It occupies virtually the entire south western corner of Bristol, links the countryside to the city and the city to its industrial past.
Ashton is one of the most famous parts of Bristol outside of the city in the rest of Britain - alongside maybe St Paul’s and Clifton - by dint of ‘the Gate’. Ask any football fan to name a part of Bristol and they’ll soon mention the stadium that takes its name from the area of the city in which it is found.
But it’s not just football that Ashton is famous for. And there’s much more to Ashton than just Ashton Gate.
The historic area that still bears all the varieties of the Ashton name stretches from the North Somerset villages to the river and to the heart of BS3 - even though estate agents and developers seem intent on expanding the more trendily-sounding neighbouring places like Southville, and therefore shrinking Ashton off the map.
So let’s celebrate this unsung area of Bristol, with a guide to help people coming into the area know their Parks from their Vales and their Fools from their Horses.
A is for Atyeo
The only statue in Ashton is of a man from a little village called Dilton Marsh, near Trowbridge in Wiltshire, and because Ashton is synonymous with Bristol City, we’ll start there.
Widely seen as Bristol City’s best ever player, the pitch at Ashton Gate was his playground for 15 years in the 1950s and 1960s.
John Atyeo played 597 times for Bristol City, scored 314 goals. He also scored five times for England in just six appearances. But what makes him the club legend he is today is that he turned down offers from teams like Chelsea, Spurs and AC Milan, to continue playing for Bristol City.
The only stand at the stadium not to have been rebuilt or refurbished in the past decade, on the northern end of the pitch is also named after him.
...and also for allotments
There are loads of allotments in Ashton. People come from all over Bristol for a little patch of their own soil. From White City, Kennel Lodge Road and the Hotwells and District in Bower Ashton to Alderman Moore’s and the Bedminster Down allotments in Ashton Vale, there’s a lot of growing goes on in Ashton.
B is for Bower
The first of all the various places called Ashton alphabetically, Bower Ashton is the place between the A370 Winterstoke spaghetti junction and Ashton Court.
It’s home to the University of the West of England’s Bower Ashton campus, Ashton Park school and a homeowner with a love of flying loads of different flags.
...and also for bowls
They like their bowls in Ashton. It’s home to not one but the city’s two main bowls clubs.
Bristol Bowling Club have a green right next door to the corner of the football stadium in Ashton Gate, while Bristol Indoor Bowls Club have a big indoor venue in the south west corner of Ashton Vale.
C is for Court
Say ‘Ashton’ to most people in Bristol and they’ll say ‘Gate’, but they might equally say ‘Court’. The vast country estate is owned by the city and is the city’s summer playground, with festivals and a golf club and a miniature railway and footgolf and off-road biking and balloons and the list, frankly, is endless.
The stately home itself is often overlooked as people head to the woods and the two great natural amphitheatres that afford stunning views over the south of Bristol.
...and also for caravans
Baileys in Ashton Vale is one of the biggest caravan factories in Europe, and makes 7,500 a year. And motorhomes and everything you need for a holiday on the road.
Martin Bailey made his first caravan in his garage in Bedminster Down in 1947 and sold it at the market at Ashton Gate (remember when Ashton Gate had a market?) for £200. The other day, the Queen came to look.
D is for deer
Ashton Court’s crowning glory are the different herds of deer that stand majestically in the various deer parks on the country estate.
There are roughly 110 red deer and 90 fallow deer that have the run of 200 acres of the estate, plus whatever wild deer fancy joining them. They aren’t tame - the team that manage them try to keep them as wild as possible.
...and also for Dolman
Harry Dolman was Bristol City’s chairman for many years, and the long stand on the east side of the stadium is named after him. His widow Marina continued his work after he died, and the concourse in front of the huge new Lansdown Stand is named after her.
E is for Eight
We’re still at Ashton Gate, and the year is 1982. The Ashton Gate Eight were eight leading players at the club who were, with hindsight, frankly given little choice but to quit their jobs and try to find another team when Bristol City faced financial ruin.
Their contracts were awarded when the club was in the First Division, but by 1982, the team had sunk all the way to the fourth division with three successive relegations. The eight are seen as club legends, and a song all about their sacrifice is still sung at least once every home game.
...and also for Eastenders
Not Albert Square - we’re still at Ashton Gate stadium, and even though the stand known colloquially as the ‘East End’ has long gone, its spirit lives on.
The most vocal fans, who gather in the south east corner of the rebuilt stadium between the South Stand and the Dolman Stand call themselves the East Enders, and sing a little song about themselves too.
F is for Flood
Some parts of Ashton are named ‘marsh’ and there are two brooks - Colliters and Longmoor - that flow into a shallow floodplain between the hills of Bedminster on one side, and the hills of Ashton Court on the other.
So it was no hydrological surprise really that when the Great Flood of 1968 hit Bristol, Ashton was pretty much totally submerged. Eight people lost their lives around Bristol and North Somerset that fateful night, and Ashton was one of the worst-hit places.
