If you live or work in Bristol, it’s impossible to escape the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s shadow – but that won’t stop some people from trying. The heritage site which looks after his early masterpiece, the steamship SS Great Britain, is to change its name from the splendid and (you would have thought) uncontroversial ‘Brunel’s SS Great Britain’ to the rather more dreary ‘Bristol Dockyards’.
This is a move that smacks of managerial timidity, scrubbing the name of a great individual and his achievement in favour of something numbingly bland and sterile
Brunel is Bristol’s most famous and celebrated son. When the BBC ran a national poll to find the public’s greatest Britons in 2002, Brunel came in second place behind Winston Churchill, seeing off competition from the likes of William Shakespeare, Elizabeth I and Isaac Newton. It was an honour well deserved.
Towering over the Avon Gorge to the west of the city is his mighty suspension bridge, over which another Bristol-based engineering marvel of the twentieth century, Concorde, famously made her final flight in 2003. Resting in clear sight of that bridge, permanently dry-docked in Bristol’s harbour, lies the SS Great Britain, one of Brunel’s earlier marvels.
