The Bristol collective on a vegan mission

It’s an inauspicious location for a social revolution but behind the door of an office block in St Paul’s is the headquarters of Viva. You may not have heard of it but the group is the powerhouse behind the burgeoning vegan movement and for the past 21 years the driving force of the group has been its founder and director Juliet Gellately.

From her small office looking out over the car park she has spearheaded campaigns against factory farming, infiltrated and exposed inhumane conditions that some farm animals are kept in, and mobilised some of the best know vegans in the world to support her campaigns.

She’s enlisted everyone from Paul McCartney to Game of Thrones star Jerome Flynn to speak out for veganism and after two decades she feels that their collective voice is finally being heard.

“When I first started campaigning people were intrigued but they were into eating traditional Sunday roasts and meat every night…people really didn’t understand the issues or connect their diet with health at all.

“I worked very hard and saw attitudes shift markedly…being a vegan has now moved from being very much white and middle-class to spreading through all walks of society.” 

Juliet has taken her campaign and her camera into the very heart of the farming industry filming exposes of farms and farming practises.

“I decided right from the start of Viva that I wanted to film exposes. I wanted to boldly and proudly banged the drum for animals.”

However, facing up to the food lobby and the farmers is not for wallflowers and Juliet is very much the face of Viva’s campaigns fronting the videos herself.

“It’s very difficult because I feel huge trepidation before I go into these places because I care about these animals. I’m in there to perform a job; record that information get it out there to a much wider public but it’s very hard…you make connections.

“You are helpless in a sense – you know you can’t rescue 10,000 animals so you are putting yourself through an ordeal but you balance that with what they are going through.

“I have a job to do and tell the public that this is the reality.”

The charity’s logo ‘Vegan is a state of kind’ is all well and good but for years sourcing decent alternatives to meat was hard. “In my 20s as a vegetarian eating out meant omelette and chips,” says Juliet.  

“However, if you take Bristol over the last 18 months there have been 10 vegetarian or vegan restaurants opening up. Vegans and meat menus sit side-by-side in many restaurants and people now accept that veganism is a magnificent culinary art in its own right done correctly. 

For Juliet being a vegan is much more than just a lifestyle choice – she is on a mission to save the world from itself.

“People can see that the world is dying – what we consume really matters. Social media is changing people’s attitudes and more and more people in their 20s are getting involved. Communication is much more powerful than it’s ever been before.”

Read more: Seven of the best vegan restaurants in Bristol