“Bristol is perhaps the one southern city which really feels independent of London,” writes Owen Hatherley in his brilliant architectural travelogue A New Kind Of Bleak. During the six weeks I have spent immersing myself in four English cities, that book and its predecessor, A Guide To The New Ruins Of Great Britain, always came with me – and in Bristol, the former works as an unflinchingly honest guidebook.

It is undeniably true that, as Hatherley points out, the bleak area around Temple Meads station is currently “one of the worst introductions to a city in the UK”. It’s true, too, that anyone looking for good buildings here can find “an enormous amount to admire … late medieval, Regency and early industrial architecture …. almost always decontextualised, thrown into collision with something hostile.”

Such juxtapositions might be assumed to be the result of poor urban planning, but many of them feel unavoidable: the simple result of history, and the fact that most big cities have a geological quality, with buildings denoting periods like layers in rock – and harking back to specific events, and particular people.

Temple Meads station, for example, sits a mile or so out of the city centre because the 19th-century city fathers refused Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s requests to bring the railway all the way to Bristol’s dockside. Some of the city centre’s modernist constructions are the legacy of German bomber pilots; going back further, the Colston Hall and Tower are named after Edward Colston, a 17th-century merchant, local philanthropist and MP who made much of his money from the city’s once-lucrative slave trade.

The good thing that’s happened in Bristol over the last 30 years is people coming back to live in the city centre George Ferguson

In his famous book English Journey, JB Priestley salutes Bristol as “a real old city, an ancient capital in miniature” – and its built environment proves his point. But history is not the only thing captured in its brickwork. The buildings in the city’s wildly different neighbourhoods also speak volumes about inequality, that huge problem seemingly embedded in most modern cities, which the onward march of free-market economics only seems to be making worse.

Here, no end of contrasting examples of the wealth gap present themselves. Ten minutes walk from the city centre is Redcliffe, and a forlorn clump of low-rise flats I visited during the general election, when one local woman cagily opened her door and told me she would vote for anyone who offered her a bit of hope. But aim yourself in a different direction, and you soon find yourself in Clifton, a byword not just for Brunel’s suspension bridge but café society, shabby-chic boutiques, and five-bedroom houses that go for over £1.5m.

Bristol has a population of around 442,000, making it southern England’s second most populous city. It is newly fashionable, attracting émigrés from across Britain, and beyond. In the time I spend here, I get a sense of an uneasy mixture of moods: solid confidence and contagious civic pride, often mixed with the sense that the place is changing fast, in ways that some people find very hard to take.

Bristol’s red-trousered mayor, George Ferguson, at the city’s international kite festival. Photograph: Redorbital/Demotix/Corbis

Maverick streak

Bristol was the only English city to vote for an elected mayor in the referendums that took place in 2012, something put down to the apparent chaos of its politics (between 2001 and 2011, the old city council was led by seven different people) and the city’s ancient fondness for doing its own thing.

That maverick streak was also manifested in the person eventually elected to the job: George Ferguson, now 68, a red-trousered independent who styles himself as an “establishment rebel” and was once a member of the old Liberal Party. He is also that rare thing: an architect-turned-politician with an array of successful projects behind him, and an array of opinions about what Bristol looks like, and the forces that have pushed its physical environment in this or that direction.



Bristol is clearly being changed by the consequences of London’s impossible property prices

When I spend an hour talking to him in a functional office block near the aforementioned railway station, he begins by explaining how he feels about modern Bristol’s cityscape. “Architecturally, I think it’s disappointing,” he says, and off we go: through 15 minutes that takes in the kind of supposed regeneration led by supermarkets and high-volume housebuilders (“I think that’s actually degeneration,” says Ferguson), and the danger of reducing the redevelopment of cities to mere numbers. He also talks about the area of the city now called Harbourside, which presents a pretty soulless vision of clinical apartment blocks and streets that usually feel devoid of life – a product, he says, of “big architecture” taking precedence over “good urban design”.

He then accentuates the positive. “The good thing that’s happened in Bristol over the last 30 years is people coming back to live in the city centre,” he says. “When I first came to Bristol, there were probably half a dozen people who did that. That’s definitely a move in the right direction; I don’t mean it’s all good development, but certainly that has made the city centre a real place, with a much greater mix.”

Some of this, it seems, is traceable to what is happening in London. Bristol is clearly being changed by the consequences of the capital’s impossible living costs and property prices, and migration beyond the M25. There are no figures to confirm it, but the city’s coverage in the media speaks volumes: the Sunday Times’s recent claim that Bristol was now the best UK city in which to live; a report by estate agents Knight Frank which identified Bristol as one of four “new prime urban markets” (along with Oxford, Bristol, Bath and Cheltenham); an item on Buzzfeed headlined “19 things every Londoner learns when they move to Bristol”.



