Building offered grand living that got all of Bristol talking

Eugene Byrne wishes he could afford the rent on one of the most luxurious flats in early 1960s Bristol, a place in town which came with central heating and fitted kitchens - and a roof garden. Though he'd also happily settle for a posh apartment in 1930s Clifton, too.

- Eugene Byrne

CLIFTON Heights, the well-known 1960s block on the Clifton Triangle, is up for sale.

If you fancy it, it’s yours for about £16m, according to an article in the Post the week before last, though you'd better be quick as it might have already been snapped up by the time you read this.

Hartnell Taylor Cook, who are handling the sale, say it could be used for offices, flats, or maybe a hotel or - of course! - student accommodation.

This is just the latest chapter in a history that goes back to the 1950s.

Clifton Heights got all of Bristol talking when it was first proposed. It was going to be a symbol of the way that the city was emerging from the dreary postwar years. Now we were going into the Swinging Sixties with what the Post at the time called “a striking modern building”

“Materials have been cut down to the fewest possible . . . glass, brick and concrete.”

Another relatively novel aspect was that it was a private develop-ment, back in an age when central and local government funded and controlled a great deal of building work.

Clifton Heights was to be built by a London company called Land and General, and it was going to cost £400,000. This was a huge amount of money for the time, but nothing was going to be too good for a luxury development that would be our own little bit of Mayfair.

At a time when Bristol’s local authority, along with many others, was building council flats, this would be very much for the upper crust. It would comprise 20 single-bedroom apartments, 19 with two bedrooms and nine with three. The later would be up at the top, with the best views, with rents predicted to be £750 a year, at a time when £1200 a year - before tax, mind - was the average wage.

Most Post readers at the time could only dream of a home featur-ing all the things we now take for granted.