’s fitting that this remarkable shopping centre bears his name, as it also bears the biggest glass and steel “sails” in Europe and maybe the world.

The glass “sails” bend and curve and sweep one into the other overhead above this 3 storey tall shopping complex and let in light, air, and keep out only the rain. It makes you realize how profoundly climate affects us in our everyday lives: this environment could never exist in Canada, certainly not in Toronto. Flooded with natural light, ventilated by breezes, with the sky visible above you day and night, it requires relatively little power during much of the day and much of the year. Individual stores are heated and cooled, but the vast common areas and terraces and walkways are not. As night falls, strategically psoitioned LED lights click on, as do the storefronts, as does the moon, illuminating the spaces in ever changing patterns of light.

Birds fly through is if you were outdoors, which you are, yet the glass sails keep you dry when it rains.

The Romans were great engineers and Giovanni Cabotti, was by all accounts,  a great romantic.

They would both approve.