‘Bristol’s rebel heart is getting bigger’

There’s a little worry that tugs at Bristolian hearts every time you read another glowing restaurant review, or see that Bristol has once again been named ‘Best One to Move To From London’ by a national broadsheet.

Or more catastrophically, hear about a community space like Hamilton House on Stokes Croft running into strife with its property owners. There goes the neighbourhood; the city’s rebel heart. A flattening. A loss of something real. The old story of gentrification.

But if reality is made by the stories we tell about it, it’s weird but that one might not fit this city. There’s another one, about Bristol’s rebel heart getting bigger.

This story says that when ‘grown-up’ isn’t about nice delis and property prices, but thinking and planning and making the future we want, not just the one we’re given, then we’re way more grown-up than those other places that have caved in.

The seeds of this go back a long time, to riots and rebellions including but not limited to those kids in the 1980s who made space for music and parties in Thatcher’s Britain, hiring generators for sound systems and buying imported 12”s.

And the ones who landed here from the party scene in the early 90s and injected their spirit of collectivity into homegrown festivals like Shambala and Boomtown.

Whatever it was that made any of it happen, it’s still here in a big city where people smile at strangers. Not having cash for so long has made us a have-a-go city and that have-a-go is exemplified in the work of so many people who base their businesses here.

It’s in the work of Grow Bristol, who grow food in shipping containers on disused land that nobody wants. It’s in Ashley Vale Action Group raising funds to buy a farm for affordable homes by the M32. Or the work at Barton Hill Settlement, or places like Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio where, to keep art and technology in the centre of the city, they gift resident artists space to collaborate (the contract states that you must be “generous and interruptible” on the basis that every idea gets better by sharing it).

There’s more money in the city, but still more evidence of community-building. That’s the real vanguard of culture right now because most people have forgotten how to do it.

Bristol is in no way perfect. The battle for community space is not going to end anytime soon and we can’t pretend we all live in the same Bristol, or even a progressive one, when our racial and economic inequality charts so shamefully high. Or, as Delroy Hibbert, a Bristolian and St Paul’s dweller all his life, put it, “Bristol is consistently ‘could do better’”.

But despite its evident loveliness on a sunny day in October, Bristol has never fallen in love with its own reflection. Not so that a person wouldn’t feel free to play their trumpet alone on a Sunday night in the St Werburgh’s tunnel because they like the acoustics. Or bring back St Paul’s Carnival after its hiatus, and let it be as wild and amazing as ever (“that wouldn’t happen in another city,” says Delroy).

Countering Colston was a successful campaign to get Colston Hall renamed and question the celebration of its slave trader namesake.

There are organisations like the Collective Liberation Project, which fuses social justice education with mindfulness and art therapy, so people can understand how issues such as racism and sexism affect our bodies as well as our communities.

Coexist, who make Hamilton House what it is, and aren’t giving up anytime soon. Places like The Haven, a piece of land in Easton run and used by ex-addicts, the Somali Kitchen, and Felix Road Adventure Playground, have also been created by people having a go at new ideas and a new future.

The capacity to ask questions that make Bristol feel like Bristol is the reason why hundreds of fresh thinkers and makers, and thousands of visitors will be at the Arnolfini from November 8-11, for KIN, a massive living experiment to reimagine the story of the world if you added a massive extra dose of kindness. It’s hard to imagine where but here it could even happen.

Every week on the billboards at the junction of Mina Road and James Road in St Werburghs, the owners paste up fresh ads, and every week someone takes a spray can to them with witty reminders of how toxic consumer culture can be.

This week on the billboards, the spray can has been preempted by ads for KIN, not cars and fish fingers.

They read: “What would happen if Bristolians ran the world?” and someone’s already scribbled “refugees would be welcomed”, “cider would come out of the taps,” and “f**k all.”

Defacing billboards and making street art is how Bristol talks to itself, and as usual the city slightly underplays its hand. But when everybody else is overplaying theirs, this feels like being a proper grown-up, and possibly the exact kind the world needs right now.

Jessica Brinton and Melissa Kidd are part of the KIN Collective and long-time Bristol dwellers