Bishopston is a suburb of the city of
Bristol
Bristol () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, the most populous city in the region. Built around the River Avon, Bristol, River Avon, it is bordered by t ...
in south west England. Bishopston is around
Gloucester Road (
A38), the main northern arterial road in the city and Bishop Road.
Bishopston is named after the bishop of the local
diocese
In Ecclesiastical polity, church governance, a diocese or bishopric is the ecclesiastical district under the jurisdiction of a bishop.
History
In the later organization of the Roman Empire, the increasingly subdivided Roman province, prov ...
who controversially sold off the church's land to private developers in the early 19th century. The sale was even raised as an issue in the
House of Commons
The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the Bicameralism, bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of ...
. The parish of Bishopston was then created in July 1862 with a population of 1300 and expanding to 9140 in the
1901 census. In the
2001 census Bishopston registered a resident population of 11,996. The district is part of the Bristol built-up area, having been swallowed by the growing city, running directly into the surrounding districts of
Redland,
Ashley Down,
Horfield and
Henleaze
Henleaze is a suburb in the north of the city of Bristol in South West England. It is an almost entirely residential interwar development, with Edwardian streets on its southern fringes. Its main neighbours are Westbury on Trym, Horfield, ...
.
The area has a relatively large student population, with 21% of the over-16 population in education compared to 8.4% in Bristol and 5.1% in England and
Wales
Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...
.
Some of the location filming for the cult
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
sitcom ''
The Young Ones'' was done in Codrington Road and elsewhere. The external shots for the famous "bank-robbing" scene in the last episode were filmed outside the now closed Bristol North Swimming Baths on Gloucester Road.
Bishopston was the home of two Nobel Prize–winning physicists. In 1933
Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac ( ; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English mathematician and Theoretical physics, theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for bot ...
, who attended the Bishop Road Primary School, just a few hundred metres from where he lived on Monk Road, won the prize after his contributions to
quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is the fundamental physical Scientific theory, theory that describes the behavior of matter and of light; its unusual characteristics typically occur at and below the scale of atoms. Reprinted, Addison-Wesley, 1989, It is ...
. In 1950
Cecil Frank Powell won the prestigious award for contributions to Physics (specifically, for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method). Bishopston was home to television presenter
Adam Hart-Davis and psychologist
Susan Blackmore.
The famous film star
Cary Grant (real name Archibald Alexander Leach) attended Bishop Road School in Bishopston. As a child he lived nearby in Hughenden Road next to Horfield Common, where there is a blue plaque to commemorate him.
Bishopston has two primary schools,
St. Bonaventure's Catholic Primary School which served the huge
Italian Irish and
South American
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...
Catholic
The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...
community and
Bishop Road Primary School COE which was a secondary school up until the mid-1980s and served children of the Anglican faith and drew in children from the
Asian and
Jamaican community in
St Paul's and
Montpellier
Montpellier (; ) is a city in southern France near the Mediterranean Sea. One of the largest urban centres in the region of Occitania (administrative region), Occitania, Montpellier is the prefecture of the Departments of France, department of ...
.
The main artery,
Gloucester Road, is a traditional local
High Street, and well used by local residents. In addition to the independently run shops such as Scoopaway, La Ruca, Gardener's Patch and Harvest, recent years have seen several supermarket chains opening stores in the area, as well as a number of cafés, restaurants, and pubs. This, together with the range of fairly traded and local goods available, has made it popular with ecologically minded shoppers.
Bishopston is home to
Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, located off Nevil Road. The
ground's capacity has been increased to hold international cricket matches.
The David Thomas Memorial church, in neighbouring St Andrews, was erected between 1879 and 1881 but was demolished in 1987, destroying most of a Gothic fantasy by Stuart Coleman. The building still retains a thin octagonal spire and west front but the massive halls, apse and rib vaults have now gone, and have been replaced by
flats by Stride Treglown.
Politics
For elections to
Bristol City Council, it is split between the
electoral wards of
Redland and
Bishopston and Ashley Down. The boundary between the two wards runs along Gloucester Road and then the southern perimeters of HMP Bristol and the playing fields of Bishop Road Primary and Redland Green School, with areas to the southwest in Redland ward.
For elections to the
UK Parliament
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, and may also legislate for the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of ...
, Redland ward is in
Bristol Central constituency, and the Bishopston and Ashley Down ward is in
Bristol North West constituency.
Before boundary changes in 2016, Bishopston was itself an electoral ward.
[
]
Education
Bishopston is the location of Bishop Road Primary School, which opened in 1900, and is the largest primary school in Bristol, notable for having educated Cary Grant and Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac ( ; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English mathematician and Theoretical physics, theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for bot ...
.
References
External links
Census data
Photographs of Bishopston at the Geograph project
Bristol Buddhist Centre
meeting in Gloucester Road, Bishopston
Bishopston Trading
A fair trade workers cooperative.
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Areas of Bristol
Places formerly in Gloucestershire