Eugene Byrne 13^th May 2026

Eugene’s lecture began with a dramatic moment in the 1980s. Bristol’s own BIG BANG when Bristol Tobacco Bond Warehouses at Canon’s Marsh were blown up in May 1988. Many in the audience had witnessed the event and some had been covered in the dust that floated across the harbour. Many of the events in Eugene’s lecture were truly memorable to our audience. Eugene spanned a decade of divisions, the first half more dominated by anger, unemployment and industrial unrest. The second half seen as the period of ‘loads of money’ for some, the phenomena of the YUPPY and rising property prices. The whole decade overseen by a single prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the city’s rich history literally illustrated by the vast archive of photographs owned by the Evening Post.
The lecture covered the well-known St Paul’s ‘riots’ of April 1980 and less remembered events in St Paul’s in 1986. The Greenwich women protestors and the resurgence of CND also featured. Avon and Somerset’s police force’s contribution to policing the miner’s strike which cost £3 million was a surprise to some of our audience. Local politics also changed despite the city’s radical history the council lost most of its Labour MPs, including Tony Benn, in 1983 and the council was no longer Labour. Eugene also presented a revisionist view of Bristol showing how its biggest turnout at an open air musical event was not the appearance of the Rolling Stones in 1982 but the Mission England Christian Rally fronted by Billy Graham and Cliff Richard in 1984.
The economy of the city also went through some radical changes. 24,000 jobs in manufacturing were lost and the Council sold off a third of its council houses by 1983. The new Industrial Museum was literally rescuing machinery from factories before the employees had been issued their redundancy pay. However, a new economy was also expanding with an expansion in white collar finance jobs and the expansion of the computer sector. The dock area was redeveloped and the city was seen as linked to the creative arts. The Arnolfini was already established but was now joined by the Watershed. Aardman flourished and the BBC’s Natural History Unit continued to be a world leader in programme making.
That BOOM that opened the lecture was illustrated again by the property explosion. Queues on Buchanan’s Wharf to buy developed warehouses now turned into flats included buyers who sold them on without ever living in them. This was decade when pubs still closed in the early afternoon and stopped serving much earlier. Bristol’s Centre was dominated by taxi ranks full of ‘lager louts’ but there was another type of Bristol night life. At the Avon Gorge hotel a group of privileged Bristol University students, part of the ‘Wills at One set’, gathered to conspicuously consume and in one case the ‘Muff Club’ trashed a local restaurant. But another image of Bristol was also emerging. As early as 1985 the Arnolfini was featuring Street Art in its gallery and there were established local artists.
The final section of the lecture featured how Bristol had changed since the 1980s and how developments foreshadowed the changes that would come with the IT Revolution. The extraordinary story of BT’s experiment with ‘Talkabout’ a Bristol BT chatline that foreshadowed more recent social media was a fascinating piece of social history. Bristolians, mostly young, ran up massive phone bills addicted to these chat groups sometimes on their family or work phone lines and BT decided not roll out this Talkabout experiment across the rest of the UK.
The lecture which had begun with a BIG BANG ended with the other demolition in 1988 of Fairfax House the Co-op department store which had been built in 1962. The lecture ended not so much with our usual questions from the audience but with people sharing thoughts and memories of Bristol in the 1980s and what it tells us about where Bristol is now. It was a brilliant contribution to Local History month and far from being a nostalgia fest it was very thought provoking.