Qualla: M Shed

M Shed: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 7 June 2020, a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters tied a rope to the bronze ankles of Edward Colston, slave trader, philanthropist, and unwilling figurehead of every argument Bristol had been having with itself for two centuries. They pulled. The statue came off its plinth. They rolled it through the city centre and dropped it into the Floating Harbour. A year later, defaced and rusted, the statue was on display inside M Shed, a dockside museum just along the same harbour, with paint still on its face and the ropes still attached to its body. The museum called it a city-wide conversation. Most visitors, looking at the bronze body laid out like an exhibit of itself, just looked.

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Image: Tiia Monto | CC BY-SA 3.0

M Shed: Shed M

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony O'Neil, CC BY-SA 2.0. Bristol's port labelled its transit sheds with letters of the alphabet. There were sheds A through M and beyond, long open warehouses where cargo was moved between ships and the quayside. Shed M sat on Prince's Wharf on the south side of the Floating Harbour. When the Bristol Ind...

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Image: Anthony O'Neil | CC BY-SA 2.0

M Shed: Bristol Places, People, and Life

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. The exhibits are organised into three permanent galleries. Bristol Places explains how the city was built. Bristol People tells stories of the humans who built it. Bristol Life shows what they did once it was built. There are roughly 3,000 objects on display. Models of Wallace an...

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0

M Shed: The Bristol Bus Boycott and the Colston Statue

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pam Goodey, CC BY-SA 2.0. The museum does not avoid the difficult bits. A display covers the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott, when West Indian workers, led by Paul Stephenson and the West Indian Development Council, refused to use the buses after the Bristol Omnibus Company refused to hire Black or Asian drivers...

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Image: Pam Goodey | CC BY-SA 2.0

M Shed: The Working Quayside

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0. Outside the museum, four electric cargo cranes built in 1951 by Bath-based Stothert & Pitt still line the quay. Three are operational; volunteers run them on selected weekends. A few hundred metres west on Wapping Wharf stands a much rarer machine: the only surviving working Fair...

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Image: Tiia Monto | CC BY-SA 3.0