Speedwell Swimming Baths (after closure).New housing on the site of the TA barracks, Whitefield Road.
Speedwell is an area of east Bristol, Part of the Hillfields ward. It has a mixture of residential and industrial land.
The 2014 population estimate of the population of Speedwell was 2,342.[1]
The one School in the area is Bristol Brunel Academy, previously known as Speedwell Technology College and Speedwell Secondary School. It was Bristol's first specialist school - a technology college since 1997. In 2007 the Academy moved into all-new purpose built buildings and the old school buildings were demolished.[2]
History
The Speedwell area had many small coal mines in the 19th century.[3][4] In the 1970s some of these old workings had to be stabilised in the area of Speedwell secondary school. A goods only railway connected the collieries and the Peckett and Sons locomotive works (also known as the Atlas Locomotive Works) with the Midland railway at Kingswood junction.[5] In the early 1970s, shortly after Avon county council was formed, approximately half of Speedwell secondary school burnt down, the school was partly rebuilt. A number of 'temporary' prefab houses, built in the housing shortage after the World War II, existed in the west side of the suburb into the 21st century.[6]
