Superb record of pre-photography Bristol

The city museum and art gallery has a priceless collection of images of the area from the early 1800s; hundreds of views of the city, its people and buildings made in the decades just before the invention of photography. It was all thanks, says Jonathan Rowe, to a wealthy collector - though some of that wealth came at a price.

- Jonathan Rowe

RAIKENRIDGE Road, St Anne's - formerly part of the original parish of Brislington when it was still a Somerset village - perpetuates the name of George Weare Braikenridge, who by the time of his death at the age of 81 in February 1856, had become probably the largest collector of general and local antiquities in the West of England.

In the 1820s, he also commissioned what would become a collection of 1,400 drawings of Brislington and Bristol, the majority of which are now owned by Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.

Braikenridge was born in Virginia 250 years ago, on 4 January 1775. The family were of Scottish descent and had settled in Brislington in the 1730s.

Braikenridge's father, George Braikenridge (1738-1827), became a tobacco planter and merchant in Hanover County, Virginia, where he married a Virginian woman, Sarah Jerdone.

George Senior disapproved of the struggle for American independence and sent George Junior, aged about ten, to be educated at Dr John Prior Estlin's school on St Michael's Hill, Bristol.

It is likely George Junior was brought up at his paternal grandmother's home, Winash, a house built around 1750 and demolished in about 1960 for the Dixon Road area of Brislington Trading Estate.

George Junior's mother and two sisters were travelling to Bristol in 1793 and were shipwrecked in the Bristol Channel. They survived but died of scarlet fever soon after.

By 1795, George Senior was in business as a drysalter with his kinsman, Weare, in Temple Street. Father and son were then living in Long Ashton, and George Senior joined the recently organised Bristol Volunteers to defend the city against the expected French invasion by Napoleon.

In 1800, George Weare Braikenridge married Mary Bush of Tracy Park, Gloucestershire at St Mary Redcliffe, and they lived at Redcliffe Parade. By 1806, his father had retired, and the firm was based at 21 Queen Square.