A long-lost country park is now buried by busy street packed with bars, restaurants, cafes and homes. While Bristol continues to have many gorgeous outdoor spaces, one that didn’t survive past the 1700s was Tyndall’s Park in Clifton.
Named after the Tyndalls, a rich merchant family with links to the slave trade, the only obvious reminder of the huge 68-acre estate is a few roads with the same namesake. Tyndall’s Park Road and Tyndall Avenue are part of the area it would have covered centuries ago, before the land was “wrecked” for development.
A 2012 article in the Bristol Times, the Bristol Post’s weekly nostalgia and history supplement, recalled: “Beneath today’s Queens Road and Whiteladies Road lie the remains of an 18th century country estate, Tyndall’s Park. It was Tyndall Onesiphorus who bought the land in 1753 but his son Thomas who transformed the area, clearing houses and cottages to create a 68 acre park.
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“Between 1758 and 1761 the family erected a magnificent Georgian mansion on the site of an old Civil War fortification. Featuring the finest plaster work and wood carving, we know it today as the Royal Fort.
“The Tyndall estate took in what is now Park Row, the Museum and Art Gallery, The Triangle and Queens Road – plus land alongside Whiteladies Road as far as Cotham Hill. But after coming under tremendous pressure to sell land to speculators Tyndall eventually disposed of his estate for the enormous sum of £40,000.
“The developers wrecked the park, digging house plots and deep trenches and laying out roads before going bankrupt, like many Clifton builders, during a long recession. In 1799 Colonel Tyndall’s son, who had bought back the land, hired top landscape designer Humphrey Repton to try to repair the damage.
“Repton’s plan was to put in sunken footpaths and trees to screen the park from the houses slowly creeping up the hillsides from old Bristol. But, over the next century, the parkland was gradually whittled away as roads were cut through the fringes and building sites opened up.
“Queens Road was carved out of one side and land to widen Whiteladies Road taken from another. The Tyndall family decided to give up the fight to retain the estate and, for the second time, sold up.
“Tyndall’s Park Road, Woodland Road, Belgrave Road and St Mary’s church, Cotham, were built on parkland, and another five acres were sold for the new Bristol Grammar School. Even more was taken over by the new University College.
“The old Children’s Hospital was built on Tyndall land, as was the Wills Memorial building, the Museum and Art gallery, the BBC and many of the buildings which line Whiteladies Road. The Tyndall family stayed on at the Royal Fort mansion until 1916, which is when HH Wills, of the tobacco dynasty, bought the building and donated it to Bristol University.”
The Royal Fort itself, a Grade I listed building, is now part of the University of Bristol and there are still gardens that are accessible to the public. A university guide to Royal Fort Garden explains: “In 1916, the house and pleasure grounds were bought by Henry Herbert Wills who donated the Fort to the University.
“Thomas Tyndall had commissioned the landscape architect Humphry Repton to design the garden. Today an impressive set of gates at the entrance to the drive leads up to the house and the garden hosts many beautiful plantings.”
This article was first published in November 2023 and was republished in November 2024.