Style
Bristol Byzantine has influences from Byzantine and Moorish architecture applied mainly to industrial buildings such as warehouses and factories.
The style is characterised by a robust and simple outline, materials with character and colour including red, yellow black and white brick primarily from the Cattybrook Brickpit.
Several buildings included archways and upper floors unified through either horizontal or vertical grouping of window openings.
The first building with some of the characteristics generally thought of a Bristol Byzantine is Bush House, which is now known as the Arnolfini a 19th century Grade II* listed tea warehouse situated on the side of the Floating Harbour in Bristol city centre. The architect was Richard Shackleton Pope, who constructed first the south part of the warehouse (1831) then extended it to the north in 1835-6. It has a rock-faced plinth, three storeys of rectangular windows recessed within tall round arches, and a shallow attic.
The style may have come about as a result of the an acquaintance between William Venn Gough and Archibald Ponton, who designed the Granary and John Addington Symonds the Bristol-born historian of the Italian renaissance. The term Bristol Byzantine is thought to have been invented by Sir John Summerson.
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