The following work has been undertaken since 7 April 2025:
Items added to the BRS collection: primary sources and guides
An event guide marking a major development of the port.
Part of an attempt to promote Bristol to North American visitors. Incorporates a recently revised edition of the popular guide How to See Bristol.
Bristol Public Libraries, Early Bristol Newspapers…in the Bristol Reference Library (Bristol, 1956)
A catalogue of Bristol newspapers up to 1800.
Bristol Social Services Committee, Facts of Bristol’s Social Life 1914 (Bristol, 1914)
Produced at the start of the ‘Great War’, this provides a digest of key facts about the city’s population and the services available to them.
A publication of one of the earliest Bristol groups created to protect Bristol’s material heritage.
An academic study of housing development in Bristol in the interwar period. Book for digitisation donated by Professor Peter Malpass.
Leech, Joseph, Brief Romances from Bristol History (Bristol, 1884)
A collection of short historical romances written by an influential Bristol journalist and writer.
A description of Georgian Bristol, accompanied by the author’s sketches, written by the author and inventor George William Manby.
One of the museum’s early catalogues.
St Mary Redcliffe, In Chancery. Attorney General v. Brickdale: copy of scheme (Bristol, 1845)
A short primary source detailing an unsuccessful scheme to establish a new primary school for the poor in Redcliffe.
Stratford, Joseph, Handel Cossham, M.P.: brief outlines of a full life (Bath, 1890)
A contemporary biography completed just before Cossham’s death.
Items added to the BRS collection: secondary works
Bettey, J. H. (ed.), Studies on the History of Whitchurch (University of Bristol, 1976)
A collection of short studies on a little-researched community.
A Festschrift of academic papers honouring the former City Archivist, Elizabeth Ralph. Reproduced with the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society.
A Festschrift dedicated to the former archivist and chair of the Bristol and Glouc. Archaeological Society. Reproduced with BGAS.
A commemorative volume marking the first 50 years of this nonconformist chapel.
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, The Red Lodge (Bristol, 1986)
A short history of the Red Lodge Museum.
Cottle, Basil and Sherborne, J. W., The Life of a University (University of Bristol, 1951)
A commemorative volume marking 75 years since the establishment of University College Bristol.
A commemorative volume marking 100 years since the establishment of one of Bristol’s earliest Congregationalist chapels.
Short pieces relating to east Bristol, written by a prominent local historian.
Shaw, Mabel G., Redland High School (Bristol, 1932)
A commemorative history of the former girls’ school.
Till, Roger, Wills of Bristol (W. D. & H. O. Wills, Bristol, 1950)
A history of the tobacco company, primarily focusing on the period 1786-1801.
A collection of documents and studies relating to the church, monastery and parish.
Wilkins, H. J., Redland Chapel and Redland (Bristol, 1924)
A history of the chapel and community, written by an influential Bristol antiquarian.
Stories
Dr Kathleen Thompson, Looking for the Lost Lepers of Lawrence Hill (26 May 2025)
Dr Thompson reveals how her research in Bristol Archives led to the relocation of the medieval leper hospital.
Wikipedia / Wikimedia
About 30 high-resolution images were added to Wikimedia of Bristol subjects of historical interest.
Wikipedia pages were created for James Millerd (mapmaker), Thomas Ashurst (sixteenth-century merchant/explorer), David Thomas (minister) (Highbury Chapel), the Custom House, Bristol, and the United Methodist Church, Berkeley Road, Bristol. About 50 existing Wikipedia pages were edited – some substantially. Many of the edits involved the addition of citations / links to items in the BRS Collection, or the addition of relevant images that we have added to Wikimedia.
Usage of BRS digital resources
From February 2025 to June 2025 the Bristol Record Society Collection on the Internet Archive received around 2,100 views / downloads per month. This is about 200 higher than the previous period. It was especially pleasing to see this increase given that many content sites (e.g. Wikipedia and BBC News) have seen a decline in traffic of about 10-15 per cent over the past year. This is a result of the great rise in the use of AI searches, which leads to fewer people visiting the content sites that feed the AI search engines. In this context it may be noted that in June 2024 the BRS Collection was visited by 1,048 bots, many of which will be harvesting data for AI providers.
The BRS website received 599 views in the last 30 days from 238 individual visitors. The monthly viewing figures have fallen over the last year or so. It is here that we may be seeing the impact of AI, as internet searchers skip the BRS website and go straight to the content. From our perspective this is not a problem. The geographical distribution of our viewers is roughly the same – about a third regional, a third from the rest of the UK and a third from abroad (esp. N. America, Australia and western Europe).
Bristol Record Society 