“I celebrate London,” Ferguson tells me. “It’s of great benefit to us all.” He cracks a mischievous smile. “But actually, I think it’s of greater benefit to those of us that don’t live in it. Economically, I think we benefit from London’s overheating.”

Artist Fujiko Nakaya creates a fog bridge across Bristol’s Harbourside to mark the city’s year as European Green Capital. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

It is not hard to understand what brings people here. I have lived about 45 minutes’ drive away since 2004, and I come to Bristol whenever I can. Almost as much as Manchester, it is a thriving place, full of cultural vivacity and the sense that it has kept hold of the kind of bohemian corners other cities have mislaid. It often betrays a brilliantly wilful, anarchistic mindset, and has a rich history of sedition and rebellion: riots, political radicalism, nonconformist Christianity.

In its own polite way, Ferguson’s election – albeit on a turnout of 24% – was proof of these traits, though his record so far is more substantial than the clichéd view of him as flamboyant maverick might suggest. As well as developing the city’s green credentials, he has started work on ambitious redevelopment of the area around Temple Meads station, including plans for a new 12,000-capacity arena, and energetically pursued a new housebuilding programme – though he says that cuts forced on him by Westminster are about to stall any progress on that front.

As we talk, Ferguson also acknowledges deeper difficulties. Compared to most of England’s big cities, Bristol is relatively prosperous, but its affluence only throws its problems with deprivation into sharper relief. As he puts it: “If you’re poor in Bristol, you’re poorer than if you’re poor in Liverpool. I had this discussion last week. Council housing is overburdened; affordable housing is meant to be priced at 80% of the market rate – and in Liverpool, generally, 80% of that is nearly half what it is in Bristol. So if you’re poor in Bristol, you’re really, really stretched.”

If you’re poor in Bristol, you’re really, really stretched George Ferguson

When it comes to inequality, most of the policy instruments (such as taxation or any say in the benefits system) that might conceivably be useful are unavailable, and the problem feels deeply ingrained. So must he simply accept things as they are? “I’m not prepared to be that fatalistic,” he says. “It’s an absolute imperative that there has to be movement. But you’re not going to do that in five years; it’s a long game. What’s interesting is, places like St Pauls are actually becoming quite trendy places to live.”

There is a problem with that, though: it sounds like what we all know as gentrification. St Pauls is the inner-city neighbourhood most associated with Bristol’s afro-caribbean population, and therefore a place with a deep sense of history. Its new fashionable status might bring in new people with money to spend, but some people think it also threatens the area’s very identity.

“Well, it’s not gentrification until it tips over,” Ferguson says. “And I think St Pauls has got enough social housing, enough in the way of hostels, enough in the way of cemented alternatives to gentrification …”

He pauses for thought. “Yes, a lot of people have seen that area as an alternative way to live quite close to the city centre, and house prices have gone up … but there’s still a very rich cultural mix. And that is my aim: that the deprived areas get enough investment to keep that cultural mix. Gentrification only becomes a problem when it tips over the edge, like you’ve seen in a lot of American cities, and London. It’s a danger.”

By way of extra emphasis, he repeats himself. “It is a danger. But I think the benefits of private investment in those areas far outweigh the risks, especially in some of the most deprived parts of Bristol.”

The Malcolm X community centre in St Pauls has been hit hard by recent cuts. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

On the ground, these issues feel a lot more complicated – something highlighted by an afternoon spent in St Pauls. On Ashley Road, opposite an imposing set of sandstone Georgian houses long since converted into flats, is the Malcolm X community centre, a facility opened in the wake of the riots here in 1980.

It has a big hall, meeting rooms and a basement recording studio, and hosts services for refugees and older people. It has also been hammered by recent cuts: in 2010, its annual grant from the city council was cut in half, from £70,000 to £35,000, meaning it now has no full-time staff, and depends more on volunteers. At the same time, the demography of this part of Bristol is changing, with consequences for what the centre does, and even what it is called – the council has reportedly suggested it should change its name, something the people in charge have so far resisted.

Amirah Cole, 49, is the centre’s vice-chair. She lives nearby in a rented two-bedroom house with two of her kids: in the last four years, she says, her weekly rent has gone up from £100 to £160, and she says she has no hope of buying a home. In her street, she says, five new people have recently moved in, all from London. “They’re professional-type people,” she says. “They socialise together; they don’t socialise with the rest of us.”

For places like the Malcolm X community centre, such changes have so far only made life more difficult. Cole says she needs active board members: people to see to fundraising, PR, and more. “But people don’t get involved. A lot of the people who would be involved are outside the area now, and a lot of people who live here now don’t have the connection any more. So in terms of running the place, you don’t get that support.”

