St Philip’s Marsh is nowadays a semi-industrial area located between the Feeder canal and Temple Meads Station. It does, however, still have amazing small businesses, cafés and shops. We created a billboard facing the area full of large letterpress prints paying homage to these businesses. We also made a little book which outlines the recent history and has wonderful accounts of St Philip’s Marsh when it was a thriving community. All this information is available in the brilliant storymap website.
Here is an example:
Roger: As a young lad, we had what we called the Piggery. Pens for cattle on the side of the railway on St Philip’s Marsh engine shed. Now, every Tuesday cattle would be, offloaded from the trucks into these cattle pens. From a Tuesday up to Thursday, those pens would be full of animals, ready to go to the slaughter house or to be sold on. At the age of 7 or 8 I would go up to the Piggery and they would drive them up the road. When they got to the Feeder Road they would turn left and take them up to
the cattle market. In later years, a company called Northover Brothers had the contract to come down, put the cattle in the lorries and deliver them and I can remember, I was about a 9 year old, I would sit with the driver in the lorry. He had his son with him and I got friendly with him, with his son and they said “you could come with us” and we off load the cattle, come back again. My mum never knew, mind. I was only a little tot. That’s how they took them to the market all the time. Anotherthing I used to do, when the pens was full and when our milk bottle was empty, I used to take the milk bottle, I can remember it, taking it up to the pens in the Piggery, milking the cow, filling it with milk and taking it back to me mum. And I can always remember, she said “I’m not having that!” I felt so proud to think I got her a pint of milk and she threw it away. Sometimes they’d have bulls brought off the cattle trucks. And it’s a naughty thing this, I can remember as a young lad, the cows separated from the bull. I always
remember it, we opened the gate, let the bull in with the cows and it was havoc. They was going round and round in circles. All of a sudden, the chap who was in charge of all the cattle up there seen what we were doing, shouted at us, chased us. Couldn’t catch us. What happened after I don’t know, but that’s another side of what we used to get up to in the Marsh. The Piggery got shut down in the late 50s, so everything changed.