The story of ‘the other Clifton and Ashton’ and their remarkable links to Bristol – Bristol Post

It is perhaps Bristols most famous area, with its zoo, bridge, brightly coloured houses and Georgian grandeur.

From the top of the hill next to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the stunning view of the south west corner of Bristol takes in the river and the Cumberland Basin first, and just a mile or so away on the other side of the river is the south Bristol suburb of Ashton.

There are at least 20 other places in England called Clifton, but none more famous than the one at the top of the hill above Ashton.

And there are at least 50 other places around the world called Clifton - including 27 in the USA alone.

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You can find Cliftons in most of the English-speaking world - from Canada to New Zealand and Australia to South Africa. The Clifton area of Karachi in Pakistan is one of the poshest in the city - the bit on the coast where all the rich people live.

There are 14 places called Ashton in the United States - although the combined total population of them all is not greater than the number of people who live in Ashton in Bristol.

But there is another place where Clifton and Ashton are a mile and a half apart - and thats not in Bristol.

Its a place with huge, fascinating, disturbing and historic links to Bristol that still resonate to this day.

So, while were stuck indoors and need a bit of escapism, lets virtually go to the other Clifton and Ashton, and find an amazing place with long-standing links to Bristol, 4,210 miles away.

The tiny Union Island in the Caribbean is known as the Tahiti of the West Indies, because the shape of its volcanic mountain, rising out of the sea, is reminiscent of the famous South Pacific island.

Union Island is just three miles across and a mile up and down and, with the great big mountain in the middle, its population of around 3,000 live mainly in two little towns.

By the sea, the beach and the harbour is Clifton, the principal town of the island.

And a mile and half over the foothills to the west, around the coast a little way, is Ashton.

Do they play football in Ashton, and eat in expensive restaurants in Clifton?

Well, yes and no.

While Bristols Clifton has the Ivy and many other places of fine cuisine, there probably isnt anything quite as nice or relaxing as the Barracuda Restaurant, overlooking Clifton Harbour.

The harbour is a natural haven, with rocky outcrops encircling a sweeping curve of coast.

On a little peninsula to the east of Clifton is the little airport - with flights to bigger islands in the Caribbean being operated by a handful of the many airlines in the region.

Clifton and Ashton rely to a large part on being a beautiful stopover point for the tourists who sail about on the Caribbean on yachts.

That may be charter tours for a day, or island-hoppers who spend a few days or weeks there.

There are a few hotels, bars and restaurants, and watersports is a big thing on Union Island too.

Clifton Harbour is usually filled with kite surfers, while the other beaches around the island are popular with scuba divers.

The island is part of the St Vincent & the Grenadines nation, and its section of the island guide - written by the locals - describes a rocky island which is still largely untarnished by modern things like tarmacked roads and skyscraper hotels.

Take a ride on one of the half-dozen dollar buses for an overview of the island, it said.

Youll be surprised as to how little of the island is paved. Mountain bikers will appreciate this the most as the traffic is minimal and the terrain as varied as the road itself.

From Clifton, head up Fort Hill, the peak above the airport. The road looks impassable, but its not impossible. A few picnic tables are scattered across a shaded pasture, it added.

A cannon faces toward Carriacou and another strategically points to the entrance of the harbor. The view from the top is the best in all this island chain. On a clear day, both St. Vincent and Grenada are visible. After the breathtaking scenery, careful maneuvering down the rugged hillside feels adventurous.

Continuing over the hill, the hardtop road weaves through grazing lands with houses dotted here and there. We wouldnt recommend that any bushwhacking hikers attempt shortcuts through the scrub; the thorns in the bush are sharp as sea-urchin quills.

Past where the pavement ends by the seashore are mangroves, their propped-up root systems sticking out of the water. Large holes in the ground are home to crabs.

This is an ideal feeding area for crabs, shrimp and several species of fish that feed on leaf particles. Birders can expect to see kingfishers and herons here, with cattle egrets in the nearby fields.

South of Clifton, the road steeps over to Ashton, Union Islands second village. If you manage to get past the school cricket field without stopping to watch a game, continue on to Campbell, where the houses thin out. A reef system lies in Ashton Harbour between Union and Frigate Island. The road pushes toward the southern end of the island, no doubt with future residential development in mind, it added.

So while Ashton in Bristol is set to rapidly expand with housing developments happening, planned or mooted from the river bank to the Alderman Moore Allotment site, to Ashton Gates big Sporting Quarter expansion to the fields between Ashton Vale and the Long Ashton park and ride, the same is true for Ashton on Union Island - a new road stretching out south west along the coast is pointing to further development.

Clifton in Bristol is famous for its Whiteladies Road - a (usually) busy, bustling row of bars and pubs. The Clifton on Union Island is famous around the Caribbean for one bar in particular - Happy island.

About ten or 12 years ago, a Clifton resident called Janti Ramage started collecting all the empty conch shells that litter the shoreline.

He then decided that there were enough to stack up together, cemented with concrete, and create an artificial island, out on the rocky harbours edge.

He named it Happy Island, and its just about big enough for a bar, a kitchen and seating area.

Its patrons come by boat, of course, and are a mixture of local fishermen and workers in the tourism industry, and tourists themselves, with some enterprising local boat operators dropping off the rich Americans and telling them theyll pick them up in a couple of hours.

The reviews on TripAdvisor are overwhelmingly positive, describing Janti as the singing, smiling king of his little creation, with some tasty cuisine and his own mix of spiced rum punch, that people (on the whole) dont appear to mind paying ten dollars a glass for.

What almost everyone who goes to Happy Island remarks about is how the island is so small that you will be sitting there watching the kite surfers zip about on the water around you, and they will often take off and fly over the island - and the heads of the punters sitting at the tables.

