My Bristol favourites: Joe Berger

Joe Berger is a cartoonist, animator and children’s book illustrator.

“My Bristol is one of two halves,” says Joe, who was born in the city but left for London aged 20 only to return 17 years later in 2006.

“I returned with my wife and our three girls, to an area only five minutes walk from where I grew up. The place has changed, undoubtedly, and so have I – but I’m still regularly floored by stumbling across a location that unlocks a cupboard-full of memories.”

Here are Joe’s top-five Bristol favourites:

Forever People
“Growing up here, Forever People Comics on Park Street was a constant haunt, not  least because my parents disapproved of its seediness. The small annex devoted to illicit underground comics fascinated and disturbed me in equal measure, and I still remember the guilt and wonder with which I snuck home the first issue of Robert Crumb’s Hup (below). Forever People finally closed its doors during my London hiatus, but Area 51 on Gloucester Road retains some of its dusky charms (and, I think, the occasional staff member), as well as a vast array of modern board games, which have mostly replaced comics as my ‘decadent’ pleasure.”

Clifton rock slide
“‘The slidey rocks’, as we used to call them when I was a kid, are an enduring Bristol feature – one that I couldn’t wait to introduce my girls to when we returned. The screaming, the blood, the A&E dash – I presume the only reason they’re not officially promoted as a tourist attraction is because the personal damages lawsuits would cripple the city. The first 30,000 years of prehistoric sliders are the real heroes of Bristol I think – we can only slide today because of their selfless efforts polishing the rocks. It can’t have been fun.”

Royal Fort Gardens
“Such a tranquil, hidden little spot in the middle of the University, the Royal Fort gardens are a fabulous place to take children for a picnic and a runaround after school, and to collect frogspawn/fall in the pond in the spring. Back in the 80s, my teenage summer nights always ended here, with a beer and a bit of Springsteen on the boombox. Mint.”

The mirror maze, undoubtedly one of #Bristol‘s best kept secrets pic.twitter.com/uOYx7SxWjV

— Tim Allsop (@timallsop) May 9, 2015

George’s bookshop
“Another Park Street institution that is gone but not forgotten, having morphed into Blackwell’s and about to disappear from the location altogether, so I hear. Back in the 80s, George’s had a fleet of specialist bookshops on Park Street, and its computing bookshop is where my dad and I bought pixel-perfect BBC Micro versions of Defender and Asteroids, and the still un-bettered Elite. More edifyingly, perhaps, George’s (and The Clifton Bookshop) is where my mum used to take my sister and me to buy a book once a month; a genuine treat. It’s also where I had my first job after leaving school, trundling the nightmarish Slingsby blue bins along There and Back Again Lane from the stockroom to each of the branches.”

Bristol Central Library
“As kids, we seemed to visit the library a couple of times a week, always in the evenings (can this be right?). After dinner my dad would drive my sister and me down there, and we would search for books to use our pink library cards on (I still remember when I graduated to grown-up green ones), while he researched… I’m not entirely sure what. As a teen, it was where I went to borrow LPs for illicit home-taping, when I couldn’t afford an album from Rayners or Replay on Park Street. Revisiting the library on my return to Bristol, much has changed: but the smell remains. The smell (of books? bones?) that still lingers in the cool marble-floored entrance transports me immediately back to 1981 – it must be preserved for eternity. The smell. And the library.”