Our Bristol Times editor Eugene Byrne has dug up 20 things you may or may not already know about our favourite hole in the ground.

1. How it got its name

Nobody knows for sure. Your correspondent had a student job as a road-sweeper for the City Engineer's Department back in the 1970s, and the other sweepers referred to it as the Bearpit back then. Presumably because from above it looked like the sort of enclosure that zoos used to keep our ursine friends in.

2. No, it was never a real bear-pit

You sometimes hear people claim it was once a real bear-pit, or the site of a bear-pit in the olden days. This is not true. It's a hole in the ground which did not exist until the late 1960s and it never had any bears in it. Not real ones, anyway.

3. But there was the occasional bear in the vicinity

Until it was finally banned in 1838, the area in which the Bearpit is now situated was the venue for the annual St James' Fair, a huge event which attracted entertainers and merchants from all over the country. Robert Southey (1774-1843) wrote of going to the fair as a child and seeing a shaved monkey exhibited as a "fairy", and a shaved bear, dressed in checked coat and trousers and displayed as "an Ethiopian savage". At other times the fair's attractions may have included dancing bears and possibly even displays of bear-baiting.

The area now known as the Bear Pit was bombed during World War Two

4. Bristolians enjoyed bear-baiting

Our ancestors did not have the same tastes in entertainment we have. Bristolians used to be fond of all sorts of "sports" which involved inflicting pain on animals, including bull- and bear-baiting, cock-throwing and goose-squailing. In fact the sturdy apprentice lads of Bristol rioted in 1600 when the Puritan-dominated Corporation banned the traditional Pancake Day pastimes of cock-throwing and goose-squailing; these games involved throwing sticks or rocks at helpless tethered birds until they died.

Good Queen Bess was a big fan of bear-baiting, and her personal bear-baiter, Harry the Bear-Ward, certainly came to Bristol to put on a few shows. In the 1600s bear-baiting took place on what's now Queen Square and later Canons Marsh. If a bear wasn't available, a bull would do almost as well.

5. St James Barton

The proper name for the Bearpit is St James Barton roundabout. The St James bit comes of course from St James Church, close by. This was originally a medieval priory and the church is generally seen as Bristol's oldest surviving building.

"Barton" was the medieval word for land retained by the person or body owning it for their own use. So St James Barton simply means the farm of St James.

6. Unfair to the fair

The Fair dated back to the 1200s and attracted traders from all over the country. It was closed down in 1838 by the city fathers for one or more of a number of reasons. Many felt it had become a massive orgy of drinking and lewdness (many a marriage resulted from assignations in the hedges around the fair) and was not appropriate now the respectable young Queen Victoria was on the throne. Others were concerned that such a huge gathering of people might lead to the spread of disease, particularly cholera. Others still hated the idea of the lower orders gathering in large numbers anyway; the memory of the 1831 Queens Square riots was still fresh. But it may be the main reason was the most pressing of all – business. The fair allowed people to come in from out of town and trade, often long after the fair was supposed to have ended, which of course damaged the profits of Bristol shopkeepers and traders. So no more fair.

7. Privatisation

St James Barton remained the property of the monks of St James until the Reformation. Then Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries to get his hands on their cash. The church became the local parish church, while the other priory buildings seem to have become dilapidated very quickly, possibly because locals were helping themselves to bits of them for building materials.

In 1544 the priory buildings and all the lands were bought by Henry Brayne, a London tailor who paid Â£667 and some change for the site and all its property. Brayne's son Robert inherited this, but died childless, so it was divided between his two sisters, Anne and Eme, the wives of George Winter and Sir Charles Somerset.

The area now known as the Bear Pit was restored after the war

8. More blood sports

It was only in the 1700s the relent- less northern expansion of the city started. The Full Moon pub, a sometime coaching inn and a popular venue for bare-knuckle fighting (bouts between women as well as men were popular) was there by the early 1700s.

9. Bristol's lost square

The memory of St James Square has been almost completely obliterated. It was built in the early 1700s when it would have been a very desirable residential location. It was gradually absorbed by the city's expansion and the growth of St James Parish as a predominantly working class area. The Square was also home to Bristol's first children's hospital in Victorian times.

By the early 20th century it was home to a large YMCA hall, often hired out for large events. The Trades Union Congress met here in 1915, for instance, and was addressed by Lloyd George. The Square was very badly damaged by several of the bombing raids of 1940-41 and was left in a very shabby state for many years before it was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the new road system.

