Bristol as European Capital of Culture? Well, we've got one thing we've got over most of the other towns competing for the honour.

We have more history. We've been around longer. And because of that we have more pseudo-history, non-history and outright nonsense in the fabric of the town as well. That's culture, that is.

Culture. Big word used by posh people, generally taken to mean music with fiddles and theatres and art galleries and all that stuff that rich clever people do. But it also means the way a place or group of people lives, the things they think are right and wrong, the habits they have, the fairy tales they tell each other.

Bristol's culture is amazingly rich in myths, half-truths and downright lies, from tales coined in medieval times to modern-day urban legends.

In the present times we have the Bristol Hum, a persistent noise described by one sufferer as being like an idling Diesel engine. Hundreds of Bristolians have been complaining about it for over 30 years. While not completely unique to Bristol - some 10% of the population of Taos, New Mexico allegedly suffer from something similar - only a handful of similar cases have been reported elsewhere in the UK, notably in Largs, on the west coast of Scotland.

Hum sufferers' homes have been visited by all manner of experts down the years but no-one has offered an explanation that would satisfy everyone. Consequently, the Hum is the result of water-pipes, low-frequency radio navigation systems and all manner of other causes all the way up to and including space aliens using the city as a sort of UFO-port. Bedminster Intergalactic, anyone?

For many of those who are visited by it, the Hum is no joke. The rest of us take a sort of perverse pride in it. Genuine unexplained phenomenon right here in our own town.

Then there's Clifton Suspension Bridge, the city's most famous landmark. Yeah, yeah, splendid bit of engineering, lovely bit of work, Brunel, yadayada... But it has a darker, more sensational reputation as a place where people go to commit suicide.

Bristolians tell their kids that in Victorian times a young woman who jumped off it was saved by her voluminous skirts acting as a parachute. This story is actually true. Her name was Sarah Ann Henley who jumped over the side on Friday May 8 1885 following a tiff with her boyfriend. The skirts brought her to a soft-ish landing in the mud although she had to spend several months in hospital. While convalescing, her fame spread and she received several offers of marriage. She died aged 84 in 1948.

Nothing in Bristol's past, though, has spawned more myth and misapprehension than the city's part in the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Even today, some pub landlords in the central part of town will tell you that their cellars were once warehouses filled with captive Africans. Actually they were never shipped to Bristol in large numbers, but were taken straight from Africa to the Caribbean or America. Two very well-known local streets, Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill, are supposed to have been named for some vague slave trade connections - typically that fine ladies would promenade on the Road while the menfolk went off to the slave market on the Hill. These names are purely coincidental; while Africans did come to Bristol in small numbers, and not always as slaves, there was never a market here.

Myths surrounding Bristol's slave trade are intensely important today. The city's got a sizeable population of African-Caribbean descent and there used to be a feeling that the episode was swept under the carpet by official Bristol. Now we talk a lot more about how to deal with it. In 1999, Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery hosted an exhibition titled 'A Respectable Trade?' which aimed to de-mythologise the whole episode and simply depict the facts. The exhibition, coming at the same time as a TV dramatization of Philippa Gregory's novel of the same name, got an awful lot of the nonsense about the trade out into the open.

Myths about the slave trade have complicated causes. It's not just shame, anger or racism. It's also because we know so little about the real people involved. So stories get made up to fill the gaps.

Let's go back a little for a moment, because this is important... Golf club bars, not-too-clever middle aged white men in blazers, that sort of bloke used to say, probably still say: "They were acting by the standards of the time. They didn't think they were doing anything wrong."

Stroll on, Herbert. Any passing familiarity with the facts quickly reveals that most of them damn well did know they were doing wrong. And they knew that a lot of other people thought they were doing wrong.

For that reason, the documentary evidence we have about Bristol's slaving past is fairly thin. No slaving captain ever wrote memoirs about what a jolly time he had dealing in human beings, while only a tiny minority of sailors and slaves could read and write, and precious few of those wrote an autobiography.

