Bristol & West Hockey Club has only carried this name since 2008. But the hockey itself goes back much further — to a club that helped bring a brand-new sport to Bristol, built the region's first hockey association from scratch, and spent the next century growing, merging, and winning. This is the story of how we got here.

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1893: A name with real roots

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West Gloucestershire Hockey Club — the senior partner in our family tree — is one of the oldest hockey clubs in the West Country, and one of the boldest. In 1893, while most of Bristol's established sports clubs were still playing an older, rougher version of the game with a lump of solid rubber, West Gloucestershire backed the new Hockey Association rules that would go on to define the modern sport. Affiliated to the Hockey Association on 23 September 1893, alongside Chippenham, it was the first club in Bristol to play hockey as we'd recognise it today — ahead of the curve while the rest of the city caught up.

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In 1845, Henry Grace and his brother-in-law Alfred Pocock founded Mangotsfield Cricket Club to represent Downend and the surrounding villages. A year later it merged into West Gloucestershire Cricket Club — the club a young W.G. Grace grew up playing for, and the direct ancestor of Gloucestershire County Cricket Club. The people behind that name didn't disappear when cricket moved on. Our first hockey players were drawn from that same community — sons, successors, and clubmates of the cricketers who'd made West Gloucestershire's name, playing on the very same Stapleton ground the old cricket circle had used for decades. When they picked up hockey sticks in 1893, they carried the name with them.

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It's that 1893 date the club still carries on its crest today.

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1894: Building the league — and leading it

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A year later, West Gloucestershire became a founding member of the Western Counties Hockey Association, helping build the entire regional structure the sport in the South West still runs on today — alongside Bristol, Clifton (later Redland Park), Cotham, North Bristol, and Northcote.

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It didn't take long to become one of the teams to beat. West Gloucestershire's early start gave it a real head start on the rest of the county, and it quickly established itself among the strongest sides in the Western Counties, trading the top spot with Redland Park and Northcote across a fiercely competitive decade of West Country hockey. By the turn of the century, it was consistently ranked among the very best clubs the Association had.

 

 

Always on the move, always growing

 

West Gloucestershire never had one settled home ground — and that turned out to be a strength, not a weakness. The club kept finding new pitches, new partners, and new ways to grow, moving through Stapleton, Blaise, Redland High School, Bristol University, and Clifton College before landing at Badminton School in the 2000s. Wherever it played, the club grew with it: from two sides in the early years to four by 1968, five by 1978, and — briefly — six.

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Along the way, teas became as much a tradition as hockey itself, with the Black Swan in Westbury — the Dirty Duck to generations of players — becoming a fixture on the West Country hockey circuit, a regular stop for visiting clubs. Training evolved from pre-season fitness work into a full season of proper coaching once the club reached Bristol University's astro in 1987.

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That same spirit of joining forces eventually led to 2008, when West Gloucestershire and North Bristol Hockey Club came together to form Bristol & West.

 

 

North Bristol: the other half of the family

 

North Bristol Hockey Club formed in 1999, from a merger of Almondsbury HC and BAC HC — itself the product of clubs built by two very different communities.

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Almondsbury HC began in 1951 as Bristol Civil Service, before becoming Almondsbury HC in 1985 and later absorbing Hanham HC in 1987. BAC HC started in 1949 as a works team for the Bristol Aeroplane Company and Bristol Siddeley Engines — one of the first Bristol clubs to play on a shale pitch rather than grass. Both were founding members of the West of England Hockey League.

 

 

2008: Bristol & West

 

In 2008, West Gloucestershire and North Bristol merged to form Bristol & West Hockey Club — bringing together West Gloucestershire's 1893 roots and pioneering role in West Country hockey with North Bristol's own strong, community-built lineage.

 

 

2019: The Jaspers join

 

Jaspers Ladies Hockey Club was founded in 1981 by a group of friends off the back of a successful touring side, and built a strong social identity that lasted decades — one founding member was still playing for the club when the merger happened. Jaspers' standout player, Lucy Culliford, started with the club at 13 and went on to play for England and the Great Britain squad.

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In 2019, Jaspers merged into Bristol & West to become Bristol & West Jaspers, bringing decades of that social spirit into the club's growing women's section — two clubs that already got on well, deciding to make it official.

Bristol & West Hockey Club is the sum of all of this: a club that helped invent modern hockey in Bristol, that was consistently among the best in the West Country from its very first seasons, and that has grown by bringing four proud clubs together into one.

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A return to Mangotsfield​

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And there's a nice symmetry to where we've ended up. In 2022 we moved our home pitch from Winterbourne to Mangotsfield, a stones throw from the cricket club that gave us our name. A century and a half later, Bristol & West, the oldest club in Bristol, is back exactly where that story started.