ANDREW SWIFT - MAY – use.qxp_Layout 2 22/04/2022 18:16 Page 1
“Conham has been restored to its pre-industrial, sylvan state as part of the Avon Valley Woodlands Nature Reserve, providing one of the most idyllic riverside walks in the area.”
Wild world
The Avon Valley, Trooper's Hill, Netham and Conham were all once home to heavy industry. Now, they are “some of the most sublime and inspiring landscapes in the Bristol area”. Andrew Swift looks at how nature can reclaim even the most devastated industrial sites and return them to their natural glory
O
ne of the most inspiring ecological books published in the last twelve months is Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment, which takes the reader on a series of journeys into some of the most devastated landscapes on earth. Flyn’s focus is not so much on the multifarious ways in which environmental destruction has been wrought, however, but on the ways in which nature has fought back. Most of the sites visited, such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone or the Zone Rouge near Verdun, where vast quantities of First World War shells and chemical weapons lie hidden in the undergrowth, are probably not places we would choose to explore ourselves. There are, however, plenty of less hostile environments that testify to nature’s resilience. The Avon Valley east of Bristol, for example, was once one of the most ravaged landscapes in Britain. To walk along it today is, however, despite the proximity of houses and light industry, to discover a green and much-loved natural corridor. The despoliation of the river’s wooded banks began four miles upstream from Bristol at Conham, where by 1696 copper smelting was in full swing. Production soon spread to Crew’s Hole, a mile downstream, and by 1720 there was a total of 54 furnaces at the two sites. By the 1750s, however, most production had been centralised at Crew’s Hole, where there were now 49 furnaces, known as the Cupolas. The rapid growth of the copper industry was driven by the slave trade, since goods made from copper or brass (an alloy of copper and zinc) were used extensively to barter for enslaved people on the coast of Africa. Brass was also smelted at Crew’s Hole, as well as lead, and it was lead that seems to have been the reason a tall chimney was built atop nearby Troopers Hill, so that the deadly 34 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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MAY 2022
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No 210
fumes produced by smelting it could be piped up through a flue before being dispersed to the four winds. There was also a hydraulic pumping engine at Crew’s Hole which piped water to Bristol. Downstream, however, there was little development until the Feeder Canal was built to supply water to the Floating Harbour in 1809. The first industries along the Feeder – the Bristol Gaslight Company and Acraman’s Ironworks – were established soon afterwards. It was the construction of the Great Western Railway in the late 1830s, however, that spurred a rash of new development. In 1838, the Great Western Cotton Mill – the largest in southern England – opened on the north bank of the Feeder. A little further east, a chemical works was established at Netham, along with another lead works. Other factories followed – a tannery, a pottery, a galvanised ironworks. By all accounts, though, the most noxious was the Glue, Size & Hair Works, which you really wouldn’t have wanted to get downwind of when the vats were steaming. For a few years, there was even a coal mine – the Great Western Colliery – between the Feeder and the railway. The railway also led to the establishment of a new industry at Crew’s Hole, where the Cupolas had ceased production after the abolition of the slave trade led to the collapse of the copper industry. In 1838, John Bethell, a Bristol inventor, developed a way of using coal tar as a wood preservative. Brunel was so impressed that he set up a Tar Works to extend the life of the wooden sleepers that were being laid by the million on his new lines. The spot he chose was Crew’s Hole, which was becoming something of an industrial hub. As well as two more chemical works, a colliery had been opened and Troopers Hill was being quarried for pennant limestone. After the colliery closed, the hill was mined for fireclay
