Past glories

The four massive electric dockside cranes on display in Bristol are the last operable dockside cranes of their type in England, and are part of the waterfront museum complex known as “MShed” that has been created in one of the formerly abandoned warehouses lining Bristol Harbour. Like mammoth steelwork dinosaurs, they dwarf everything around them: stand in their shadow and you feel infinitely small and powerless. On weekends, museum volunteers clamber up the bridgework and into the operator’s cabs and energize their enormous motors, and demonstrate a little of the lumbering power that once brought these docks to life.

Built in 1951, towering 5 storeys above the waterline, capable of lifting up to 10 tons of cargo from deep within a ship’s hold, they were the newest of over 40 cranes lining the port’s shoreline during Bristol’s heyday, when thousands of ships and millions of tons of cargo flowed through Bristol and from here by rail and road to the rest of the country.

But times change.

Enormous container ships made Bristol’s harbour obsolete: the piers too small, the waters too shallow.

The cranes were abandoned, scheduled for sale to recyclers until local museum authorities intervened to save them. All the others were taken down and sold for scrap.

Then the harbor was abandoned to the forces of decay: rust spread its red webs along steel stanchions and mooring posts, moss settled into the shingles and doorways of every abandoned building along the quayside, weeds sprouted from unexpected places amongst the cobblestones, beside the walls of old pump houses, next to corrugated sheds that had once stored goods waiting for onward transport.

Neglect became the landlord of the dockside.

Now in a case like this a city, a neighbourhood, has but two choices: rage about the unfairness of the past disappearing like surf on a sandy beach, or do something to revitalize the city.

Bristol chose the latter.

So today, along with the museum, the café’s and the galleries, there are condominiums and restaurants all along the water, and tourist attractions like The Matthew, an exact working wooden replica of the ship that John Cabot sailed to Newfoundland in 1497, and the original and fully restored SS Great Britain, the world’s first steel-hulled steam-powered ocean liner, launched in 1843 right here in Bristol.

Proof that you need to let go of yesterday to let tomorrow in: past glories are a poor blueprint for the future.