While historians can tell us a great deal about what actually happened during the slaving era - numbers, dates, names, statistics - few individuals have left their own stories behind. The handful that there are are very valuable. So when the exhibition opened in 1999, an elegant new pedestrian bridge in Bristol's harbour was named Pero's Bridge in honour of a black servant in the household of 18th century Bristol slave owner John Pinney.

At the edge of Bristol, in the parish churchyard at Henbury, is the grave of another famous Bristol slave. His name was 'Scipio Africanus' (though not originally, you may be sure), a joke name more suited to a pet than a person. But a pet, it appears, is exactly what Scipio was. He was a servant or slave of the Earl of Suffolk and died in 1720 at the age of 18. The graveyard inscription tells us that he was born a 'pagan', but was now a Christian, which is a good thing.

Scipio is not famous because we know anything about him; we know almost nothing. He is famous because his is one of the few known burial places of an African from the era when Christian Englishmen traded human beings like cattle. It's an important monument and, to some, a place of pilgrimage. Flowers are regularly left at the grave.

In writing a graphic novel about some of Bristol's myths, it seemed important to me to include a slave element, not from any sort of political correctness (whatever that is), but because the subject is so important today. We still need closure on this one, and because of that we all still subscribe to myths about it.

Scipio's a blank slate; all we know about him was that he was an African servant in a rich man's house at the start of the 18th century, that he died young, that he was force-fed strong doses of block-headed, uncompromising English Protestantism and named after a hero from the white man's antiquity. Everything else about Scipio is up for grabs. Sometime in the distant future he'll be forgotten, but until then, he lies in Henbury as mute testimony and as a blank screen for each of us to project our particular ideas about slavery onto.

From the same era as the slave trade comes another character who may well turn into one of the most famous Bristol myth figures of all.

Hop forward please, Long John Silver. LJS has, on first appearance, little to commend himself to Bristol. He was a Bad Guy, and more importantly he is a complete work of fiction, product of the pen of a Scottish novelist who didn't actually visit Bristol until after he had written 'Treasure Island'. But we like Silver a lot. We like him so much that in recent years people ranging from the Bristol Civic Society through to a local anarchist newsletter have called for a statue of Silver to be set up somewhere in Bristol.

In 'Treasure Island' we first encounter Silver running a dockside pub with his black wife. Many Bristolians believe that Silver's pub is the Llandoger Trow in King Street or possibly the Hole in the Wall on Queens Square. Indeed, many Bristolians probably believe that Silver was a real historical character. He is a powerful icon for all sorts of reasons, but which basically stem from the fact that Robert Louis Stevenson knew that to make the bad guy a bit more interesting, he had to make him a little bit good. In fact, it's only a pity that being a Victorian, he couldn't follow the corollary and make the good guys a little bit bad. Dr Livesey, Squire Trelawney and Jim Hawkins are all insufferably dull and upstanding when compared with the charismatic and amoral Silver.

So why not a statue to a fictional bad guy? Some say it would make a nice tourist attraction. Others say Silver is a real working-class hero. A disability rights campaigner said to me, "We like Long John Silver because it proves you can be disabled and be interesting as well. The one thing he's not is a victim."

To be even considering erecting a monument to a bad guy, even a fictional one, is terribly modernistic, but then in Bristol we're used to morally-ambiguous statuary. In the city centre is a very fine statue of Edward Colston, a great benefactor of the city who donated most of his immense personal fortune to various good causes, from schools to almshouses, both during his life and after his death in the 18th century. The problem is that much of this wealth came from sugar and slaves. At the foot of the statue are figures of dolphins because of a story that one of Colston's ships was once saved from sinking by a dolphin which used its body to plug the hole in the hull. Myths everywhere, see?

In earlier times, Bristolians told one another stories that had much clearer morals, such as the instructive tale of the giants Vincent and Goram. The origins of the story go back to the middle ages.

Vincent and Goram were brothers. They both fell in love with Avona, a fair lass from the distant land of Wiltshire. We are to assume that she was normal-sized, which would have complicated the courting process, but never mind.

