Culture in Bristol
The city is famous for its music and film industries, and was a finalist for the 2008 European Capital of Culture.
The city’s principal theatre company, the Bristol Old Vic, was founded in 1946 as an offshoot of the Old Vic company in London. Its premises on King Street consist of the 1766 Theatre Royal (400 seats), a modern studio theatre called the New Vic (150 seats), and foyer and bar areas in the adjacent Coopers’ Hall (built 1743). The Theatre Royal is a grade I listed building and the oldest continuously-operating theatre in England. The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which had originated in King street is now a separate company. The Bristol Hippodrome is a larger theatre (1981 seats) which hosts national touring productions, while the 2000-seat Colston Hall, named after Edward Colston, is the city’s main concert venue. Other theatres include the Tobacco Factory, QEH and Redgrave Theatre (at Clifton College). Bristol is home to many live music venues, including Fiddlers, Victoria Rooms, St George’s and a range of pubs from the jazz orientated The Old Duke to rock at the Fleece and Firkin and indie bands at the Louisiana.
Since the late 1970s, the city has been home to a crop of bands combining punk, funk, dub and political consciousness, the most celebrated being The Pop Group. Ten years later, Bristol was the birthplace of a type of English hip-hop music called trip hop or the "Bristol Sound", from artists such as Tricky, Portishead, Smith & Mighty and Massive Attack. It is also a stronghold of drum & bass with notable artists such as the Mercury Prize winning Roni Size/Reprazent as well as the pioneering DJ Krust and More Rockers. This music is part of the wider Bristol urban culture scene which received international media attention in the 1990s.
The Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery houses a collection of natural history, archaeology, local glassware, Chinese ceramics and art. The Bristol Industrial Museum, featuring preserved dock machinery, closed in October 2006 for complete renovation and plans to reopen in 2009 as the Museum of Bristol. The City Museum also runs three preserved historic houses: the Tudor Red Lodge, the Georgian House, and Blaise Castle House. The Watershed Media Centre and Arnolfini gallery, both in disused dockside warehouses, exhibit contemporary art, photography and cinema, while the city’s oldest gallery is at the Royal West of England Academy in Clifton.
Stop frame animation films and commercials produced by Aardman Animations and television series focusing on the natural world have also brought fame and artistic credit to the city. The city is home to the regional headquarters of BBC West, and the BBC Natural History Unit. Locations in and around Bristol often feature in the BBC’s natural history programmes, including the children’s television programme Animal Magic, filmed at Bristol Zoo.
The Llandoger Trow, an ancient public house in the heart of BristolIn literature Bristol is noted as the birth place of the 18th century poet Thomas Chatterton, and the poets Robert Southey, who was born in Wine Street, Bristol in 1774, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge married the Bristol Fricker sisters; and William Wordsworth spent time in the city where Joseph Cottle first published Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
The 18th and 19th century portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence and 19th century architect Francis Greenway, designer of many of Sydney’s first buildings, came from the city, and more recently the graffiti artist Banksy. Some famous comedians are locals, including Justin Lee Collins, Lee Evans, and writer/comedian Stephen Merchant.
Bristol University graduates include the satirist Chris Morris, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead and Matt Lucas and David Walliams of Little Britain fame. Hollywood actor Cary Grant was born in the city, Patrick Stewart, Jane Lapotaire, Pete Postlethwaite, Jeremy Irons, Greta Scacchi, Miranda Richardson, Helen Baxendale, Daniel Day-Lewis and Gene Wilder are amongst the many actors who learnt their craft at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, opened by Sir Laurence Olivier in 1946 and Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith, The Matrix) studied at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital School.
