[6] Samuel Pepys, his wife and servants came to the Horse Shoe Inn on Wine Street for a day in 1668, and described Bristol as 'in every way another London', though he noted that there were 'no carts, it generally stands on vaults, only dog-carts'.

[12] By the 1820s, it seems the drapers of Wine Street were becoming complacent: William Ablett came from London to manage a shop here and wrote that 'trade was conducted in a droning sort of way', and shocked the local traders by his new-fangled ideas about window-dressing several times a week with lavish displays of shawls and bolts of fabric.

Thomas Jones, whose department store started in Wine Street in 1843, was considered outrageous for selling not just drapery, but anything that would make a profit.

In 1915 the globes and lanterns of its street lamps were painted blue to dim their light as an air raid precaution; in the event Bristol suffered no aerial attacks during the First World War.

[20] Plans for the area to the south of Wine Street to become a new Civic Centre, including a city museum and art gallery, were eroded by the leasing of the Bank of England and the Norwich Union sites and then dropped on the grounds of cost.

[24] Andrew Foyle, in his Pevsner Architectural Guide to Bristol, describes Wine Street as 'perhaps the saddest post-Blitz transformation'.

He is scornful of the Bank of England building on the south side, 'merely occupying the land, with bleak fenestration and a puny entrance', its 'weak' extension 'weakly set back over a parking access ramp'.

[26] The redevelopment of this area 'offer[s] perhaps the greatest potential of any site in the city to demonstrate the ambition of Bristol and to realise a connected and coherent historic core'.