Bristol Municipal Charities (1884 to 1938)
Reading the front of the building
Quay Head House was built to impress. Its brick, terracotta and crests tell you exactly who paid for it and why.
Stand on the Centre and look up at Quay Head House and you are looking at an advert for Victorian philanthropy.
It was designed in 1884 by Foster and Wood, one of the busiest architectural practices in Victorian Bristol, as the offices of the trustees of Bristol Municipal Charities. The trustees managed money left by generations of wealthy Bristolians to run almshouses and other help for the city’s poor. The building needed to look solid, civic and trustworthy, and a little bit fashionable.
Historic England’s listing describes it as Queen Anne style with Dutch Renaissance influence: red brick, dressed with limestone and terracotta, under a slate roof with brick chimney stacks at the gable ends. It is two storeys high with an attic and a basement, and five windows wide.
The crests
Set into the front are the crests of merchants and benefactors whose money funded the charities. One of them belongs to Edward Colston, the seventeenth century merchant whose fortune was bound up with the transatlantic slave trade, and whose statue stood across the road from 1895 until it was pulled down in June 2020. The crests are part of the listed facade, and part of the building’s history whether we are comfortable with it or not.
We do not yet have a full record of which crest belongs to whom. If you are a heraldry enthusiast, or you have ever photographed the frontage up close, we would love your help identifying every one of them.
Send us your photos of the facade.
Sources: Historic England, list entry 1372267; Bristol Culture, Cloak and Dinner, 2010; Bristol Archives, Bristol Municipal Charities records (ref. BMC)