Description:

Historic site, Marsh Street. This was once a rough area near the quayside, the haunt of seamen and, by the 18th century, of poor Irish migrants. The anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson wrote in 1808 that Bristol slave ship captains would get crew for their slave ships in the mainly Irish-owned public houses there. The pubs were known for their music, dancing, rioting, drunkenness and profane swearing . There are said to have been some 37 public houses on this street alone. In the 1820s one such pub, The Fortunes of War , featured a figure of a sailor with a wooden leg, loading the gunpowder into a cannon. Opposite this public house was once the bonded sugar warehouse of Messrs Robert Bird and Son.

With thanks to the authors of the Slave Trade Trail around Central Bristol, Madge Dresser, Caletta Jordan, Doreen Taylor.

Date: 2003

Copyright: Copyright BCC Museum