Bristol Glass Blowing

As far as records show, the first named glass blower to set up business in Bristol in 1651 was ‘an Ingenious Glass-maker, Master Edward Dagney, an Italian then living in Bristow’. He was probably one of the Dagnia family, brought to England by Sir Robert Mansell, who in the first half of the seventeenth century, held the monopoly in glassmaking. There are fleeting references to glassworkers in the city in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and there are glaziers recorded in the sixteenth century apprentice books. In 1696 John Houghton recorded that ‘In and about Bristol’ there were five glass houses making bottles, one making bottles and window glass, and three making flint (i.e. lead) glass and ordinary (soda lime) glass. This was the largest concentration of glasshouses in the country, outside of London.

Undoubtedly, the local availability of coal for firing the furnaces, raw materials such as sand, limestone and red lead, and the availability of kelp used as a flux for melting, which was imported for the soap industry, together with clay for making pots for furnaces which could be shipped down from Stourbridge were all factors which encouraged the development of the industry. A further important factor was the importation of sugar into Bristol, which led to a growth in liquor distilling. This with the established wine and cider trade in the city provided markets for the glass bottle manufacturers, which by the middle of the eighteenth century were making about three quarters of a million bottles a year.

More glass houses opened in the city in the early eighteenth century, and the distinctive brick glass cone soon became a feature of the skyline, until it was said that Bristol contained as many glasshouses as Churches.

One of the glass houses set up just outside the city in Bedminster, (then a separate town in Somerset) was known to exist as early as 1716, when Daniel Taylor, senior, took a long lease on premises ‘in St. Catherines’. Glass-makers are recording as voting in polls between 1722 and 1754. Daniel Taylor and his sons Samuel and Benjamin, made window glass and probably bottles. By 1830 Daniel Wilmot is recorded as the owner of the glasshouse, but it ceased production soon after that date. Its site is approximately either beneath the floor of Bristol Blue Glass South West’s present workshop, or under the Bedminster car-park behind the building.