Bristol History Podcast Tom Brothwell

This week I met with Professor Madge Dresser to discuss the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963. The boycott against the Bristol Omnibus Company over its racist employment policy was the first black-led protest against racial discrimination in post-war Britain. We explored race relations in Bristol around the time of the boycott, and why its legacy continues to resonate so strongly today.

A brief bonus podcast with some thoughts on the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston on Sunday 7 June 2020.

This week I spoke with Pete Insole, Historic Environment Officer for Bristol City Council, to discuss the historical mapping tool ‘Know Your Place’. We also talked about the historic development of Bristol and about planning the future of the city.

Arriving at the end of the First World War, the 1918 'Spanish' Flu was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, killing between 40 and 200 million people worldwide. I spoke with journalist and historian Eugene Byrne - we discussed official strategies to combat the spread of the flu, as well as its local impact on Bristol.

This week I met with Mike Slater, West-Country Occult Historian, to discuss the history of witchcraft in the West Country. We spoke about the continuance of popular belief in magic, long after official witchcraft trials had ceased. We also explored 'witch scratching', the pernicious and long-lived idea that drawing a witch's blood would remove her curses.

Nowadays Bristol is internationally known as a centre of graffiti and street art culture. I met with John Nation - pioneer and promoter of graffiti culture and its artists since the early 1980s - to discuss how perceptions of the culture have changed. From being despised as 'vandalism' to hailed as a cultural export of the city, graffiti continues to elicit strong opinions, not least because it raises questions about who gets to have a say in the visual culture of the city.