A Bone to Pick: Bristol's harbourside needs a 180

Stick it where the sun does shine

We’ve had an influx of new subscribers over the weekend, which I think may be in some small part due to a shout out from Jay Rayner in the Financial Times. If that’s you — welcome! You are now part of a growing community of the most informed eaters in Bristol. We publish two articles each week: a restaurant review every Thursday and on Mondays either news, investigations or tongue-in-cheek opinion pieces like this. We pay all our writers, we pay in full for everything we review, we’re always honest and we don’t use AI in any of our writing. If that’s something you can think you can get behind, then we hope you’ll stick around. Thanks for reading! Meg X

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Picture the scene: you’re sat outside RAGÙ sipping a locally-made wine, toasting another productive week of being a quintessential Bristolian (pulling down statues/flying hot air balloons/petitioning for new cycle lanes/making stop-motion animations/extolling the virtues of moving to Easton - delete as appropriate) as the sun sets in the sky. The last rays reflect off your sunglasses and warm your shoulders, kissing them farewell until tomorrow. It’s been a lovely, warm, boozy evening; you finished work at five, heading straight for the last remaining table outside Junction where you started with a pint, and you actually think you may have caught the sun a bit too much as one pint turned into three. You notice your cheekbones are looking more than a little flushed as you wash your hands in the Wapping Wharf toilets after popping into Pigsty to double check the entry code. Oh well. One should never take an evening in the British sun for granted…

Can you see the sun? Me neither.

Stop right there. Have you noticed anything slightly off about the above paragraph?

You see, you can never achieve such an evening of dreams, because Bristol’s harbourside is wrong, all wrong. It is completely the wrong way round. The setting sun casts the entirety of Wapping Wharf and all its restaurants and terraces in an enormous, cold, looming shadow from the neighbouring M shed and flats from about 6pm. You cannot enjoy the sunset from any of those terraces, you can’t grab a Squeezed dinner and sit by the water in the last gasps of the day’s fading warmth unless you’re willing to delay your prandial gratification to walk all the way around to the Arnolfini, where you will have to dodge the boozers to enjoy your rapidly cooling burger and fries. The only place you can enjoy the sun is the Olive Shed — but good luck getting a table when the weather is nice.

I am available for all your graphic design needs, though you probably can’t afford me

Meanwhile, on the other side of the water sits the aquarium. A building with no windows which closes at 5pm. There’s also We The Curious, which does have windows — albeit tinted ones — but nobody goes for that, and anyway, they’ve also vacated the place by sunset. Then there’s the Lloyds building; an office block hogging all of our precious rays. Don’t get me started on Za Za Bazaar. I’d rather try to catch myself a fish from the murky harbourside waters than force myself to swallow a plate of their claggy noodles and three day old chicken tikka masala.

So you see, it’s all wrong. They don’t need the sun over that side. Those of us, punters and restaurateurs alike, hoping for a prime al fresco Wapping Wharf restaurant experience this summer really do.

To me there are three obvious solutions to this problem. Number one — we simply pick up the shipping containers and dump them on the other side, where they really belong. This is the best thing that could be done for the food lovers of Bristol. Shipping containers are literally designed to be picked up and moved. We must take advantage of this. We were planning on moving them anyway, weren’t we? This is a far more logical set up. We’d have to demolish both the Lloyds’ buildings, but that’s no great loss. The Lloyds people can move into Wapping Wharf (or, indeed, anywhere else) and us restaurant goers can enjoy the setting sun over the water alongside our umami bomb from freshly-relocated Bertha’s, the best pizza in Bristol now within stumbling distance of Watershed.

Alternatively, we use the often vacant space in the Lloyds Amphitheatre to install a giant, angled mirror. I am talking the Jodrell Bank of mirrors. There’s a town in the mountains of Norway called Rjukan that doesn’t get any sun from September to March where they have done exactly this, apparently with great success. I expect our mirror would become something of a tourist attraction in itself. It would be like the new planetarium, everyone would come to take selfies in it. A boon for the local economy on both sides of the harbour. Wapping Wharf would be sunny all evening and Bristol once again known for being a pioneering, problem-solving city. This would have been the perfect job for Brunel, but I guess these days we’ll have to enlist the guy who built that massive water slide down Park Street.

Or, we simply stack Wapping Wharf’s shipping containers on top of each other like a giant, restaurant-y game of Jenga so that they tower far above the neighbouring buildings and thus we can enjoy the sun late into the evening. Simples.

I suggest we set to it immediately. Judging by how long it takes Bristol to complete any project of scale, by my calculations if we start now, we might just about be ready to enjoy a summer of sun by 2035….

All words and photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour

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