A look at Broadmead in 2032

‘Welcome to Banksy’s Broadmead Hotel’ reads the neon pink sign that greets people coming up through the Bearpit towards the city centre shopping district.

It has been ten years now since Bristol’s most famous street artist bought the former Debenhams building and turned it into a global attraction.

Top floor rooms in the hotel are available for a whopping £3,000 a night, with all proceeds going to the collective of NGOs working to create safe passages to refugees after the Nationality and Borders Bill of 2022 criminalised those seeking sanctuary in Britain.

The middle floor of the hotel is taken over by a restaurant, staffed entirely by people who were out of work or facing homelessness, while the ground floor is an ever-changing art exhibition and pop-up venue.

Banksy’s transformation of the Bearpit saw the once-neglected sunken roundabout into a living art museum that depicts the city’s rich history and features installations by artists from within Bristol and around the world.

What the Bearpit looked like back in 2021, before Banksy’s takeover – photo by Martin Booth

The queues stretching around Bond Street are all but permanent and have given rise to a new series of pop-ups – from coffee vendors to entertainers – to keep people occupied as they wait.

Aerial travelators stretching from the coach station into The Galleries and out to Temple Meads give views of the city centre, where a sea of coral-coloured electric scooters fight for space among the rest of the bicycles, e-bikes, cargo bikes and bio-powered buses and taxis. The city council has now banned all private vehicles on the city centre roads but has still failed to install properly marked and separated cycle lanes despite the ongoing campaigning efforts of Sustrans and others.

The shopping centre in the heart of Broadmead was revamped in the mid-2020s into a popular entertainment and science complex. The top floor and former car park have been transformed into vibrant gardens, rich in biodiversity, by the Incredible Edible team. Now world-renowned, the site not only provides fresh produce for the city but is recognised as a centre of excellence, attracting scientists, gardeners and horticulturalists from far and wide.

Realising the need to shake up the retail sector and provide an experience-led offering, the centre’s new owners created a whole new way to shop on the lower floors of The Galleries, leading to a business model inspired by escape rooms and the 90s TV show Supermarket Sweep.

People pay to enter the building and take part in an adrenaline-fuelled shopping expedition in which participants have to solve riddles to move through to the next level or risk losing everything in their basket. Some have complained it has changed shopping for the worse but few can argue with its popularity.

Residents in the new Castle Park flats are plagued by an eternal stench – design by Arup and Farrels

In many ways, Broadmead has enjoyed a fantastic revival in the last decade but one of the biggest concerns for businesses is the now-notorious stink that wafts over from Castle Park. Mask-wearing that was mandatory during the pandemic of 2020 is now a choice for most to block out the overpowering stench that is a result of the sewage routinely dumped into the River Avon.

Since ministers failed to adequately clamp down on water companies, the practise of dumping raw sewage into Britain’s waterways has increased and waterside communities are bearing the brunt.

People living in the series of high rise buildings on Castle Park – having been promised riverside views and city centre living – are now embroiled in a battle for justice, forced to live with a constant unbearable stench in flats now rendered unsellable.

Down on Union Street, the bright lights of the old Odeon Cinema beckon. Following on from the success of his popular Bristol-based BBC series, The Outlaws, comedian Stephen Merchant decided to permanently invest in the city by turning the art deco building into a film school that has already turned out two Hollywood stars and a raft of well-known TV actors in the short time it has been open. Rumour has it the ghost of the former manager who was murdered there in 1946 still haunts the newly developed cinema.

Merchant is now in talks with Lidl about taking on the next-door building that was once home to H&M amid plans to expand the school. A Broadmead walk of fame has been created on the pavement on Union Street. The extra foot traffic created has helped provide a much-needed boost for KFC, which struggled to regain popularity since switching to an entirely vegan menu in 2023 after supplies of chicken became unsustainable.

Stephen Merchant (pictured with Outlaws co-star Christopher Walken) opened a film school in Bristol after the success of The Outlaws – photo courtesy of the BBC

Most of the shops in Broadmead these days are second-hand clothing stores or independents. The one exception is Primark, which has continued to thrive while other high street giants have gone under and has now added two additional storeys to its flagship store on The Horsefair with further expansion expected.

A display in the centre of the shopping district details the new mayor’s plans for the area, which include extensive rewilding, the installation of a new solar panel roof and a raft of improvements to transport infrastructure. The referendum in May 2022 saw Bristolians narrowly vote to retain the mayoral model and Mya-Rose Craig became the first woman elected to the role this year.

After the city missed its target of reaching carbon neutrality by 2030, Craig was voted in on a platform of promising to deliver the changes needed to reach the milestone and she is on a mission to exceed all expectations.

The mayor is holding a much-publicised meeting with former mayor, now cabinet member for transport, Marvin Rees this week. After leaving the mayoral office in 2024, Rees quickly rose up through the political ranks and secured a cabinet position when the fractious New New Labour (NNL) Party swept to power in 2030, finally ending two decades of Tory rule.

Craig is now seeking the £6bn in government funds needed to complete the underground transport system first proposed by Rees back in 2017. The city’s central shopping district may have knocked the Suspension Bridge and harbourside off the top most-visited areas, but it continues to be plagued with transport woes. One local business owner recently implored Banksy to step in to sort out the city’s infrastructure – the elusive street artist is yet to respond.

Main photo by Ellie Pipe

Read more: Bristol’s transport in 2050

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