The first full history of Bristol for two generations, this beautiful book tells the story of one of the most important maritime cities in the UK. Certain to appeal to Bristolians the world over. It was a thousand years ago that a simple wooden bridge provided a crossing over the Avon, at a place known as the `Bridge Place'. Only 200 years later Bristol had become the largest and most prosperous town in the West of England, and it subsequently grew to become the second city in the kingdom. Anybody who has ever tried to understand Bristol's long and turbulent history will know that the number of books on the shelf is so bewildering, and the books so specialised, that there is simply no place for the beginner to start! Peter Aughton's book solves this problem. Many excellent and detailed specialised studies have been published in the last fifty years but this is the first full history of Bristol to appear in two generations. The influence and history of Bristol extend well beyond her neighbourhood. The city played a major part in the discovery and colonisation of America; she has been a great centre of industry; as well as being one of the world's leading mercantile ports. She still retains a strong nautical atmosphere and the old-world charm of an ancient English city. The range of the book is very wide, but the reader will still find much which is new in the text. Most of Bristol's previous historians, for instance, have shied away from analysing the true impact of the slave trade, but here it is given a chapter in its correct context as a critical part of eighteenth-century Bristol. The author brings the railway, the steamship and the development of the docks into the narrative as an essential part of Bristol's Victorian development.