Can you tell where this is? The mural itself gives its location away: Cawardine’s in St Stephen’s Street on the centre, near the White Lion pub.

Although I must have passed the cafe hundreds of times, I had never been in until today. It’s a traditional place inside, with plenty of space, and the mural taking up all of one wall.

The mural features many of the characters who frequent Cawardine’s: office workers with stacks of takeaway coffee, lawyers from the Crown Court around the corner and the chambers nearby, builders, schoolchildren, a cyclist with a copy of the Evening Post, and a sizeable woman dressed as a Viking who could have just stepped from the stage of the Hippodrome.

Carwardine’s has a long and proud history in Bristol, tracing its routes back to the 1860s when Edward Carwardine was apprenticed in the tea trade at a time when Bristol was a fluorishing commerical port, with tea clippers returning from plantations in India, Ceylon and the Far East.

The first Carwardine’s cafe was opened in the 1920s on Corn Street. The fantastic Gert Lush Online sums up its history thus: “Carwardine’s rapidly became a Bristol institution known not only for its smart, uniformed waitresses, but also for the pungent fumes spilling out into the streets from its roasting coffee beans.

“From the mid- Sixties onwards, the company ran the Berkeley cafe at the top of Park Street (it had once belonged to rival Cadena) before selling up in 1981.”

Today, Martin Carwardine & Co is a coffee roasting company based in Upper Langford in the Mendips. Visit their website here.

There still exist two Carwardine’s cafes in Bristol alongside branches in Bath, Worcester and Salisbury, one on St Stepehen’s Street with the mural inside, the other on Queen’s Road in Clifton opposite the museum (which is currently actually closed and up for sale – the cafe, not the museum).