Stokes Croft is now an international tourist attraction: ‘We have graffiti tours coming round here all the time.’ Photograph: Rufus Cox/Getty Images

Self-organised bohemia

Perhaps the most fascinating example of how much Bristol is changing lies next to St Pauls, in the neighbourhood of Stokes Croft. In April 2011, this was the scene of the so-called Tesco riots: disturbances at least partly triggered by the arrival of a new Tesco convenience store, which only served to highlight Bristol’s reputation for a feisty kind of defiance. The area’s walls are festooned with creative graffiti and huge art pieces: it has a sense of the kind of self-organised bohemia that one might associate with East Berlin, or Greenwich Village before Manhattan’s affluent transformation did for it.



A lot of this is traceable to the work of Chris Chalkley, a 57-year-old embodiment of the radical Bristolian attitude who first came here as a student. Thanks partly to a childhood spent in Staffordshire, his main line of work is bone china, and a workshop and showroom that sell cups, plates and more, decorated in a spirit of creative subversion: mugs featuring the Queen and the words “I eat Swans”, and a new line of Jeremy Corbyn items that are apparently selling very well indeed. This business now turns a profit, and contributes to Chalkley’s other work, as a community activist and leftist entrepreneur, determined to protect Stokes Croft’s singularity and obstruct the forces that, as he sees it, threaten this last redoubt of what cities should be all about.

Around 10 years ago, Chalkley used to drive through Stokes Croft on the way to his old HQ in nearby Montpelier, and look askance at an area with a 30% rate of dereliction. “It was grey,” he says. “It was the kind of the place that if you were going through it, you’d keep your head down and not look left or right. It was an intimidating place … begging, drugs, alcoholics, and the net effect of intervention by the council was to make it incredibly unwelcoming.”

As well as being a byword for social problems, Stokes Croft was a favoured part of town for street artists including the young Banksy – but part of its malaise, as Chalkley saw it, was a policy of painting over their pieces as soon as they appeared. By 2009, when he had shifted his operations to Stokes Croft, he was ready for a battle.

Chris Chalkley, founder of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt

On a new website, he listed all the empty spaces in the area that could be painted on. With the co-operation of a local property owner who allowed an exterior to be decorated, he then picked a fight with the city council, who soon proved unable to follow which artworks were authorised, and unauthorised . And soon enough, as Chalkley renamed his business and wider ventures the People’s Republic Of Stokes Croft, and he extolled the wonders of what he calls “an outdoor art gallery”, the authorities started to back off.

“What that led to was a kind of self-governance scenario,” he says. “And it’s very different now: there’s a recognition that this is significant. We have graffiti tours coming round here all the time.”

What tourists now behold is an area of the city in a delicate state of balance. A visible part of its population is still made up of street drinkers and homeless people, who Chalkley says need more help. In among Stokes Croft’s social enterprises and co-operatives are the kind of independent businesses – cafes, boutiques, art outlets – that always denote a city’s more vibrant areas. But as he himself acknowledges, they also tend to herald changes that often end with rocketing property prices and a kind of ersatz bohemia: a transition some people in Stokes Croft think is already underway.

Chalkley says he was always mindful of this possibility. Now, having bought another big local building from a church and begun letting its rooms out to artists, theatre groups and others, he has set up a co-operative land trust that will issue shares and take control of it early in the new year. The idea, he says, is to set up a structure that will allow the possibility of buying up property so local people can own it.

“It’s really about a new economy,” Chalkley says. “All the major problems that have confronted Stokes Croft are basically about businesses from outside. I think we can be competitive with the forces of darkness. And I can’t see another answer.”

Plans for the redevelopment of the Carriageworks building in Stokes Croft are dividing the local community. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt

Across the road from the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft HQ is the focus of a huge local story. The Carriageworks was designed by the Victorian architect and polymath Edward Godwin and built in 1862, and is now a Grade II* listed building. In 1982, along with a neighbouring office block called Westmoreland House, it became empty. Since 1989, under the ownership of the Comer brothers, billionaire property tycoons based in Ireland, both buildings have been the focus of sporadic planning applications for the site’s redevelopment, as it has fallen into borderline dereliction. As evidenced by the caravans behind a set of locked gates, it is now home to a group of travellers.

In 2011, local campaigners organised as the Carriageworks Action Group carried out a huge consultation involving 1,600 people, and came up with a grassroots plan for a mixed-use development with social housing. By 2013, the city council were ready to introduce a compulsory purchase order and then hand the site’s redevelopment to a housing association, with a view to making this vision a reality. Now, though, a new scheme has been given planning permission: a combination of 113 private apartments and some new business units, to be built by a London-based developer called Fifth Capital – which, in a fairly unprecedented turn of events, was asked by the city council to work with the action group on improving its initial set of plans.

