In their own words: Matthew Montagu-Pollock

Journalist and campaigner Matthew Montagu-Pollock has spent nearly a decade engaged in a battle against the mayor to rid the city of high rises.

In this edition of ‘In their own words’, Matthew discusses Marvin Rees’ plans to build Bristol up, looking back at Bristol’s historic urban planners and exploring different ideas for our city.

Matthew breaks down the defences for high rises, and argues the administration in Bristol should look instead to build a ‘mid rise’ city that prioritises sustainability and community, while retaining the city’s architectural heritage, to ensure the city’s future prosperity.

“I  came to Bristol in 2011 after 23 years in Asia”
“I  came to Bristol in 2011 after 23 years in Asia, and I was attracted to Bristol because I found it a very pretty place. The harbour is very attractive. Lots of the suburbs are very attractive, and it has these pleasant green hills around. And then in 2016, Marvin Rees got elected and quite soon after that he started talking about his desire to make the city a high rise city. And this was in his first talk at the Wills Building.

“I was puzzled by this. There was no justification for it offered except for ambition and energy, and there’d been no mention of building high in his manifesto.  It would seem to me that if you really wanted to change the built topography of Bristol entirely, which is what he claimed to want to do, you might tell people that that was your intention before you got elected.”

Bristol’s historic architecture and bustling harbour side has attracted tourists from far afield – photo by Ellie Pipe

“A fairly central part of Bristol is the way it looks”
“A fairly central part of Bristol is the way it looks. And it seemed that Marvin really was serious. He set up a plan to invite developers into the city, and Nicola Beech was appointed head of planning and was very active. And I got worried and joined the Civic Society and they seemed not to be keen to push the objections to this as vigorously as I thought they should be approached.

“So I set up my own little group called the Bristol Campaign Against High Rises. I set up a Facebook group, started teaching and started learning about architecture because my background wasn’t at all in architecture. I was a financial journalist. So I went online and went to universities like the Bartlett and read all the reading lists to try and understand what planners actually thought of what Marvin was doing.”

“There’s just an enormous amount of building going on at the moment”
“I spent quite a lot of time educating myself, and I started a campaign, which made a certain amount of noise. I got a certain amount of publicity in newspapers, but the campaign hasn’t been successful since. There’s just an enormous amount of building going on at the moment, lots of plans being put forward. It’s very alarming to anyone who cares about Bristol. Bristol is a very unique city. It’s also a pretty rich city and its attractiveness is part of what draws people to it.

The demolition of the Premier Inn overlooking the Bearpit could see two towers built in its place of 28 and 18 storeys – image: Olympian Homes

“For me, at the moment we are really in a very worrying situation”
“So, for me, at the moment we are really in a very worrying situation. Ongoing proposals include the Rupert Street car park, which is a horrendously tall building, the Premier Inn, which is two tall buildings, Debenhams, Castle Park View – which is already up, Gorham Castle Park, which may be a 33 storey building, the Galleries, which would be a 28 storey building, St Mary Le Port, which has three very, very tall and large prominent buildings and then many, many buildings on Temple Quay.”

“The idea is that soon Bristol will be full of these tower blocks, and then the success of filling Bristol with tower blocks would be copied by other cities because they would see how wonderfully successful Bristol has been.”

“We know this is not what Bristolian want for their cities”
“We know this is not what Bristolian want for their cities. We know it partly because Nicola Beech became head of planning and went out to put in a new supplementary planning document which is necessary once every five years. And there was a consultation where they asked lots of questions about whether people were in favour of high rises and 85 to 90 per cent of the answers came back with a “no, that’s not what we want for the city.””

“If you are ambitious, you have to show that you are doing something and getting stuff done”
So why are they doing this? I think it’s a combination of taste – Marvin really seems to think that tall buildings are beautiful and attractive – and a desire to achieve something. If you are a mayor and we are in a period of austerity, that means the city has no money. If you are ambitious, you have to show that you are doing something and getting stuff done. ”

“Some people will say, why are you objecting to this – we’re in a housing crisis? But there are several reasons why I do”
“Bristol is a historic city. When we go abroad to cities like Munich, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Toulouse or Vienna, we don’t go to see high rises, we go to see the older city.

“Secondly, as living places, people are less happy in high rises, they are less sociable. All kinds of sociological tests have been done to see whether if you leave something in the corridor, whether people pick it up and try to return it. The taller you go, the less this kind of process of social activity happens there. It’s also not great for women with children. How can they let their kids out to play?

