Bristol (UK): Brunel's bridge and street art

A port city that gave birth to both engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and, centuries later, street artist Banksy, Bristol still bears today the marks of both legacies in its urban landscape.

The center and historic port are easily walked.

The Clifton Suspension Bridge, designed by Brunel and completed in 1864, five years after his death, crosses the Avon River gorge at seventy-five meters height, linking Bristol to Somerset.

The SS Great Britain, the iron-hulled transatlantic ship designed by Brunel in 1843, is today preserved in the original carenage basin where it was built, visitable both on deck and in the engine rooms below.

The murals by Banksy, scattered at various points in the city where the artist grew up, include works like 'Well Hung Lover', protected by plexiglass sheets after years of weather exposure and vandal attacks.

The Harbourside, the historic port redeveloped, alternates contemporary art galleries with old brick warehouses, with local ferries connecting the two sides of the harbor basin in minutes.

Brunel's bridge and Banksy's murals, born almost a century and a half apart, share the same impulse: to leave a permanent mark on a city both knew as young people.

Harbourside, which grew around both these legacies, shows today a Bristol that has learned to coexist with its industrial history without becoming its prisoner.