Architectural Walks in Bristol

These twelve urban routes take in the city's rich architectural heritage and explore Bristol's unique maritime history, not to mention its, often scandalous, street art by Banksy and Nick Walker. All the walks have pubs and restaurants as stopping off places, and all encourage the walker to discover, reflect critically upon the environment and challenge accepted wisdom about matters of planning and conservation. They range from a circuit of the Floating Harbour, edged with colourful new housing now that Bristol is no longer a working port, through a sculpture trail around the Old City and Castle Park, to an extraordinary linear park, designed by one of the twentieth-century's most influential landscape architects, which threads through, over and underneath the 1960s Cumberland Basin flyover complex. One walk focuses on the city's rich mercantile past in the Victorian excesses of Corn Street; another centres on the sharp financial dealing that created Clifton - Bristol's classical cliff-top suburb - while another looks at the uneven quality of the archiecture built by the University since it was founded, with a generous benefaction, by the Wills family of tobacco fame, in 1909.

Walk 1 In the footsteps of the reckless engineer and an imaginary medieval monk

Walk 2 A John Piper-inspired excursion around the city's maritime past

Walk 3 A sculpture trail through the city of the merchant princes

Walk 4 Greek versus Gothic and a failed sculpture park

Walk 5 Building on the Marshes with eighteenth-century confidence and twenty-first century uncertainty

Walk 6 From a pugilistic pub to a hospital of alternative medicine built in the shadow of the gallows

Walk 7 A battle of the styles up Park Street towards a university set within the city

Walk 8 A lost Georgian spa and a forgotten route through a Sixties landscape of concrete roads and walkways

Walk 9 An escape from the city of dreadful night to the suburb on the edge

Walk 10 Bristol's island of alternative living - St Paul's, the People's Republic of Stokes Croft and Montpelier

Walk 11 High Kingsdown to The Arches - conservation and dystopian planning in a romantic Georgian suburb

Walk 12 Civic pomp, a 1930s picture palace and an unrealised basilica in the Clifton hinterland