As you wait at the traffic lights where Bond Street joins the St James Barton roundabout, you are on the spot where the YMCA Hall used to be, and your car is idling in a place where Lloyd George once made a rousing speech full of humour and patriotism.

10. One of Bristol's earliest public parks

In the 1880s it was decided some of Bristol's redundant graveyards could be turned into pleasant ornamental gardens. The first to be tidied up and planted with flowers and shrubs were those of Temple and St Nicholas churches in 1880. In 1881-82 the Parish of St James spent Â£600 "in converting the parochial cemetery into an agreeable promenade and garden for the use of the crowded population of the locality." It was formally opened by the Lord Mayor on June 30, 1882, and to this day people still stop and sit there to read books and eat sandwiches.

11. Paper Sally

One of Bristol's best-known street characters, known as Paper Sally, was found dead in her room in a house in Deep Street, just to the west of the churchyard, on Christmas Day, 1926. Her real name was Mary Ann Taylor and she was 82. She was well known around the neighbourhood for her habit of wandering the streets and collecting waste paper, sticks and rags. The room was full of paper, and she was suffocated by smoke when it caught fire. People genuinely mourned her passing and there was a huge turn-out for her funeral at Greenbank cemetery. Among the floral tributes was a wreath from Bristol's police and firemen, as she often stopped and chatted with them on her daily rounds. Or so the papers said; according to others she was actually a snitch who helped the cops by regularly grassing up her neighbours.

The Bear Pit as it once was

12. The Blitz

The area around St James Barton was heavily damaged by German bombing in the war. Among the losses were the Upper Arcade – identical to the Lower Arcade which still survives in Broadmead, and which stretched almost as far as the Bearpit.

The Luftwaffe had prematurely started the demolition of the area which the postwar planners completed. The area would now be transformed from a densely-populated area of shops and homes to a place "zoned" for shops and offices, with very few people living there.

13. How to deal with the corpses of plague victims

St James's Church, and the Priory before it, had a very large burial ground that once extended as far as Broadmead. When the foundations were being dug for Lewis's department store (now Primark) in 1954 a number of corpses were found and there was a bit of a panic that they were victims of the 14th century Black Death. It turned out they were probably victims of cholera in the 19th century. So that's all right then.

14. Digging the Bearpit

By the late 1960s the area around St James Barton roundabout had seen little improvement since the war, though part of this was a deliberate policy of neglect while the Council awaited the funding and developers to realise its plans for the area, which included wide roads and new office blocks.

The Council's plans started to come together in the late 1960s, when work started on the massive concrete office blocks of Avon House and Avon House North, the demolition of several old streets. Work on digging the bearpit began in 1968. We have no idea whether or not there was a grand opening; if you attended any such ceremony, please let us know.

15. Mugger advises victim to avoid the Bearpit

In 2007, a mugger tried to rob a man in the Bearpit, only to find that he had already been robbed there a few moments previously. When his would-be victim explained that he had already been robbed once, he told him: "Don't cross the Bear Pit unless you want to get robbed."

The Bear Pit as it once was

16. What to do about the Bearpit? (Part 1)

The Bearpit is loved and hated in about equal measure by Bristolians. By the 1980s it had become a haunt of beggars, some of whom could be quite aggressive. What was intended as a pedestrian-friendly, people-friendly public space became a place people wanted to get through as quickly as possible. The Council tried to engineer the social problems out; initially the seating benches in the Bearpit had been large back-to back affairs; there were even concrete tables on which one could picnic or play chess. Down the years these were removed or changed. The street furniture was replaced with single seats and benches on which street drinkers and the homeless could not lie down.

The Bear Pit as it once was

17. What to do about the Bearpit? (Part 2)

The "problem" of the Bearpit has long been discussed in the Council chamber and the local press for years. Some of the suggested solutions (not all entirely serious) have included:

1. Fill it with water and make it a giant aquarium. With dolphins.

2. Fill it with water and turn it into a lido, putting an artificial "Turbo Island" in the middle. And invite the British Olympic synchronised swimming team to give a display here before the 2012 games.

3. Just fill it in and leave pedestrians at ground level with the traffic, putting in some new pedestrian crossings.

4. Spend a lot of money on making it nice, and put some new shops in.

5. Skateboarding park. (Someone suggested adding a "wall of death" for moped-riders.)

6. Install a giant TV screen so people can gather to watch major sporting of cultural events.

7. Roof it over with glass and turn it into Bristol's version of the Eden Project.

18. What to do about the Bearpit? (Part 3)