Janti is described as a local legend - the nearby Palm Island donated some palm trees for his new kingdom, and his barbecued lobster is renowned across the area.

Perhaps the biggest party in Clifton is a relatively recent addition to the calendar - the Downs Festival, which takes place on the first weekend of September.

Ashton, meanwhile, is home to Bristols biggest cultural event - the annual Bristol Balloon Fiesta, which takes place at Ashton Court.

In the Clifton and Ashton 4,000 miles away, there are also two big events of the year - Easterval is a big thing during Holy Week in the run up to Easter, and then, in late May, theres a day long celebration which begins before dawn and lasts well into the night called the Maroon.

It involves a huge party, a carnival with drums, dancing and lots of food and marks the passing from the dry season in the first half of the year, into the rainy season - if the party doesnt happen, maybe the much-needed rains wont come.

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Like all of the islands in the Caribbean, the original settlers, the Arawak and the Caribs, were soon killed or died of disease when colonisers from western Europe arrived in the 16th century.

The island was one of many hundred in the Caribbean taken over by French and English slave traders and plantation owners, and the slopes of the big hills on Union Island were fertile for growing cotton.

Things started getting serious for Union Island in 1763 when the French handed over St Vincent & the Grenadines to the English, and the English immediately rewarded one of its own navy chiefs, Admiral Samuel Spann.

Spann gave Union Island its name, and immediately started filling the cotton plantations with enslaved people from the regions of Africa that are now Nigeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Ghana.

Spann was an influential man in Bristol, as well as on Union Island - where he literally owned not just the island but the people who lived there too.

The people brought to Union Island in chains on board Spanns Bristol-crewed boats were forced to work on the cotton plantations, and the villages they built were named Clifton and Ashton by Spann himself.

The names were given in honour of the two places on either side of the River Avon that the boats passed through on their way out of Bristol Harbour, before they sailed to West Africa.

Theres a false urban myth that the people trafficked as slaves by Bristols merchants came to Bristol in large numbers - but its not true, only a handful would ever have seen the original Clifton and Ashton, only the prison villages named by Spann that the slaves had to build themselves.

Back in Bristol, Spann became the head of the Merchant Venturers, and it was to him that Bristols MP Edmund Burke - whose statue stands in The Centre to this day - wrote one of Burkes most famous letters.

About ten years after Spann first took control of Union Island, there was a big issue in the union of two islands back home.

Ireland was part of the British Empire, just like Union Island, but there was a fierce debate about whether taxes on goods coming from Ireland should be imposed or maintained.

Bristols MP Edmund Burke, who today is most famous for the quote about the only thing that needs to happen for evil men to succeed is for good men to do nothing, was an Irishman himself, and a passionate advocate for free trade and the end to taxes on trade with Ireland.

But Bristols Merchants, led by Spann, fiercely opposed the dropping of the duties - it put them at a huge advantage and they were making a lot of money out of it.

Burke wrote two lengthy letters to the Merchants - addressed to Spann - explaining his position. It wasnt popular with Bristols voters - who were only the rich men of the city - and he didnt last long as the citys MP.

Back in Spanns Clifton and Ashton, generations of African people lived and worked in slavery and poverty. The abolition of slavery by the British Empire in the 1830s brought huge fortunes to one Clifton and Ashton, and little change to another.

In Clifton in Bristol, the owners of plantations and slaves were given compensation which amounts to the biggest single pay out by the British Government in history - until this week.

In the 1830s, it amounted to 40 per cent of that years GDP for the whole nation - at a time when Britain was the richest nation on Earth.

The Government borrowed so much money to do it, it wasnt until 2015 that the debt had been paid off.

The effects were huge for Clifton - with a massive amount of cash suddenly in their pockets, the rich merchants of Bristol sparked a big boom in development in Clifton, creating the suburb of grand Georgian houses we see today.

The plantation owners didnt lose their plantations, or indeed their slaves. Those people working in Clifton on Union Island might have celebrated their freedom, but the deal was that they still had to work for up to five years for free.

And then, on an island with nothing much except cotton plantations, the freed slaves continued on as share-croppers - their homes and land were still owned by the Spann family, who now employed them rather than enslaved them.

In 1850, Clifton and Ashton and Union Island itself were sold by the Spann family to a local businessman called Major Collins, and 13 years later leased to Charles Mulzac, an aggressive sharecropper of French descent.

The people of Clifton and Ashton in Bristol arent particularly noted for their rebellious natures - not compared with the likes of Stokes Croft, St Pauls or perhaps Easton.

But Clifton and Ashton on Union Island has always been a place of fierce independence.

In the late 19th century the locals rebelled against the conditions of their sharecropping, and won significant improvements. Many headed off to work on the whaling boats, and when Union Island was eventually bought back by the British Empire in the 1920s, the inhabitants of Ashton and Clifton found themselves, for the first time - in theory at least - on a level footing with those living in Ashton and Clifton in Bristol. They were British citizens and were even given the vote.

Union Island is part of the island chain nation of St Vincent and the Grenadines, and is the most southerly of those. The island nation of Grenada - which has such close links with the US, even though its a member of the Commonwealth - is close by, and can be seen from the hill above Ashton on a clear day.

In the 1970s, the people of Clifton and Ashton were so fed up with being the forgotten part of their country, that they rose up in rebellion and demanded to be allowed to breakaway from St Vincent and the Grenadines, and instead become part of the nation of Grenada.

Their country sent its own troops to the island - and soldiers fought the locals and patrolled the streets to put the insurrection down.

Since then, there has been positive change. The US Navy came to help build better harbour facilities, and investment in communications and the internet has helped the people of Clifton and Ashton embrace their new opportunities for tourism.

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The story of 'the other Clifton and Ashton' and their remarkable links to Bristol - Bristol Post