Shirehampton is a district of Bristol in England, near Avonmouth, at the northwestern edge of the city.
It originated as a separate village, retains a High Street with a parish church and shops, and is still thought of as a village by many of its 6,867 inhabitants. Although on the far northwest corner, and largely separated from the rest of Bristol by a broad swathe of parkland extending from the Blaise Castle estate, with the River Avon forming a barrier for access to Somerset, the community is still a convenient location from which to reach all parts of the city.
Travel is also easy from Shirehampton into Gloucestershire, South Wales and Somerset since it lies within reach of the main motorways in the area, including the M5, the M4 Second Severn Crossing, and the M49, and it is served by the A4 Portway and by Shirehampton railway station, which allow access to near the city centre. It is informally known to local people as "Shire".
Situation
Shirehampton looks across the Avon towards the rural Failand Hills of Somerset. For many centuries the only direct connection with Somerset was via a small rowed ferry which crossed from near The Lamplighters pub ("The Lamps") to the village of Pill, Somerset opposite. This state of affairs continued until the completion of the M5 Avonmouth Bridge in 1974. From the limestone ridge of Penpole Point (whose name meant approximately Land's End in the Celtic language spoken here before English), there used to be far-reaching views across the River Severn to the distant hills of South Wales, but tree growth has restricted this prospect.
Prehistory
The gravel terraces above the River Avon provide some of the earliest evidence of human occupation in the British Isles. Here and around Ham Green and Pill, on the opposite bank of the Avon, humans with a Lower Palaeolithic (earliest phase of the Old Stone Age) culture (possibly of the hominid type Homo heidelbergensis) left tools and debris behind some 250–400,000 years ago. For comparison, the well-known Palaeolithic sites at Waverley Wood, Warwickshire, and Boxgrove Quarry, Sussex, have artefacts from about 500,000 years ago, and Boxgrove has yielded bones of H. heidelbergensis.
History
Shirehampton was originally a detached part of the parish of Westbury-on-Trym, separated from the main part of Westbury by a part of Henbury parish, which included Kingsweston, the great house, King's Weston House whose inhabitants have had a considerable impact on Shirehampton as employers and benefactors. The area is on record as part of the estate of "Stoke", which was granted by King Offa of Mercia to the bishop of Worcester in about 795, along with the district that is now called Stoke Bishop, and there are two later Anglo-Saxon documents about the same pieces of land.
The place was originally called simply Hampton, meaning "large farming estate" or "farm enclosed on several sides", and later became known as "sharny Hampton", meaning "dungy Hampton". The name was "cleaned up" by the Elizabethans to its current form.
The village grew up around the lowest safe river crossing on the river Avon before it empties into the Severn. The ferry between the villages of Pill, Somerset, and Shirehampton, originally in Gloucestershire, connects a ridgeway along Kingsweston Hill (sometimes now called Abbot's Way) with the hills beyond the Avon and continues on towards Clevedon. The ferry ran until 1974, when it was superseded by the M5 bridge.
A priory of the Benedictine abbey of St Mary, Cormeilles, in Normandy, is sometimes said to have been established at Shirehampton in the early Middle Ages, and the converted fifteenth-century tithe barn in the High Street is believed to have belonged to the monastic estate. However, the place referred to in Domesday Book is certain to have been Kyre in Worcestershire, and there is no real connection between Shirehampton and Cormeilles apart from the building stones exchanged by the two communities in 1963 on the strength of the supposed historical connection.
The development of Shirehampton throughout the eighteenth century is closely associated with the history of the adjacent King's Weston House and its extensive estate. Much of the surrounding area was in the ownership of the Southwell family, owners of King's Weston and later to receive the title of Baron de Clifford. Shirehampton prospered through tourism as sightseers from Bath, Clifton and Bristol's Hotwells came to view Kings Weston and the famous views from Penpole Point.