Story of Watershed in Bristol

Watershed is a culture centre focusing on screen media, i.e. film and digital media. We're housed in two old dockside sheds in Bristol’s old docks. The docks used to be very busy throughout the 17th, 18th and the 19th century, but we're about 8 miles from the mouth of the river so by the middle of the 20th century it just wasn't practical and the docks moved to the mouth of the river. The entire area around the docks became completely derelict. When these two sheds were going to be knocked down in the late 1970s, a campaign group got together to retain the dockside landscape. As a result these sheds were preserved and a deal was done that the ground floor of the buildings would be used for cafes and bars and the first floor would be for public cultural use. A group of young people, mad film lovers, got the money together to set up a new cultural film centre in this space. Watershed opened in 1982 with lots of energy and enthusiasm and almost no money at all. In fact the centre borrowed the money to get itself of the ground. One thing that made it work was its location. It's right in the centre of the city, and though there was dereliction all round it, the space was very unique and very central. Because nobody had really cared for it, there was a lot of freedom to do things. It became an alternative activist centre, engaging with film but also very heavily with contemporary media and through that with creativity and opinions and with politics. It became a space for ideas and that's what we really stuck to – whether the medium is film or digital media, for us it's all about ideas, and how we exchange those ideas; it is about a culture of ideas. Bristol's got quite a strong media production cluster. The BBC have a production base here and in the 1970s and the 1980s they also had their animation division in Bristol, so many strong animation companies based themselves here, like Aardman Animations, who created Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run. So around us we didn’t have just lively audiences, there was also quite a strong production and professional base and we became a hub for people to come together.

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Story of Watershed in Bristol

Dick Penny, MBE

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