The cringeworthy rebranding of Bristol’s SS Great Britain
From our UK edition
If you live or work in Bristol, it’s impossible to escape the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s shadow – but that won’t stop some people from trying. The heritage site which looks after his early masterpiece, the steamship SS Great Britain, is to change its name from the splendid and (you would have thought) uncontroversial ‘Brunel’s SS Great Britain’ to the rather more dreary ‘Bristol Dockyards’. This is a move that smacks of managerial timidity, scrubbing the name of a great individual and his achievement in favour of something numbingly bland and sterile Brunel is Bristol’s most famous and celebrated son.
