Timelines have petered out, deadlines missed…
05:56, 04 Jul 2026
Cllr Andrew Brown, leader of the council Cllr Tony Dyer and Alex Lifschutz, the lead architect on the ‘Western Harbour’ masterplan, pictured near the Cumberland Basin.(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach PLC)
It was supposed to be the great transformation of one of Bristol’s most famous and picturesque areas – turning the Cumberland Basin into something called ‘Western Harbour’ to create what would effectively be a new part of Bristol’s waterside city centre.
But the project has stalled – like many other major regeneration projects – with timelines slipping and deadlines passing with nothing actually happening to progress it forward.
The idea was first mooted almost a decade ago by the then new mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees.
Faced with an ageing and complex, but vital, road infrastructure at the Cumberland Basin, his administration proposed something drastic.
A plan was produced to get rid of the existing A370 Brunel Way flyover, and the two bridges – Avon Bridge and Plimsoll Bridge – and demolish all the ramps, spiral access roads and criss-crossing lanes – and build thousands of new homes around both the Cumberland Basin and the River Avon.
The best would have the kind of stunning views people make tourist postcards out of – of the Avon Gorge, the rising terraces of Hotwells and Clifton, and the Suspension Bridge.
Around that would be a new road infrastructure, with a series of options for crossing the various bodies of water there, each proving controversial for different reasons.
The plan was hugely controversial. At the start of 2020, Mr Rees went to Hotwells and faced a church full of angry residents alone, defending the plan because of the desperate need for new homes in Bristol.
(Image: Michael Lloyd Photography)
Then came the pandemic, and everything was halted for a time. The council went back to the drawing board for the third time, and again put the future of the existing businesses – like the Riverside Garden Centre – in doubt with plans to either build flats, or drive roads and bridges through their sites or people’s homes.
Then, in 2024, Mr Rees’ term in office was over, Labour were voted out of power and the Green Party took over.
New council leader Tony Dyer, who lives nearby and has part of the ward he represents in the ‘Western Harbour regeneration area’, took up the job of resurrecting the idea, while again trying to take local residents with him.
A new advisory group was appointed, a new consultation launched. By the end of November, there was another return to the drawing board, to factor in what people said about the idea of redeveloping the Cumberland Basin again.
In October 2024, and launched by Cllr Dyer and Alex Lifschutz, the director of masterplanning firm Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, who was brought in to pull everything together and come up with a new plan.
They took media on a walking tour around the entire area – from Hotwells to the bonded warehouses, and over to Ashton Meadows on the south side of the river – and explained the vision.
The first thing was this was very much scaled back from the kind of huge transformation Mr Rees’ administration first proposed. Instead of 3,000 flats or more, Cllr Dyer said they might build anything from 750 to 1,200 new homes in the area – including the conversion of the two big bonded warehouses that are the landmark buildings.
Cllr Andrew Brown, leader of the council Cllr Tony Dyer and Alex Lifschutz, the lead architect on the ‘Western Harbour’ masterplan, pictured near the Cumberland Basin.(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach PLC)
And the idea of replacing or moving the Brunel Way flyover was also out. Instead of taking the opportunity provided by the need to replace the ageing infrastructure – as Mr Rees said he wanted to seize – the council would keep patching up the flyover, and instead remove only a fraction of the maze of roads around the Basin.
By February 2025 a ‘draft masterplan’ was finally published. In March, there were more presentations and meetings, and the council chiefs at the time said confidently that the masterplan would be finalised this year and presented to the council to be adopted, and they wanted to see things actually happening within a couple of years, with everything done within a decade.
That was 18 months ago. Nothing, as far as anyone living in the area can tell, has happened since.
On the ‘Harbour Hopes’ website, created by the council and its consultants to keep residents and the city informed, the last update was in March 2025. At that point, the Harbour Hopes team said: “We will be reviewing options for how Western Harbour can be embedded into planning policy going forward and envisage that the masterplan will be made public (alongside consultation) at this point – likely in Spring 2026.” That has not happened.
Western Harbour aerial(Image: Bristol City Council)
Meanwhile, the issues and challenges that triggered the entire idea of a regeneration in the first place continue.
Drivers on the Brunel Way flyover are familiar with the weekly roulette of emergency roadworks. In the first heatwave of 2026 – back in May – the fire brigade had to hose down the joints at the Hotwells end of Plimsoll Bridge – the bridge infrastructure had got too hot and made the road dangerous for vehicles.
They even had to call on the vintage fire boat Pyronaut – which is usually only seen as a feature of the Harbour Festival – to come and spray cooling water from underneath.
The ageing Plimsoll Bridge is also impacting other things in the Floating Harbour. Bristol Live reported recently that the charity that runs the replica of the Matthew said the future of their operation was in doubt because the Plimsoll Bridge was broken or being repaired so unpredictably that they couldn’t guarantee the lucrative trips out of the harbour and up the Gorge that they depended on for economic survival.
This week coming, councillors will hear about and are expected to rubber-stamp a council bid to the Department for Transport for millions of pounds of Government grant to repair Bristol’s creaking infrastructure – with the Brunel Way flyover, including Avon Bridge and Plimsoll Bridge – at its core.
A view across the Cumberland Basin – from the Western Harbour Masterplan(Image: Bristol City Council)
The council officers make dire warnings. “Within the Cumberland Basin complex the Avon Fixed Bridge is categorised as being in ‘very poor’ condition and without repair will require full or partial closure within the next 12 years,” they warn.
“The nearby Plimsoll and Junction Lock bridges are also in poor condition with recent examples of mechanical faults causing lengthy delay,” they added.
When the Western Harbour plan was first proposed, Mr Rees said putting three jobs together – sorting out the road crossing of the river and the basin, a wide-ranging plan for new homes and creating new flood defences – meant the Government would look far more kindly on big asks for national cash.
Now, the requests to London for money to patch up Brunel Way have to continue, even with the Western Harbour plan stalled.
One source, who had been on one of the many working groups and liaison groups and declined to be named, said it’s clear there is the desire for Western Harbour to happen, just not the capacity.
“We’ve all been left a bit in the dark, it’s like things go months without any update or anything happening,” they said
“It’s going to take a lot of work. And unfortunately I don’t think there is the sheer numbers of people at City Hall needed. We’re told the regeneration of the Temple Quarter area, which is already well underway, is taking priority at the moment. We might be next in the queue, but it doesn’t look like anything is going to happen any time soon,” they added.
The other issue is one of timing. Since the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the UK economy – and in particular, the construction industry and housing development industry – has suffered a series of jolts so profound they have stopped many developments in their tracks.
Work on the council-owned Baltic Wharf site is only now finally underway, while other regeneration redevelopment sites on the fringes of Western Harbour – like the old Payne’s Shipyard site on the south bank of the river – have also stalled.
“It’s one thing the council coming up with this great masterplan,” said the working group member. “But it’s another thing the council finding some big construction firm who will come along and say ‘yes, this is something that I want to get involved in right now’. It’s unlikely to happen straight away, anyway – whereas at Temple Quarter, things are actually getting built right now,” they added.
Marvin Rees’ eight years in office saw him defined by moments like the one in early 2020 in the church in Hotwells, defending the need to build thousands of homes at the Cumberland Basin. He also regularly decried the fact that no one ever seemed to go on protest marches about the austerity cuts that saw things like planning experts and strategic masterplanners be made redundant from City Hall.
Now, it seems that the latter is proving more important than people thought.