Bristol Colonnade

The Colonnade (built c. 1760, rebuilt here 1959, listed Grade II 1971) was opened by Earl Russell, O.M., on April 10th 1959. Its dedicatory inscription reads as follows: "This colonnade built circa 1760 by the Quaker copper smelter William Reeve, stood before his bathhouse at Arnos Court, Bristol. Damaged by bombs it had fallen to decay and although scheduled as an Ancient Monument, Her Majesty's Minister of Works approved its removal on condition that it should be here re-scheduled." The interior of the Bath House had ornate plasterwork by the Bristol plasterer Thomas Stocking but this already crumbling and could not be saved. Transporting some hundred tons of fragile and elaborately wrought masonry tow hundred miles by road was no light matter, but was as nothing to the feat of delicately dismembering at the sending end or the faultless reassembly of the jigsaw at this. A precise measured survey made by an architect at Bristol survives, showing every single stone, each numbered on the drawing as well as on itself. Clough's master mason, Mr William Davies, took over all the papers along with the stoneheaps and set about the resurrection. As Clough recalled, "First to last, in Bristol as well as at Portmeirion, it was almost entirely a matter of high masonic craft, for, having determined its site and fixed its levels, there was little more for me to do but look on, approve and very much admire."

Clough's head adorns the Colonnade, made by Jonah Jones who recalls the occasion in his memoir of Clough (*): "At either end of the Colonnade, an ogee cupola is supported on two corbels. One of these was missing when the drivers off-loaded, so Clough asked me to carve one out of a blank in its place. He gave me very little time, as usual, and I carved, as I thought, a sketch portrait of Clough."

The figure of the angel holding a scroll (right) that graces the Bristol colonnade is in the style of French or Netherlandish fifteenth-century sculpture.