The Clayton is one of Bristol’s newest luxury four star boutique hotels situated on Broad Street in the heart of the old city. It is close to the harbourside, theatres and shops.

I have not been inside yet but the facade makes it one of my favourite buildings in Bristol. This week for Thursday doors and Natalie’s weekend coffee share I am inviting you to join us in the heart of old Bristol.

I belong to a history walking group and on Monday mornings we often walk around a district of Bristol looking at random stuff. One of our members volunteers at M shed Bristol’s industrial museum and earlier this month he gave us a behind the scenes tour of some of the items not normally on display. One of the largest items is an old letterpress printing press complete with trays of lead type letters. I am old enough to remember seeing the local paper the Bristol Evening Post being printed in the old-fashioned way and the pages coming hot off the press. I also visited the Pitman Press in Bath over fifty years ago and was fascinated to see how they produced shorthand textbooks.

This Monday we met by St. Nicholas Market and were lucky enough to be invited in to one of the last remaining letterpress workshops in the city. The printers still use lead letters to print cider labels and posters.

The Edward Everard facade

Broad Street was the centre of the Bristol printing industry. Edward Everard who commissioned this building was one of the leading letterpress printers in the city. His brother-in-law George White was another remarkable man who started the Bristol Electric Tram Company and the Bristol airplane works. Everard printed the timetables and sales brochures for him. The old offices of the Bristol Mercury newspaper were also in Broad Street.

The Everard facade finished in 1901 shows Everard’s admiration for the Arts and Craft movement led by William Samuel Morris and also Guttenberg who invented the printing press. The facade includes pictures of the two men together with examples of the fonts they used. The letters of Edward Everard’s name use his favourite font. The facade is an important example of art nouveau glazed tiling. It features a double archway on the ground floor, two arches on the second floor and four on the upper floor.

The rest of the building was demolished in the seventies but luckily the facade was saved and I am pleased to say the Clayton Hotel chain have done a very good job of preserving its character.

The hotel backs on to Tower Lane and brass plates with a number of phrases that were associated with printing have been set into the pavement behind the hotel. See how many you recognise: “upper and lower case” “stereotype” Mind your P’s and Q’s” “a dab hand” “make a good impression” “hot off the press” “come a cropper”. Our group got five out of seven.

We stopped for coffee in the New Room, the first Methodist chapel in the world but that is a different post. For today I am inviting you to share a bench in the sun. The text below the seat reads “sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello.” I always love it when visitors stop to leave a comment.