(The) Portway, the great, wide, level road running for five miles from the Suspension Bridge to Avonmouth is 100 years old this week. But, says Eugene Byrne , it was always more than just a road.
Its proper name is not “the Portway”, it’s just “Portway.” But everyone started attaching the definite article more or less from the start. It was really only the Western Daily Press, with its strict style-book rules of spelling and accuracy, that called it Portway for a short while before giving up and going with the flow.
There had been some discussion over what to call what was originally and prosaically designated the new “Low Level Road” from Bristol to Avonmouth. Seven years before it opened, and indeed before serious construction work had started, there had been plenty of suggestions, from the workmanlike to the poetic to the absurd – Avonmouth Dock Road; Severnsea Road; St Vincent’s Way; Victory Drive … “See Sea Road”??!
One local wag, riffing on the popular old song/Rudyard Kipling poem, came up with “The Road to Mend Delay”, which at least acknowledged why the road was needed.
Road traffic was increasing and the problem with Avonmouth, as the First World War had amply demonstrated, was getting to and from it. As one of Britain’s main Atlantic-facing ports it had been very busy during the war (as it would be in WW2). Individual lorries or whole convoys of them were travelling between Bristol and the docks at all hours along hilly, narrow and winding roads running from central Bristol via the Downs, Sea Mills and Shirehampton.
A P&A Campbell steamer passes along the empty road in its early days(Image: Bristol Post)
So a low-level road running through the Avon Gorge beside the river was the obvious solution – but an expensive one.
It would end up costing £800,000, making it mile for mile the most costly road project ever seen in Britain – the most expensive in the world at the time, said some. Small wonder that yet another name suggestion was “The Road To Ruin.”
Under normal circumstances, official Bristol would have spent years arguing over the cost and whether the road was even needed at all, but things were not normal.
Work started in 1919 just as work was also starting on building substantial numbers of new council homes. The men who had returned from the trenches had been promised “a land fit for heroes to live in” and that meant work as well as housing.
Being so wide and long, the Portway was always a temptation for boy racers. It even featured in 1962 movie ‘Some People’ with some ton-up kids getting themselves into trouble after a race along it(Image: YouTube)
Aside from the house-building programme and the Portway, the other big project from this period, something we all take for granted now but which was a big deal at the time, was the Muller Road.
These all kept huge numbers of men, most of them ex-soldiers, off the lengthening dole queues. For each day of the Portway’s six-year construction period, an average of 800 men were employed, most of them as labourers. (An earlier plan to use German prisoners-of-war to do much of the work had been dropped.)
The grand opening took place on Friday July 2 1926, with thousands turning out to see it.
More than just a road – a leisure amenity, too. The Portway on a sunny afternoon, c. 1930(Image: Bristol Post)
While officially this was a happy occasion, there were tensions behind the scenes. Officiating at the ceremony was Lt.-Col Wilfrid Ashley, Baron Mount Temple, the Minister of Transport in Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government.
But it seems His Lordship was the second choice. For some months beforehand it had been loudly proclaimed that King George’s glamorous and hugely popular eldest son, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, had been invited to do the honours.
But this was only weeks after the General Strike, and tensions between political left and right were very high. Many seriously believed that Britain was on the verge of communist revolution and the story goes that the Prince was advised against taking up the invitation. Given what we now know about his self-indulgent lifestyle and low boredom threshold, he probably wasn’t disappointed.
Looking busy during the snows of 1963 (old colour slide restored using Google Gemini AI)(Image: Copyright Unknown – Public Domain)
The day was one of brilliant sunshine, and the ceremony, with the Minister, the Lord Mayor and all the other local dignitaries took place at the bottom of Bridge Valley Road.
Thousands of the men who had worked on the road looked on from the Suspension Bridge while down below was the band of the 4th Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment. Also present were girls from Red Maids and boys from QEH school in their traditional uniforms and adding colour to the proceedings.
