Bristol Car Parks
Bristol's brutalist car parks
Celebrating a time in the post-war era when concrete temples to automotive freedom rose across Britain's cities. These photos try to capture the raw beauty of Bristol's multi-storey car parks against blue skies, as symbols of post-war optimism and the promise of the open road.
Architecture Details
Construction Period: 1950s onwards
Architectural Style: Brutalist and Modernist
Location: Bristol, South West England
Designers: Various architects
Significance: First multi-storey car parks celebrating motor car culture
Why Bristol's brutalist car parks matter
Buildings are most in danger of demolition a generation after they were built. Some deserve to be. They are unimaginatively designed or poorly built. But too often the default is to knock everything down without appreciating that some should be kept.
But why photograph these brutalist car parks in Bristol? Why maintain these concrete temples to the motor car - structures that disrupted cities and contributed to pollution?
Well, it’s a reminder that once cars were the future. The motor car promised independence, flexibility, and the romance of the open road. This was a time of optimism and possibility.
Until everyone got one and the roads became congested and the air polluted. Cities were cut apart and reconstructed to accommodate underpasses, bypasses and overpasses - fundamentally altering urban landscapes.
A paean to Bristol's multi-storey car parks
This photographic series is a paean to a time when Bristol’s multi-story car parks emerged alongside rising living standards. When car ownership gave the masses freedom to go where they wanted. A time of optimism and possibilities.
The historic Rupert Street Car Park: Bristol's first multi-storey
This project was prompted by a recent application to replace the iconic Rupert St Car Park in Bristol with a 21 storey accommodation block. This isn’t any old car park thrown up in the 60s. It holds the distinction of being Bristol's first multi-storey car park and the first in the UK to feature a continuous half-mile spiral parking ramp.
More than car storage
These brutalist Bristol car parks demonstrate how parking your car extended beyond functionality into architectural expression. Their concrete forms and scale serve as historical documents - concrete testimonies to when Britain embraced the motor car as the key to modernisation and mobility.
All photographs feature car parks located in Bristol, South West England, documenting the city's brutalist architectural heritage and its relationship with celebrating the motor car era.
