The SS Great Britain site in Bristol is being rebranded as Bristol Dockyards to attract a cooler and more inclusive image. The historical names associated with the ship and its designer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, will no longer be used.
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One of the UK’s maritime landmarks is being renamed as part of a drive to make it “cooler” and more inclusive.
For a decade, the dockland site in Bristol that houses the ocean liner SS Great Britain, which was designed by the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, has been promoted as Brunel’s SS Great Britain.
A sculpture of Isambard Kingdom Brunel inside the museum at the SS Great Britain last year. Photograph: NJphoto/Alamy
But the names of both ship and engineer are being ditched and the site is to be renamed as Bristol Dockyards.
The site will also focus more closely on the role the vessel played in the British empire and seek to prompt conversations about topics such as migration.
Andrew Edwards, the chief executive of the SS Great Britain Trust, accepted that some would describe the moves as “woke”. He said: “Change is never easy. You’ll always get those that are resistant, but when we were shaping the vision, I tried to take stock of where the city was and what the city was all about.”
Edwards said Bristol was often named the UK’s coolest city and he was determined the site should be “cool” too.
“We’ve consciously tried to avoid falling into those stereotypical ideas of what a maritime museum should look like and tried to present something that feels a little bit more rooted in Bristol,” he said.
The site is being renamed to create a cooler and more inclusive image.
The new name for the site is Bristol Dockyards.
The SS Great Britain was designed by the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The site has been promoted as Brunel's SS Great Britain for a decade.
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The quayside at Brunel’s SS Great Britain last year. Photograph: UKman/Alamy
Renaming spaces in Bristol can be a delicate matter.
There was criticism from some quarters when it was announced that the city’s largest concert hall was getting rid of the “toxic” name of the slave trader Edward Colston. It was renamed Bristol Beaconin the same year that a statue of Colston was thrown into the harbour.
The statue of Edward Colston being pushed into the River Avon in June 2020. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
Edwards said people sometimes thought that the “SS” in the ship’s name referred to “slave ship”. In fact, he said, it is short for “steamship” and the vessel was built after the British abolition of the slave trade.
The new name was announced before the July opening of its expanded and revamped museum, which will focus not so much on an engineering triumph – SS Great Britain is often called the world’s first great ocean liner – but on telling the stories of the people in Bristol and across the world that the vessel helped shape.
It will include research by community groups that delves into the previously untold, personal histories of the ship’s passengers and SS Great Britain’s impact on Australia, India, the Caribbean and the US.
Edwards said: “We live in a very diverse world and we live in a very diverse city in Bristol. I believe the role of organisations like us is to represent that diversity as best we can and to be able to provide a little bit of something that appeals to everybody, whoever they are and wherever they’ve come from. Heritage really only works, in my view, when it has ownership within the community within which it sits.”
Highlights include:
Details of the people from south-west England who built the ship in Bristol, such as the Johnson family – five brothers who travelled from the Wye Valley, on the English-Welsh border, with their father to work as shipwrights.
The impact of the ship on Indigenous Australians as SS Great Britain made 32 round trips between the UK and Melbourne.
Details of voyages made by the ship as part of Britain’s role in global and imperial conflicts, including carrying British soldiers to Mumbai at the time of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
The stories of people such as George Moses, a ship’s cook from Jamaica, and the Barbadian musician and poet James W Jones, who travelled on the ship from Melbourne to Liverpool via Sydney.
Edwards said: “As a world, we’re dealing with lots of big issues. We are also about people movement. We’re about how the oceans connect us all. It strikes me that one of the joys of running this sort of organisation is that we can provide a place where you can have those conversations.”
The renaming and museum reopening is the first phase of a broader transformation to turn the historical site, which includes two dockyards, into a “cultural campus” tackling issues around heritage, sustainability and diversity ahead of the 60th anniversary of the ship’s return to Bristol in 2030.
Edwards said the site would still be described as “home to the SS Great Britain”, so the name of the ship was not being wholly expunged.