Among the speeches, the least boring was from Stephen Lessel Mackenzie, the City Engineer. He had designed the road and explained some of the work involved. Some 25,000 tons of rock had had to be blasted away at Hotwells alone.
It was done from the top downwards, he explained, and steel netting designed to protect warships from torpedoes had been used to catch the falling debris.
In the early 1980s a steel and concrete canopy directly under the Suspension Bridge, an idea borrowed from the mountain roads of Switzerland to protect from rock-falls(Image: Bristol Post)
Twelve hundred yards of concrete walls had to be built along the riverbank, there was a steel girder bridge over the railway near Sea Mills, and a six-span viaduct over the Trym at Sea Mills (it was faced with stone from the bottom of Bridge Valley Road.) Nowhere did the gradient exceed 1 in 40.
In 1924, part of one of the walls had collapsed and had to be re-built 25ft further back. Unusually for a more stiff-upper-lipped age, Mackenzie told the crowd how grateful he was for the kindness and sympathy shown him by Bristol. He had “heard not a word of censure, and that was a great comfort at a moment when life was scarcely worth living.”
It had been designed from the start as an amenity, with its wide footpaths, and tennis courts built with ash from the Feeder Road electricity works.
Colonel Ashley cut the ribbon and declared that the road would stand as a monument to the enterprise of the Bristol municipality for hundreds of years. This, too, might have caused a little cynical harrumphing in the background. Central government had only put up a quarter of the cost where it was being far more generous in subsidising projects elsewhere in the country. Whitehall assumed, as Whitehall always does, that Bristol can pay more.
Watching the ‘Waverley’ sail by, 1997(Image: Bristol Post)
Lessel Mackenzie, the road’s designer, had told the crowd that “every effort has been made to harmonise the new work with the natural scenery.”
And so it was. Deep in the subconscious of every Bristolian is the knowledge that the Portway is so much more than just a road. It goes through some spectacular scenery, and there can be few of us who haven’t thought at some time or other how idyllic it would be without the traffic.
It’s beautifully wide (100ft in some places, designed for tram lines which were never laid), and we miss it during the frequent closures, usually for work to stop rock falling on it, and we’ve always loved those occasions on which it’s closed to traffic and we can walk, cycle or run half-marathons along it.
Bristol Half-Marathon, 2008(Image: Bristol Post)
And if nowadays driving along it is almost always trouble-free – at least by comparison with trying to drive through central Bristol – just think what it must have been like back when there was far less traffic on the roads. It was never just for lorries to go to and from Avonmouth; it was intended as an amenity, a place for leisure and Sunday outings. Small wonder that every so often someone says it should be closed to traffic every Sunday.
George George – master blaster
Building the Portway required the removal of a huge amount of rock, not just at Hotwells. By one account, 55,000 tons of stone were removed, and much of the credit for that goes to an illiterate Bristolian named George George.
George George was born at Hotwells Point Villa, Lower Bridge Valley Road in 1863 and his working life began at the age of seven when accompanied his grandfather, a quarryman. George was initially a “little hammer” chipping out cobblestones before learning the more complex skills of boring and blasting.
George George(Image: Copyright Unknown)
He took charge of the explosive operations involved in making the tunnel for the Clifton Rocks Railway and the Aberystwyth Cliff Railway. He also worked on part of the London Underground.
In the 1920s he blasted away rock which was used for the foundations of the Portway, and had to demolish his own home. Point Villa, close to Bridge Valley Road, had to go in order to make way for the Portway. He took the gateposts to the new home he built at Longwell Green.
George George remained illiterate all his life. His wife Harriet, whom he married in 1884, had to do all his paperwork for him, as well as running a household with nine children and keeping pigs and poultry.
Despite his inability to read and write, he was plainly a highly intelligent man, and one whose skills were in much demand.
He died in 1950. He has a headstone at Canford cemetery, but his ashes were spread at Bridge Valley Road.