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Bristol History Podcast

A podcast dedicated to exploring various aspects of Bristol’s history. Produced in partnership with the Bristol Cable since April 2018.

Image of Arthur Rackham's 'Fairy Procession', originally for a 1908 edition of Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights Dream

Bristol History Podcast

Listen: Sabrina, goddess of the River Severn

Nicola Haasz discusses the origin myths of Sabrina, goddess of the River Severn, and the cultural responses the river has elicited through history.

Listen: How hundreds of squatters responded to the housing shortage after the war

Listen: The Bristolian Refugee by Sam Sayer

Bristol History Podcast

Listen: The Bristolian poet prodigy Thomas Chatterton who died at 17

Born in Redcliffe in 1752, Chatterton produced a great body of poems, plays and prose works before his death as a teenager.

Bristol History Podcast

Listen: Ann Yearsley, the working class Bristol poet who took on the slave trade

Bristol History Podcast

Listen: Meet Bristol’s ballooning pioneer Don Cameron

LISTEN: Telling the stories from Bristol LGBTQ people going back 300 years

Andrew Foyle from Outstories Bristol, a volunteer community history group, discusses the stories of LGBTQ people throughout Bristol’s history from the 17th century to the present day.

Listen: How local industry profited from the slave trade

The hidden history of how the family wealth of Edward Protheroe, famous coal industrialist in the Forest of Dean, was built on the slave trade and labour of enslaved people on sugar plantations.

Listen: Healthcare in Bristol before the NHS

This week I met with Dr Michael Whitfield to discuss Bristol's dispensaries. For the two hundred years or so before the creation of the NHS in 1948, the dispensaries were one of the main providers of healthcare in Britain, especially for its poorest people. We discussed how the dispensaries opera...

Bristol History Podcast: State Surveillance in Bristol and Beyond

This week I spoke with Colin Thomas and Tim Beasley of the Bristol Radical History Group to discuss the history of state surveillance in their...

Bristol History Podcast: The Bristol Blitz

2020 marked the eightieth anniversary of the Bristol Blitz, which saw 77 Nazi air raids on the city, with six major raids taking place in the winter of 1940-41. I spoke with Eugene Byrne of the Bristol Post to discuss the origins of the Blitz and how Bristolians coped with being bombed. We also e...

Bristol History Podcast: West Country Counterculture in the 1960s and 70s

Explore 'the artistic, radical and experimental communities that flourished at the time.'

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