Pie Poudre

The problem with Old Market is that all old residents have been moved away in different ways so the main sources are those online and some public archives.

• There is a very famous private archive, of which many photos have been published in books http://www.reecewinstone.co.uk
• Online of course Flickr is the biggest resource and you can have a look at our Flickr group where  we are tagging all photos around Old Market.  http://www.flickr.com/groups/1724458@N22/ You will find that the most interesting photos are at the end of the stream (found before).

One of the best Bristol photo collections is maintained by Paul Townsend (nickname brizzle born and bred) and he can be contacted very easily if you need to request for permission to use the photos.

• Then there is the Bristol Records Office and apart from general photos that you can search just with keywords there is a new postcard collection in which there are beautiful and rare photos of Old Market.

“Vaughan postcards online: An exciting addition to our online catalogue http://archives.bristol.gov.uk/dserve/  is the Vaughan postcard collection, containing over 9000 digitised images of local places and events. To view the postcards, search for RefNo. 43207.”

• Last you should look at “Know your place”  http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace/ (install Silverlight) where there are beautiful images of the area, from an earlier period (XIX century).

Mike Mantin will introduce his work on the history of The Bristol Guild of the Poor Brave Things (The Guild Heritage Building, Braggs Lane, Old Market) during the conference “Telling Our Stories and Resistance” at the M-Shed on Saturday the 14th of January.

“In a unique collaboration to support UK Disability History Month, Bristol based deaf and disabled artists, writers, film and theatre makers are hosting a day of activities to explore disabled people’s often forgotten history and to celebrate disability arts and culture. Telling Our Stories will take place alongside Liz Crow’s international award winning exhibition Resistance:which way the future? showing at M Shed 5^th January to 5^th February 2012.”

For details on the conference please visit  the web page of the initiative.

For more information on The Guild Heritage Building visit its website.

The Hydra Bookshop will open on Saturday 26^th November 2011 with a talk from Ian Bone a prominent British anarchist and an active publisher of anarchist newspapers and tabloids.

 ’The Hydra’ is a bookshop and coffee shop by day; event space and meeting place by night situated at 34, Old Market Street (BS2 0EZ). We have a warm inviting event space suitable for groups of up to 25.

Run by local people as a workers’ co-operative, the shop grew out of the Bristol Radical History Group and similar networks across the city.

There will be an opening week of events organised by Bristol Radical History Group. The details will appear in the Events Calendar on the website .

Barstaple Almshouses, Old Market Street

The Holy Trinity Hospital, also known as Barstaple Almshouses, will be opened on the 10^th of September during the Bristol Open Doors 2011 day, from 10 am to 4 pm.

The Almshouses, at the corner of Old Market Street and Midland road, were funded in 1395 by the rich merchant John Barstaple.

During the day Bristorica will re-enact life during the Tudor period in the Courtyard of the Almshouses.

The day will also see the exciting opening cerimony of the Pie Poudre – a court held to sort out disputes and punish misdemeanours on the spot.  At 10.45 the actors will leave the Nails in Corn Street, walk through Broad Mead and reach the Stag and Hounds, Old Market roundabout, where they will re-enact this tradition, which ran from the time of King Alfred until it was finally interrupted in the 1970s.  We will restart it to celebrate the history of the Old Market.

Details on the history of Barstaple Almshouses are on the website of Bristol Charities, which has recently sold the property to Sunley Holding Plc  which we wish to thank for allowing us acces to Barstaple House.

Trinity Hospital is a Grade II* listed building.