Give me our grisly past over latte culture

This comment article is written by Tom Phillips

To be honest, after more than five years, I have got used to it. At least to the point where I no longer stop on the pavement and vomit every time I cross the footbridge from Coronation Road and find myself facing the rank of plasticized billboards, aka The Great Wall of Wapping Wharf.

It’s not, though, the meaningless advertising rhetoric about putting heart back into the harbourside or similar guff, it’s not even the touched-up photos of aspirational white middle-class folk slurping lattes that threaten to bring out my gibbering inner Russell Brand.

In the early days of The Wall, in fact, most of the panels were blank and some poor minion had the thankless task of going along it every morning, painting over the irate scribbling of the night before, most of which appeared to involved the phrase ‘capitalist scum’ and a variously inventive string of expletives (and no, that wasn’t me, your honour).

Even then, in its unadorned state, like a pre-graffitied version of the Berlin Wall, it used to piss me off – generally because at that time, long before any building work actually started on Wapping Wharf, it seemed like a completely arbitrary act of enclosure and, more specifically, it marooned an important – and venerably rusty – piece of Bristol’s history behind a large white fence.

It still strikes me as decidedly odd that whoever owns that chunk of land was ever allowed to block off the New Gaol gate. Sure, it’s not the city’s most beautiful landmark, but it’s where the Bristol Riots reached their fiery apotheosis in 1831 and where, between 1821 and 1849, various felons were dispatched from the gallows on top of the gatehouse, often in front of crowds running into the thousands.

In short, it’s a reminder of cruel and grisly times, of some of the injustices which accompanied the era of industrial revolution and, oh yes, the origins of capitalism. Maybe that’s one of the reasons developers want to keep it parked behind a cordon of cheery billboards about retail outlets and boutique hotels.

Either way, I can’t imagine anyone agreeing to a bit of the Tower of London or the Menin Gate being stuck behind what’s almost certainly referred to by the kind of blank-brained middle managers featured on the billboards as a modular advertising solution.

OK, so at least part of the gate is still visible, but that’s not the point. For a while, in fact, The Wall itself was entirely pointless. There was a phase in its history, after all, when anyone could take the short-lived path by the equally short-lived Mud Dock Deli across the car park behind the M Shed and simply circumvent the glossy abomination.

That was when ‘archaeology’ was allegedly going on, most of it seemingly involving JCBs but without so much as a chirpy quip from Tony Robinson. Whatever happened to whatever was ‘discovered’ then? Or was that just a pragmatic nod towards ‘forwarding our heritage platform going forward’?

As you can probably tell, The Great Wall has, over the course of several years, tangled with my grasp of the English language and of the syntax of logic. It’s not the worst thing that humanity’s ever done to the planet, our shared history or ourselves by a long chalk, but in the Venn diagram of atrocity, it’s hanging in there on the outer fringes – a modest but insidious manifestation of a value system which makes ‘lifestyle’ sound like something we have to achieve rather than something we just have. For my money, I’d rather look at a rusty gate.