Cotswold Archaeology have recently concluded fieldwork on an excavation undertaken in advance of development at Wapping Wharf in Bristol. This historic site is located just south of the area that was home to West Wapping dry dock.
This was one of the most important docks in the city from the early 18th-century until the closure of the Wapping shipbuilding yards in the 1860s and was the place where Brunel’s Great Western, the first steam-ship purpose built for crossing the Atlantic, was launched in 1837.
You can read about the results of the excavation and view a 3D model of the site below.
The numbers in brackets below correspond to those on the model. Click on the corresponding number on the model to fly to that location.
The excavation uncovered the south wall [10] of the early 18th-century ‘ropewalk’ – an area where rope for use on the ships was made. A row of properties was built fronting onto the ropewalk. These were probably a mixture of cottages and workshops serving the docks, but they were demolished in the early 19th century and little remained to indicate their original function. Four narrow plots in the centre of the site, with gardens [7] adjoining the ropewalk and a communal yard surface to the rear, could have been the site of small two-up two-down cottages [8]. The recovery of locally produced Delft-style floor tiles and a stone-setting for a ladies’ ring from within a stone-capped drain [9] at the rear of one of the properties seems to indicate domestic activity.
Ownership of the shipyard changed several times in the early 1800s, being under the control of Hillhouse & Sons until 1824, when it was sold to timber merchant turned steamship builder William Scott. Under Scott the yard underwent a sharp decline in fortunes in the late 1820s, eventually resulting in Scott’s bankruptcy and the acquisition of the yard by William Patterson, his assistant and master shipbuilder, along with his partner John Mercer. Maps of the site from the early 19th century show a complete renovation of the site, probably linked to one of these changes of ownership. The cottages and workshops at the west of the site were demolished by 1826 and a new, larger building was constructed at the east of the site. This new building featured two large basement rooms, one with a brick floor [15] and one with a flagstone floor [18]. It is likely that these basements were storage or workspaces of a commercial premises (probably still associated with the shipyards) with office space on the floors above. In 1858 Patterson and Mercer moved their shipyards further west along the floating harbour to the Great Western Yard.
After the relocation of the shipyards, the site was occupied by a timber yard, which the Goad Insurance Survey map of 1893 depicts as belonging to W. Church. The large office building was extended to the north to meet Wapping Road, which had replaced the ropewalk as the northern boundary of the site. This extension included the construction of further basement storerooms, accessed through brick archways [17]. In 1865 the site was acquired by the Docks Committee of the City Council for the construction of the Harbour Railway, which opened in 1872. Despite this, historic mapping shows that the timber yard remained in use until the turn of the 20th century, when it was demolished to make room for railway sidings and associated buildings, including a weigh machine room [25], built in the late 1940s.
