November 24th, 1940, was the deadliest night of the Bristol Blitz. In the course of a six-hour assault by the Luftwaffe, the city was bombarded by approximately 12,000 incendiary bombs and 160 tons of explosives. The urban landscape was irrevocably changed that night. In the wake of the destruction, the remains of the historic heart of the city emerged in the forms of heaps of rubble and husks of burnt-out buildings. One of the few architectural survivors of the night was the tower of St Mary-le-Port, a medieval parish church at the centre of Bristol’s Old City. This project, ‘The Spectacle of Decay: Ruin, Representation and Renewal at St Mary-le-Port, 1940-2025,’ interrogates the ruin as a category of urban space and its status within contemporary society. It takes the lone tower of St Mary-le-Port, a site of such ‘ruination,’ as its case study.

In the post-war period, the site of St Mary-le-Port was the focus of the city’s controversial redevelopment strategy, which, in 1979, was dubbed ‘an architectural disaster much longer drawn out than the Blitz but, in its effects, quite as severe.’¹ From the 1960s onwards, a series of modernist buildings, including Bank of England House, Norwich Union House and Bank House, gradually encircled the medieval fragment. The recent history of the site has been fraught. These modern structures are now, themselves, in a state of dereliction and are set to be demolished as part of a sweeping redevelopment scheme of the city centre. Less than a century after the devastation of the Blitz, St Mary-le-Port will, yet again, bear witness to its own destructive transformation.

St Mary-le-Port is a prototypical urban palimpsest, shaped by centuries of recurring cycles of destruction and creation. Originally, this term referred to parchment or vellum, which bore the traces of successive reuse. As Andreas Huyssen asserts, it can be used as a conceptual frame for ‘configurations of urban spaces and their unfolding in time.’² The rich materiality of St Mary-le-Port exemplifies these processes of stratification. It has experienced life as a bustling medieval thoroughfare, a victim of wartime devastation, the subject of post-war optimism, and a site of contemporary urban decay. It is constituted of overlapping images and ideas of the past, the present, and the future of the city. The unique assemblage of ruin typologies present at St Mary-le-Port typifies the spatial, material, and temporal complexities of the ruin as a category of urban space. This project engages with the many modes of ‘ruination.’ This includes the ruin as an object, a process, and an image.

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the site has been taken as a tabula rasa, or blank canvas. Its immanent ‘promise’ has spawned a series of conflicting visions of what the site is, was, and will be. As Brian Dillon states, ruins are akin to a ‘desolate playground’ in which ‘we have space and time to imagine a future.’³ Thus, we witness the emergence of multiple visions of a utopian future, whether realised or unrealised, at such sites. In 1960, a group of young architects (Bristol Architects Forum) produced a short film entitled ‘Dead Centre.’ In less than 9 minutes, the film reimagined the city centre as an idealised modern city, through the segregation of vehicles and pedestrians with super-highways and elevated decks. It was a wholly new spatial and social order, truly of the twentieth century. Although never realised, this alternative vision of the site lives on through film.

Increasingly, immaterial representations of sites of ruination are experienced and emphasised over their material realities. These representations of decay and destruction range from the patriotic romanticism of John Piper’s war paintings, the bleak realism of post-war photography, to the transgressive documentation of contemporary exploration. In analysing such images, the project sought to identify the dominant (and not-so-dominant) narratives which emerge. In particular, the ‘ruin’ is especially subject to aestheticisation, fetishisation, and politicisation. We see the site as a picturesque icon of war, the photographic subject of atmospheric decay, and as an effective subcultural playground. The ruins, and their depiction, are far from objective. Inherently, the representation of architecture is fragmentary, partial, and incomplete. There is a danger that such selective visions of the past and the present neutralise the critical potential of the ruin.

The concept of the ruin can be wielded to both uphold and critique institutional norms, such as progress, use or value. What we choose to represent, and how, shapes what is then valued and preserved. Hence, the impending demolition of the modern bank buildings. What makes certain categories of ruined urban space acceptable, and others undesirable? As Gastón Gordillo puts it, the great secret of the heritage industry is that its spectacular ruins are ‘rubble that has been fetishised.’⁴ The abstraction of the church tower, as a ruin, is a deeply political act. Such ruins are far from neutral. These spaces are active participants in the making, unmaking and remaking of the city’s history and materiality. The overarching aim of this research was a demonstration of the fact that, contrary to prevailing narratives, St Mary-le-Port is far from ‘vacant’ or ‘derelict.’ It is constituted of rich layers of meaning, whether manifested materially, representationally, or discursively. As Henri Lefebvre states, ‘the most important thing is to multiply the readings of the city.’⁵ This project emphasises multiplication in the face of impending demolition.