At the pointy end of Spike Island

“So what’s your favourite place in Bristol?” It sounds like a straightforward question. When I was journalising regularly, I deployed it fairly often, either at the beginning of an interview to put someone at ease or at the end to wrap things up with a warm, fuzzy answer about a quiet pub garden, an eccentric secondhand shop, an old-style greasy spoon, that sort of thing. 

Last year, though, I was on the receiving end of this seemingly innocuous enquiry and discovered that while I could waffle on at unnecessary length about other stuff – moving to Bristol in the 80s, the gentrification of BS3, translating poetry from languages I don’t really know, the political situation in Bulgaria – coming up with a favourite place in the city stumped me. 

That’s not because I don’t have favourite haunts, but because I couldn’t make my mind up. Various options suggested themselves, arriving like contestants on a talent show or parliamentary candidates desperately trying to convince me to vote for them.

I ummed, ahhed and stalled while the obvious suspects paraded themselves: the Suspension Bridge, the docks, Brandon Hill, any number of pubs, a theatre, a bookshop. Or platform 15 of Temple Meads on the day we set out for Albania, the weird little concrete circle in St Andrew’s Park which, despite the absence of icy wastes and polar bears, I convinced my four-year-old daughter was actually the North Pole.

In the end, though, I went for somewhere I only found a couple of years ago. On the face of it, it’s not the most prepossessing of places and I’m not even sure what it’s called, but to all intents and purposes it’s the pointy end of Spike Island – the prow of grassed-over mud bank that juts out into the Avon beyond the Create Centre. You can only get to it on foot on a path running beneath the non-stop rattle and boom of traffic on Brunel Way.

Given that you look directly up the gorge from here, the most evident attraction is the view, but it’s not just the vertiginous rocks, the bridge, the way Clifton looks a bit like a poshed-up Tibetan monastery that I like about it. There’s something likeable too about its air of abandonment, marooned beyond the flyover and often as not peppered with fag ends and dog shit. At low tide in winter, the exposed, slimy mud banks and slicing breeze enhance the effect, but even on a summer afternoon without a cloud in the sky and with the Avon hiding its glaucous, silty banks, it can still feel like amputated space – the kind of place hearty mariners might have stood, longingly gazing down the river.

Perhaps the oddest thing about it, though, is that it’s also home to a monument – a sort of concrete podium facing away from the water. If the scurf of empty bottles and broken glass is anything to go by, its primary function these days is as a hang-out for clandestine boozers. Its original purpose, however, was to celebrate the very road system which has cut it – and the patch of grass it stands on – from the rest of the city.

And that, perhaps, is what makes it seem odd: not only because the powers-that-be chose to commission a monument to a set of dual carriageways, slip roads, traffic lights and a swing bridge, but also because, even though the citation glows with civic pride, they chose to put it somewhere nobody except a handful of dog-walkers, chain-smokers, alchies and imaginary sailors would ever see it.

Hell, you can’t even see the Cumberland Basin system properly from here – it’s just a narrow band of concrete curving across the sky – and the dignitaries who attended the grand unveiling must have stood around the engraved podium gazing at nothing much in particular. Some of them probably shuffled from one foot to another and muttered ‘What exactly are we opening here?’ And that’s an image which has also helped to endear the place to me – a symbol of ludicrous, self-congratulatory pomposity and the absurdity of celebrating an enormous piece of concrete by putting up another, smaller one.

Read more about hidden corners of Bristol in our weekly Bristol Favourites feature.