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Read next: The reality of life in Bristol tower block

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“Thirdly, tall buildings are more expensive to build. People who are particularly affected by the housing crisis are the poorer parts of the population, and if you build a tall building, this can cost about 40 per cent more to build than a mid-rise building. So you will get much less affordable housing.

“You also take the centre of the city and block out one of the things which we enjoy so much about the city, such as the green hills in the distance. To be surrounded by greenery is part of what makes people happy. Do we want to destroy these views? This is particularly the case in Castle Park. A lot of these new buildings are coming up around Castle Park. It’s going to be completely surrounded on all sides by very, very tall buildings. So it’s going to be dark and you’re not going to be able to see the hills beyond.”

Castle Park today – photo: Mia Vines Booth

“It’s also not as if we don’t have places where we can build. I think an ambition for the city should be to build mid-rise streets in places like St Phillips, which is a fairly large area. People prefer to be in mid-rise or low rise properties. It’s so large that it’s such a perfect site. Of course, there is a flooding problem, which I believe is being dealt with in one way or another. But St Phillips has such a perfect position because it’s just next to the station. It’s just next to water, and has a large road next to it. It’s a perfect place to put a mini city, basically. And I was very surprised and shocked when I found how little planning had been done.”

“It is an illusion to think that if you build tall, you are necessarily able to house more people”
“I understand that we want to densify the city and that we want to have a city where people can walk around, but you can do that without building skyscrapers. The most dense cities in Europe are Paris and Barcelona, which are 18th and 19th century cities.

“In Bristol, a whole lot of the city was bombed to smithereens during the war, like Castle Park, and we wanted to rebuild. What they decided to do was to build enormous roads through a lot of Bristol, which caused a lot of knocking down of houses in working class neighbourhoods.

“Nobody in the council could understand the idea that you might want to live on the edge of the harbour because it was seen as a smelly, dirty place. So they decided to fill it in and concrete it over and put offices around it. So there was a period where the historic core of Bristol was threatened.”

Bristol’s harbourside in the 1950s before the cascade steps were built. The gates to the Watershed and Za Za Bazar can be seen on the bottom right hand corner

“When you walk around the harbour today, it’s an outstanding success”
“Then a man called Ian Patterson was eventually appointed as head of planning. He still lives in Southville. He was a Glaswegian socialist who was furious at what was being done to Bristol.

“Patterson created the harbour as it now is. He insisted that a harbour surrounded by offices was not what we wanted. And he insisted that what did go there paid some homage to what was built previously around Bristol. When you walk around the harbour today and you see these very low rise buildings everywhere, it’s an outstanding success.

“So when the current mayor talks of getting stuff done, I think he ought to go back and look at what Ian Patterson did, because Ian Patterson created the most beautiful part of Bristol and never gets any credit for it.”

Bristol Civic Society has slammed plans are for 500 new homes, up to 2,000 new jobs, and a new hotel and conference centre on Temple Island – photo: Legal & General

“The negative response to Marvin’s plans has been largely from local people”
“The negative response to Marvin’s plans has been largely from local people like the Windmill Hill group, which have been meeting for five or six years to try and draw up plans. But when you ask people to help in saving the centre, you don’t get a response.”

“The Civic Society took the view that it shouldn’t really campaign and that it should be polite and not make a fuss. But as they’ve realised the lengths to which Marvin is prepared to go in the last few weeks, they have started speaking out and effectively campaigning.”

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Read more: Civic society slams Temple Island plans as ‘unattractive’ and ‘too tall’

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“The easy route has been taken, rather than the integrated route”
“It’s not just a question of taking one piece of land and boom, high rise on it. It’s a question of designing a city. You’ve got to design the schools and the playgrounds. It’s a complicated business and it takes time.

“On that note, I’m reviving my campaign, so I’m very, very keen to have people. One of the things we’re going to do is go out and poll people and present them with four or eight pictures of buildings and say, if one of these was going to be built near you, which one would you prefer? So we have a sense of what people want built in Bristol. Those interested can email me at [email protected].

Main photo: Mia Vines Booth

Read next:

• Where should Bristol build homes in the midst of a housing crisis?
• Is Bedminster ready for a high rise boom?
• Civic Society slams Temple Island plans as ‘unattractive’ and ‘too tall’
• In their own words: Catherine Withers
  

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