Ask anyone to picture Bristol and the Floating Harbour turns up first: painted houses stacked above the water, a yellow ferry crossing, cranes standing over the old docks. It’s the most photographed view in the city. That’s exactly why it’s worth taking apart.
The famous view, repainted
The trouble with a famous view is that everyone already has it. So in Harbourside Houses we kept only what makes it work as an image — the rhythm of the terraces, the ferry’s wedge of colour, the dark line of the water — and let the rest go. Reduced to blocks, the row of houses stops being a row of houses and becomes a piece of pure colour design that happens to be Bristol.
Four colours, roughly
Across the harbour pieces the palette keeps returning to four notes. The teal of the water and the painted ironwork. The ochre and pink of the houses and the brick. The slate grey of the sheds and cranes. And the white of masts, gulls and the gaps that let the whole thing breathe. Harbour Life — a red narrowboat under a dockside crane — is really a study in how those few colours sit against one another.
The working harbour
What keeps the harbour from being twee is that it still works. Liveaboards and lifting cranes share the same stretch of water; a visiting motor yacht moors next to a barge that’s been there for years. Plimsoll Bridge, caught mid-lift with the spire of St Mary Redcliffe beyond, is a piece about machinery — a moment most drivers only ever experience as a wait.
Where to start
If you’re new to the collection, the harbour pieces are the easy way in. The Grain Barge is the largest and most painterly; Harbourside Houses is the one everyone recognises; Marina Yacht has a drier sense of humour about the harbour’s newer arrivals. All are limited editions, matt, and printed here in Bristol.
The view you’ve walked past a hundred times, finally holding still.