...and also for Flying Fox
Continuing the nautical theme, Ashton has its own Royal Navy vessel, albeit one that is firmly set in the ground. HMS Flying Fox is the Bristol base for the Royal Naval Reserve.
It started out being based on an actual ship in 1924, was called the Flying Fox in 1951 and moved from a ship to an ‘onshore’ base, in Winterstoke Road, Ashton, in 1972.
On still evenings in the spring and early summer, the haunting sound of bagpipe band practice will often float across Ashton.
G is for Gate
Ashton Gate isn’t just the football stadium, it’s a place in its own right that takes its name from the gate that would have been the main entrance to the Ashton Court estate.
Where that gate is or was is a bit confusing - probably because Ashton Court is so big it had lots of gates. The main one is a gatehouse currently within the grounds of Ashton Park School, but there’s a toll house right in the middle of Ashton Gate, at the end of North Street, that many people say was the original gate.
Where the suburb of Ashton Gate is now is also the subject of vague dispute. It certainly used to be a lot bigger than people think it is now.
Ashton Gate really should extend to Coronation Road and the River Avon in the north, include the Tobacco Factory, everything west of there including Greville Smyth Park, and all the way down to Winterstoke Road.
...and also for Greville Smyth
The Victorian lord of the manor at Ashton Court, he has the biggest park in Ashton - Greville Smyth Park - named after him, even though most locals grew up thinking it was called just Ashton Park.
Until recently, the park contained the oldest swings in Bristol, now sadly gone, however.
H is for Jack House
If you were born, grew up, lived and died in Ashton in the last few decades, you would almost certainly have known Jack House.
He was a teacher, vicar, school governor and community stalwart, mainly at Ashton Park School and St Francis’ Church. That meant he may well have baptised you, taught you at school, conducted your marriage ceremony and then buried your grandparents.
When he died in June 2019, tributes flooded in from across the city, but his loss has been widely felt in Ashton.
I is for Imperial Tobacco
Created in 1901 with the merger of no fewer than 13 different British tobacco firms, including South Bristol’s largest employer Wills Tobacco, Imperial has never left its roots in Ashton.
The vast tobacco factories of Ashton Gate are still there - one is now Ashton Gate Primary School while another has been turned into a theatre and bar complex.
Imperial are still headquartered in Ashton - in a large office on Winterstoke Road.
J is for Jesus
On a cross, on the side of the Signmarket, facing the front of the Rising Sun pub, in a Bristol City shirt, with the word ‘Religion’ stencilled below.
It’s protected with a perspex sheet and if it wasn’t done by Banksy, then does it matter that everyone thinks it was?
K is for Kill Devil
The fairly gruesome but probably rather apt name for one of the biggest deep coal mines that Ashton was rather shakily built on.
Kill Devil Pit’s proper name was the New Deep Pit, and it was worked for decades during the 19th century, from 1833 to 1887. It was such an integral part of the story of the growth of Ashton. It had another jokey name too - Nine Bottle Pit - after the nine bottles embedded in the wall of the engine house at the pit head near Gore’s Marsh Road in Ashton. The building - and the bottles - were still there until 1949.
L is for Long
Another of the places called Ashton, Long Ashton isn’t part of Bristol, but IS part of our Ashton family.
It’s proudly a North Somerset village, separated from the city by the A370 Long Ashton Bypass, the Long Ashton Park Ride car park, and a few fields.
Bristol’s Ashton is getting ever closer to Long Ashton though, with housing development planned for those fields in the years ahead.
...and also for Lounge
The Lounge chain, founded in Bristol and now spreading across the country, reinvented people’s social habits by blurring the lines between a pub, a coffee shop, a restaurant and a bar.
Founded by a couple of savvy entrepreneurs who spotted a gap in the market for all the people who were returning to ‘going out’ after the smoking ban.
The ‘Lounge’ brand has spread out with each Lounge given the name of where it is - but there’s only one that simply called ‘The Lounge’ - the first, original one, on the Ashton side of North Street.
M is for Meadows
It sounds slightly more idyllic than the reality, but Ashton Meadows were designed and created by the renowned landscapist and urban planner Sylvia Crowe as a way to off-set the brutalist road network of flyovers that connected Hotwells and the Cumberland Basin with Ashton in the 1960s.
It is from Ashton Meadows that the pictures that form the images most associated with Bristol are taken - of the Avon Gorge, the Suspension Bridge and the coloured houses climbing up from Hotwells to Cliftonwood.
It’s under threat though, with potentially thousands of homes built there as part of the controversial ‘Western Harbour’ plan.
...and also for Mock Tudor
Ashton’s homes range from spacious inter-war council homes, cul-de-sacs of classic semis, big Victorian homes and detached suburbia, but in a couple of the Victorian terraces just below North Street, there’s something a bit different.
Terraced rows of homes are beautifully mock-Tudor, with shared arch entrances and all white walls and black timbers.
Coupled with the squat, historic lampposts casting their warm orange glow over the streets - lampposts that still haven’t been seconded to leafy Sneyd Park - it’s almost Harry Potter-esque down there.
