Qualla: Bristol Temple Meads

Bristol Temple Meads: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 14 November 1909, the suffragette Theresa Garnett pushed through the crowd at Temple Meads with a riding whip in her hand and a sentence in her mind. The MP was on the platform. The man who had spoken so dismissively of women's suffrage was within arm's reach. She struck Winston Churchill across the face, opened a cut on his cheek, and shouted what she had come to shout before the police pulled her away. She got a month in jail. The station got a footnote in Churchill's biography, and went on doing what it had been doing since 1840: moving people through one of the most architecturally important railway buildings in the world.

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Image: Ben Brooksbank | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bristol Temple Meads: Brunel's First Station

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Immanuel Giel, Public domain. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was twenty-seven when he was hired to engineer the Great Western Railway, and the western terminus he sketched for Bristol was the first complete passenger station he ever designed. It opened on 31 August 1840, perched on a viaduct above the marshy water m...

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Image: Immanuel Giel | Public domain

Bristol Temple Meads: The Battle of the Gauges

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0. For decades Temple Meads was the front line in a peculiarly British war: the battle of the gauges. Brunel had chosen seven feet for his broad gauge, convinced that wider tracks meant faster, smoother trains. The rest of Britain settled on four feet eight and a half inches. When t...

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Image: NotFromUtrecht | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bristol Temple Meads: Fox's Curve

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Woahnowbetty, Public domain. By the 1870s Brunel's terminus was choking on its own success. The Bristol and Exeter Railway had been reversing trains in and out of the cramped station for thirty years, and something had to give. The engineer Francis Fox designed an extension with a sweeping curved train shed,...

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Image: Woahnowbetty | Public domain

Bristol Temple Meads: Thirteen Platforms, Eight Tracks

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anders Sandberg from Oxford, UK, CC BY 2.0. Modern Temple Meads is a flexible puzzle of 13 numbered platforms serving eight tracks, with platforms 2 and 14 mysteriously omitted from the numbering. Platforms 3 through 12 share five tracks, divided into northern and southern halves so that any train can use any platform from...

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Image: Anders Sandberg from Oxford, UK | CC BY 2.0