55 Years of Change – Bristol Cumberland Basin

I was sorting through my Lightroom Catalogue and came across these images from a club night last season. We had to show a pair of images taken at the same location spaced apart by as much time as possible. Mine were of the view off the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, looking towards the Cumberland Basin and the Rver Avon. The bottom image was taken in 1969 and the top one in 2024 specifically for this exercise. The 1979 image is a stitched panorama made from a scan of the two original negatives, scanned on an Epson Perfection V600.

The 1969 images were taken with a Prinzflex 500 35mm SLR film camera  produced in the Soviet Union, which I bought from Dixons. The recent image was taken with a Sony A6700 using a Sony Vario-Tessar T* E 16-70mm F4 ZA OSS zoom lens set to 35mm to give an approximately equivalent focal length to the 50mm lens that came with the Prinzflex. This would give an equivalent field of view and image compression which seems to have worked out comparing the two images.

Remarkably, the differences between 1969 and 2018 are not that great. There is more vegetation now, particularly noticeable round the road system at Cumberland Basin which was quite new in 1969. The landing stage at Hotwells was in good condition in 1969. Zooming in you can see the difference in the cars. Otherwise it’s quite hard to see the passage of 55 years.