So anyhow, the cunning little (or normal-sized) minx said she'd marry whichever of them drained a huge lake which stretched from Rownham Hill to Bradford-on-Avon. Which is to say it ran the same course as the present-day river Avon.

The brothers got cracking. Goram started digging a route from the lake to the sea through Henbury while Vincent started work at Durdham Down. Goram got tired, though, and, since it was thirsty work, he had been consuming prodigious quantities of beer. Sort of like Desperate Dan's disreputable uncle, the hairy-arsed Builder From Hell.

While halfway through carving out Hazelbrook Gorge in what is now Blaise Estate, Goram fell asleep in his giant stone chair.

The industrious Vincent on the other hand, kept off the beer and hacked his way through the Downs to Sea Mills and drained the lake and got the girl. When Goram woke up and realised he'd lost he got so angry that he stamped his foot. The footprint, like the chair, is another feature you can see for yourself at Blaise.

Goram then threw himself into the Bristol Channel where he turned to stone. His head is the island of Steep Holm and his shoulder is Flat Holm.

There appear to have been several major variations on the story of Vincent and Goram, notably one in which they were sharing Vincent's pickaxe, chucking it to one another as they worked. Vincent threw it to Goram, who had fallen asleep. The pick hit Goram on the head and killed him. In a fit of remorse, Vincent not only dug the Avon Gorge, but also built the stone circles at Stanton Drew and Stonehenge before swimming to Ireland to build the Giant's Causeway.

The stories were re-told by 17th and 18th century antiquarians and there'd have been a time when Bristol children probably knew one or another version as well as later kids knew the tales of Snow White or Dick Whittington. Nowadays, fewer people know the stories, although Goram is commemorated in a few features at Blaise estate and in the name of a nearby pub. Vincent could sort of claim St Vincent's Rocks by default, although they probably got their name from the medieval church, possibly from monks using caves in the rocks as hermitages. The name of the river Avon is of Roman origin.

If Vincent, Goram and Avona are fading from local memory, King Brennus, the legendary founder of Bristol, is hardly known at all. The only trace we have of him are a pair of little statues of him and his brother Belinus on the city's medieval St John's Gate. Both of them are holding crucifixes, although they are supposed to have lived long before Christ's time.

Brennus and Belinus were sons of King Malmutius and Queen Conwenna of England. When the old king died, he left the lands north of the Humber to Brennus, while Belinus got the south. Brennus was not at all pleased that he had got the roughest, coldest and least productive land, while Belinus had the richest parts of the kingdom. The brothers were about to go to war with each other when their mother stepped in to stop them. She persuaded them to share all the lands between them. Brennus, the story goes, came south and built Bristol, the 'place of the bridge'.

Bristolians, it seems, have always preferred fanciful explanations for things, because life is more interesting that way, and while Brennus and Belinus and Vincent and Goram might be fading from popular memory, there are always new stories. There are persistent older ones, too. This is my favourite:

In April of 1960, the American singer Eddie Cochran headlined a week-long rock 'n' roll extravaganza at the Hippodrome. The bill included fellow American Gene Vincent and British rockers Billy Fury, Joe Brown and Georgie Fame. On their last night in Bristol, Cochran and Vincent decided not to catch a late train from Temple Meads but hire a taxi to Heathrow Airport instead. In the early hours of April 17th, the taxi carrying Cochran, Vincent, road manager Pat Tompkins and Cochran's girlfriend and fellow songwriter Sharon Sheeley blew a tyre on the A4 near Chippenham and crashed. The only person to be seriously injured was Cochran, who was taken to hospital in Bath where he died the following afternoon. He was 21 years old.

The first person to reach the scene of the crash was a young police constable by the name of Dave Harman, later famous as Dave Dee of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beeky, Mick and Titch. (Ask your grandmother.)

And in Bristol you sometimes hear this story that while he was here he got a local girl into trouble. The problem is, the legendary love-child is always only known to a friend of a friend's mate's cousin's brother-in-law. This person has never come forward. But that's how better anyhow because if Just Like Eddie did come out, a simple DNA test would settle the matter. And the truth would almost certainly be rather dull.
It usually is.