The proposals have visibly changed – most obviously, the development is no longer going to be gated – but Chalkley is still less than impressed, not least with the new development’s complete lack of social housing. “It’s going to look like Cabot Circus [a Bristol shopping centre],” he says. “It’ll completely change the area. It’ll be much more controlled: there won’t be that element of freedom there has been for the last 20 years.”

But there is another view. In the co-operatively run Café Kino, I meet Lori Streich, 59, one of the local people who has been painstakingly working with Fifth Capital. She explains what has been achieved: among other things, “less blocky” architecture and a new accessible space in the development’s centre, which will host a market. She is also pushing for a Bristol social enterprise to manage the new business units and thereby ensure they go to local people (“No chains,” she emphatically insists), and her group’s proposal to put all the apartments under the management of a housing association, so as to avoid the worst aspects of the private market.

When I speak to Marc Pennick, the owner of Fifth Capital, he confirms he is actively pursuing these proposals. He says that as well as 11 affordable flats that will be sold under shared ownership with a housing association, 80% of the 100-or-so other apartments will be privately owned, and sold for around £140,000 for a one-bed, and £210,000 for a two-bed; while 20% will be privately rented. A greater share of affordable homes, let alone social housing, he insists, would simply not be economically viable, not least given the reconstruction work involved. He promises a “centrepoint for Stokes Croft, where people can go to from Monday to Sunday”. He also confirms that there will be no chain businesses.

People who’ve lived here for a long time find the anarchy quite alienating. They need to have their voices heard as well Lori Streich

“I’m sure it’s going to put up property values, because there won’t be a huge derelict suite any more,” Streich tells me. A little later, she says this: “A lot of people who live round here find the area quite depressing. There’s a huge vibrancy about it, and a lot of people are attached to it. But other people who’ve lived here for a very long time find the anarchy quite alienating. And I think they need to have their voices heard as well … there is a sense of wanting something to be a bit more proud of.”

Before leaving for home, in Chalkley’s new community building, I spend half an hour in the company of his most interesting tenants: the small collective who devote their time to the Bristol Cable, a website and quarterly newspaper that stands as a shining example of the inventiveness and energy that cities can foster, and how it enriches civic life. Run as a co-operative, it currently has 500 members, whose financial contributions raise a monthly £1,300 – enough to meet their day-to-day overheads and cover the costs of printing. Over time, the aim is to increase their membership to 2,500, which would bring in as much as £75,000 a year.

Every working day, a small group of people work here, for free. Their mission, they tell me, is to fill the vacuum left by a declining local and regional media, and investigate a tangle of ongoing issues in the city , from the treatment of refugees to the role of money in local politics. Among their most striking pieces so far was an infographic published in April showing the share of new Bristol housing developments given over to “affordable” homes, which has seemingly always fallen well below the 30-to-40% stipulated in official council policy – proof, they say, of how gentrification is axiomatically connected to inequality.

What do they think will be the future of Stokes Croft? “It is changing,” says Alon Aviram, 25. “I think in a few year’s time, there’ll be less drunk people on the street, but I think the graffiti will still be here – ’cos it’s a commodity the city trades on. If you go to Bristol Airport, there are big displays about Banksy. You see it here: every 10 minutes there’s a group of tourists with cameras. But in terms of rising rents and people who are here now moving out – I think that’s probably inevitable.”

His colleague Ellie Coombs, 27, is a self-employed writer and journalist. Thanks to rising living costs, she says she’s just moved out of the inner-city area of Easton to a new rented flat 15 minutes further from Bristol’s centre. She has three different zero-hours jobs, and once her rent and bills are paid, gets through the average month on £100. She talks about clear signs of things changing: landlords selling up, new cafes popping up, and cash-strapped creative people leaving: “You just see everyone taking these steps further and further out.”

Twenty-five-year-old Adam Cantwell issues a final prediction from behind his laptop: “In 10 or 15 years, what Bristol trades off is going to disappear.” What he says sounds like a warning – relevant not just to this city, but anywhere in which rising confidence and thriving creativity are colliding with spiralling property prices and people finding life increasingly impossible. “That’s what I think,” he says. “It’s going to become another standard place that doesn’t have anything to sell to its tourists, and put in its brochures.”

• Festival of the Future City is part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas, 17-20 November 2015. John Harris will be speaking about the future of British cities on 18 November, debating immigration on 19 November, and discussing cities and places with Jonathan Meades on the same day