N is for North Street
Ask people where North Street is and they’ll say either Bedminster or Southville, depending on what kind of bread they like. But much of North Street is actually in Ashton.
Technically, according to long-standing BS3ers who regularly debate this, the south side of North Street is Ashton, all the way from the corner of Luckwell Road. And both sides are Ashton Gate, once you get to the Tobacco Factory.
That’ll be why the wonderful fruit and veg shop there is called Ashton Fruits, then. And why the wonderful Clarks Pies - on the same stretch on the south side of North Street, list its address as ‘North Street, Ashton Gate’.
O is for Only Fools and Horses
The classic sitcom is known throughout the English-speaking world, and is set in Del Boy’s manor of Peckham. But anything outdoors was filmed in Bristol, mainly in Ashton and Bedminster.
And that includes the Trotters’ own home tower block, Nelson Mandela House. In real life, in Ashton Gate, it is Whitemead House, one of a complex of three blocks of flats off Duckmoor Road next to the football stadium.
P is for Plastic bagged cider
British Cellophane already had a big factory in Bedminster back in the day. It made the coloured plastic bags that were popular in supermarkets.
But then, the firm developed something new and much more important - a way to bag up liquid, specifically cider (and wine). This meant it could be sold in lightweight boxes.
So the firm opened a new factory in the 1980s, at the cutting edge of the technology of getting larger quantities of cider to thirsty people. That was set up in Ashton Vale.
Q is for queues
They love queues in Ashton. Queueing is an Ashton pastime. They might well love queues in other parts of Bristol, maybe in the rest of the country, but in Ashton it's an artform.
Every year, thousands of people turn up to watch some balloons take off or glow in the dark, before they queue to get on buses on Clanage Road in Bower Ashton.
Then there’s the queues for the award-winning sheep pies and cider at Ashton Gate stadium every weekend.
Earlier this year, people loved queuing in Ashton so much, dozens of people camped outside the stadium to do it, and just last week, around 50 people queued for the Aldi store in North Street, Ashton Gate to open.
R is for Robins
The Robins is the only pub that you could describe as possibly being in Ashton Vale.
The rest of it, true Ashton Vale on the other side of the railway, is like one of those dry counties from the Deep South of the USA.
...and also for Roof
It’s a relatively recent thing, but since around 2016, the main landmark of Ashton is the gleaming white criss-cross steel of the roof of Ashton Gate stadium.
They love that roof too, Bristol City fans. It is now a ritual that every new player who comes to play for the club has to climb to the top of it, pretend they are not scared of heights, and have a video of them sitting on the roof.
S is for Sainsbury’s
The main supermarket for everyone in Ashton, Ashton Vale, Ashton Gate, Ashton Park, Long Ashton and Bower Ashton.
It opened at 9.30am on Tuesday, June 9, 1992, just two months to the day that John Major won a surprise General Election victory.
Back then, Sainsbury’s drew Ashton like it was a leafy cartoon village.
T is for Tannery
It’s always been a place for heavy industries, as the mines and the vast ironworks of the Ashton Rolling Mill - which is now the South Bristol Retail Park next to Ashton Gate stadium - show.
But some industries still thrive. Thomas Ware & Sons began at the Clift House Tannery in 1840, and is one of Britain’s last remaining traditional tanneries. It’s the place where the cricket balls for the Ashes series are made, among many other things, including the gun holsters for most European police forces.
U is for UWE
The University of the West of England, to be precise. Based at the Bower Ashton site, it’s where Ribena was invented, when part of that campus was called the 'Long Ashton Agriculture and Horticultural Research Station'.
V is for Vale
We’ve had Bower, Court, Gate, Long and Park, and Ashton Vale is last in the alphabet. A quiet spot of inter-war housing built the ‘other side’ of the Portishead rail line, it’s surrounded on two sides by railways and industry.
It’s kind of like an urban island, with a strong sense of close-knit community. They tried to change the 24 bus there this year, and that didn’t go too well. For the bus company.
W is for Willson
Sue Willson was executive headteacher of Ashton Gate Primary for years before she passed away in October 2018, just days after her 59th birthday.
She oversaw the school’s growth to two sites, and took it to a position where it was rated Outstanding in every category by Ofsted. She’s still missed in Ashton.
X is for Axis
They say what goes up must come down, but at Axis Trampolining & Gymnastics Club it tends to go back up again.
Based in one corner of Ashton Vale, the club is not-for-profit, and charitable donations and fundraising form a big part of their work, along with all levels of coaching up to elite High Performance level.
Y is for Yanley
Yanley is Ashton’s rural cousin - a little hamlet of North Somerset countryside hidden away almost under the Long Ashton dual carriageway. It’s hard to imagine you’re just yards from the city, there.
Z is for Zone
As in, Residents’ Parking Zone, Matchday Parking Zone.
People want it in Ashton. Badly. Some people in Ashton say they are moving out because the parking is so bad, and because Southville has got a Residents Parking Zone and Ashton hasn’t.
That might be about to change, finally, though.
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