Success of arts venue helped with development of area

Fifty years ago this week, the Arnolfini moved into its new home, a former dockside warehouse where it's been ever since. The move was also one of the starting points in the gradual transformation of the disused City Docks into the modern Harbourside. Eugene Byrne looks at the story.

- Eugene Byrne looks at the story.

Annabel Lawson, Jeremy Rees and, right, John Orsborn at the opening of the original Clifton Triangle gallery in 1961

NEW chapter in the history of a remarkable arts gamble begins on Friday," said an article in the Post on Monday October 13 1975.

"The Arnolfini makes its fourth and hopefully final, move into the Bush Warehouse, Narrow Quay, Bristol, after 14 years of pioneering professional contemporary arts."

Jeremy Rees, founder of the Arnolfini, said: "I must have looked at every warehouse in Bristol, since these buildings are the obvious choice for an arts complex, and set my sights on the Bush Warehouse, on the waterfront, in the centre of the city, where I felt we must operate."

Since then, the Arnolfini has become a local fixture, a place everyone knows about even if some Bristolians, perhaps intimidated by the very idea of contemporary art, have never been inside. It's survived financial crises and numerous controversies, plus the everyday complaints of the "Call that art? My four-year-old could do better!" variety.

In the process, it was one of the places that led the transformation of the City Docks, derelict by the mid-70s, into "Harbourside" and even became a poster child for the renewal of former industrial areas nationally. As early as 1984 it featured on a postage stamp as part of a Royal Mail issue on the theme of urban regeneration.

Some, at least, of the story will be well known to older Bristolians.

By the 1960s the writing was on the wall for the old City Docks, and most of the facilities of the once-thriving heart of Bristol closed (or had already long since moved to Avonmouth) while everyone started arguing about what was to become of the area.