‘Ban all corporate advertising in Bristol’

Painting on walls has been around for a very, very long time. Public space has been used since time immemorial for people to express ideas through words and images.

The struggle  for visual space in the city has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years, and inevitably reflects the relations of power within the City.

Since the advent of the printing press posters and pamphlets were used all the time to express opinions and ideas, many of which found their way onto walls..

We have a situation presently where much of the visual amenity of the city is commercial advertising, signage and of course the architecture of the city. Graffiti, street art – call it what you will – is a healthy counterbalance, an opportunity for voice, often from the disenfranchised. 

How does Stokes Croft fit into this? Stokes Croft was an area of massive dereliction. Post-war, it was an area that was very much unloved and many of  the organisations that the rest of the city didn’t want elsewhere ended up here. Because Stokes Croft was blighted, it meant that rents were low.

Artists could afford to rent space. The dereliction meant there were walls to be painted, and empty buildings meant a looser attitude to property ownership, as exemplified by the long history of squatting in the area. You put that all together and you have the ingredients for an arts movement that comes from the streets.

At the inception of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, the idea was to work with the skills of the people already in this area to improve the area in a very gentle way, by changing attitudes, by turning perceived negatives into positives.

What we did from the beginning was to approach buildings that were boarded up, repair where necessary, and then to paint them carefully. Though much of this was technically illegal, it was a direct challenge to the council and police anti-graffiti teams that were busy painting grey squares on any artwork, and locking people up.

Suddenly we had the flavour of a local area expressed in a positive way. It was a community-led regeneration which started with a few pots of paint and a challenge to the status quo.

Now, what we have is a situation where the culture that has come into being over so many years, way before PRSC, risks being subsumed by mainstream culture.

Over the last few years we’ve had car companies and other advertisers placing their products next to the kind of  street painting associated with Stokes Croft and elsewhere

For me personally this is not a good look for Stokes Croft. The hard-won freedoms to express voice have precipitated debate. What we should engaged in city-wide is a debate about visual amenity: i.e. Who has the right to put what messages where?

As it stands we bang on about some of the graffiti being negative for the city – particularly the tagging – but for me driving into the city and seeing massive corporate advertising boards is much, much worse.

Currently our city is planning to install a whole swathe of LCD advertising hoardings because this kind of advertising generates huge revenues for the City. For example, advertisers offered the Bearpit Group £40,000 a year for the space on which the Arts cube currently sits. This would have solved all of our financial problems.

But we took the position that if we did that we would have basically sold our soul to corporate interests. We now have a space in the middle of a major roundabout where real discussion can take place. And that is priceless.

Advertising is massively powerful in its effect on the communal psyche. There are KFC ads outside the Hospital, the irony of which should not escape us, and Costa Coffee now appears to “own” the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

You switch on the telly and it’s the same thing – we’re  basically being fed lies and half-truths most of the time. We are so inured to it, that we just accept it. The level of expectation of truth is so low that we hardly notice it, just as fish don’t notice the water they swim in. Which is why freedom to put alternative ideas for all to see, is so important.

There are always contradictions. I can see the irony of a Dr Martens ad painted in graffiti style in Stokes Croft. It is actually part of the debate. There’s also been a rum ad down Hepburn Road painted by Cheo, and there have been tequila ads stencilled on the pavements of Stokes Croft at one time.

And, of course, there are many ads painted for local club nights and sometimes for local businesses. A thriving local gig poster culture exists in Stokes Croft and is an important component of the local landscape.

Advertising per se is not evil. The dominance of corporate advertising though is a major problem, and in my mind a greater problem than all of the graffiti and tagging put together. 

We need to debate this as a city – the effects of this assault on our collective senses. Where we need to get to is to take the lead and do as Sao Paulo has done and ban corporate advertising altogether in Bristol. Period.

Chris Chalkley is chairman of People’s Republic of Stokes Croft.

Main picture taken by Darren Shepherd.