How a Twitter account became a living for Bristol writer Charlie Revelle-Smith

Charlie Revelle-Smith was given a 50-50 chance of survival after contracting Covid in hospital following being admitted for alcohol withdrawal.

He was originally planning to self-publish his third Weird Bristol book in 2020 but the pandemic and his recovery from illness put pay to that.

Fast forward a few years and Further Weird Bristol is now available to buy, continuing the pattern of ten walks themed around different areas of our city alongside maps and illustrations.

Charlie was born in Essex and grew up in Cornwall but has made his home in Bristol since arriving in the city to study at UWE. The “naturalised Bristolian”, as he calls himself, has recently moved from Bedminster to Lawrence Weston, admitting that his first book especially was skewed to south of the river as that is where he knew the best.

The 42-year-old began Weird Bristol in February 2017 as a Twitter account and still posts there daily, with its popularity encouraging him to expand the tweets into a book; having previously self-published historical novels set in Bristol.

Charlie, currently sporting a very natty moustache, admits that he is not a trained historian so makes the odd mistake, especially at the beginning of Weird Bristol. A Twitter account called Weird Bristol factcheck was even set up in 2019 to provide “reliable evidence-based commentary” on Charlie’s latest factoids.

“Hopefully I have improved since I started out. There was a lot of things that I started repeating as I had heard it multiple times over the years, about things like I really should have done a bit more research into, like the origins of Blackboy Hill and Whiteladies Road which I assumed like a lot of people was something to do with the slave trade but actually doesn’t have anything to do with it.

“In the early days I repeated a lot of that and the more I started getting people correcting me, I realised that I had to take it a bit more seriously. It had stopped being a hobby. It was something that people were reading and paying a bit more attention to. So I like to think that my quality with the passage of time and hopefully I don’t make as many mistakes as often as I used to.”

Charlie is hesitant to describe himself as a “proper” historian, preferring to call himself an amateur historian or a history enthusiast, as he lacks any professional training. After beginning as a writer of fiction, becoming a non-fiction writer saw him having to adapt his prose to a new audience and new style.

When Charlie started the Weird Bristol Twitter account, he said that he “didn’t really give much thought into it. I liked going out for walks and looking for interesting things. Why don’t I just take some photos and write about things? I thought maybe it would get a few fellow history nerds following me.”

He credits Carol Vorderman for helping Weird Bristol grow after she tweeted a link, pushing him from a few dozen followers to almost 1000 overnight.

Further Weird Bristol includes looks at Westbury-on-Trym, Knowle West and Troopers Hill, with countryside walks and cemetery walks. “I looked at the places that I might have overlooked or missed in the past and filled them in, visited these places looking for bits and pieces and curiosities that people not know about and then started writing about it.”

This may be the end of the “core” trilogy of the Weird Bristol books according to Charlie, but this is not the end for his non-fiction books about the city, with future works possibly focussing on true crime and the supernatural, two particular interests of his having previously co-hosted a podcast called The Spooktator.

Charlie says he was already drinking too much before the pandemic but lockdown became “a really good excuse to drink more” while living off the royalties from his books.

“So there was nothing stopping me being able to drink whenever I wanted to and it began and it snowballed and after a few months of lockdown I had gone from being someone who was a heavy drinker, a problem drinker, to a full-blown alcoholic.”

Charlie’s drinking came to a head in June 2022 when he decided to go cold-turkey, going without any alcohol at all for three days before collapsing and having a suspected seizure as part of the withdrawal process.

He was rushed to the BRI and kept there for one month while gradually getting better but then catching Covid in the hospital.

“I had a very lucky escape,” he admits. “At one point it was 50-50 whether I was going to make it and that was before I got Covid.”

Charlie then stayed in the Covid ward before being moved back to the liver ward and leaving hospital on July 11 2022, being told that he should not drink ever again and not touching a drop since. He had to walk with a Zimmer frame and then a walking stick but now walks unaided.

The book of course had to be put on the back burner, with Further Weird Bristol beginning to take shape at the start of 2023 with Charlie “feeling a lot better and more positive about the future”.

“I thought that I just needed to get back into writing again. But that was the bit I felt the most worried about. Being in hospital and feeling like I had lost a lot of my brain capacity, I felt like I might not be able to write again.

“So when my faculties slowly started coming back piece by piece, when my brain came back, I wanted to come back and finish this trilogy.

“I wanted to complete it not just because I think it’s a very good book but because it has really meant something to me. I wanted to complete what I set out to do and it feels like a bit of a triumph now getting it done…

“Considering that the Twitter account started out with so little expectations, for it to have escalated so much, I sometimes have to take a step back and think, wow, this is really impressive that I have managed to do this.”

Main photo: Martin Booth

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• ‘Bristol has and always will be the place that saved me’

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