By the mid eighteenth century Bristol had firmly established itself as the ‘metropolis of the west’, servicing and receiving goods from a vast hinterland. Daniel Defoe foresaw this in his famous Tour of 1724, noting that Bristol merchants maintained carriers ‘to all the principal countries and towns from Southampton in the south, even to the banks of the Trent north; and tho’ they have no navigable river that way, yet they drive a very great trade though all these counties’. Grain came in from the Midlands and Wales, peas and beans from Gloucestershire, butter from west Wales and Glamorgan, eggs and poultry from Somerset. As far as industrial products were concerned, timber came down the Severn from the Forest of Dean, wool from Milford and Cardiff for local weavers and the Cotswolds, metal goods from the west Midlands, tin from Cornwall, copper from Anglesey. Such was the traffic that Bristol emerged as an entrepôt for raw materials, displacing other Severn and Channel ports, who tapped into its trade networks, both regional and Atlantic.

While nearly five hundred vessels linked Bristol to Africa, Europe and the New World, some nine hundred coastal vessels would sail the Avon each year by 1750. Indeed, coastal trade was very much the backbone of Bristol's metropolitan status. At the same time road traffic was important, for local supplies of coal, for the flow of goods to and from neighbouring counties, for the famers and hucksters who flocked to Bristol's two annual fairs.

In the eyes of many a civic booster, the five main roads in and out of Bristol were poor. What were needed were turnpikes, toll roads managed by boards of commissioners who would supplant the older system of statute labour whereby each parish was responsible for its section of the road. First introduced after the Restoration, turnpikes strove to make travel faster, safer, and over time substantially cheaper for commercial traffic. Bristol was among the towns that invested in turnpike trusts in the second wave of activity in the mid 1720s. Its act followed hard on those that linked the West Country woollen trades to vital supplies and expanding markets.