Bristol Brutal

Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Here's another short photo-essay from my recent Bristol dérive.  In this case, it features a series of architectural studies, of often-overlooked corners of the city - each stumbled upon, rather than sought-out, during my perambulations.

The Bristol Hotel, Narrow Quay, Bristol, April 2019

Anyone familiar with Bristol will know it's all too easy to be seduced by the Georgian, Regency and Victorian architectural styles, which still characterise much of the city - dating from the period of its spectacular mercantile expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries.  There's no denying that there's much to enjoy there, in terms of sheer visual (or atmospheric) environment.  But it's also important to remember that much of what now appears charming and quaint was built with the proceeds from massively exploitative colonial expansion, the trades in alcohol and tobacco, and most disturbingly - slavery.  Indeed, Bristol's dirty history as a major nexus of the slave trade is still commemorated in specific place names - not least Whiteladies Road, Blackboy Hill, and the various locations named after famed slave trader and so-called 'philanthropist' Edward Colston. 

Either way, Bristol has reinvented itself more than once since those days. Notably, it has  currently thrown-up numerous pockets of much more contemporary redevelopment -  often styled with the kind of sleek, almost hyper-real, minimalism beloved of late-stage Capitalism.  Such buildings often seem to incorporate highly reflective surfaces that seem to camouflage their real intent by throwing our own image back at us - or else the kind of curtain-walled transparency that might privilege the idea of transparency over any real insight into the interior workings of a specific institution.  Increasingly, there is almost a sense of architecture as a series of monumental screens - an analogue of the pocket-sized portals to the digital realm  we all now routinely carry.

Millennium Square, Cannon's Marsh, Bristol, April 2019

In Bristol, one such notable example would be the Millennium Square complex.  Nominally an attempt to re-imagine the old quayside hinterland of Canon's Marsh, as an 'exciting' public space, there's a strangely alienating Science Fiction quality at work here, with its huge mirrored sphere, geometric reflecting ponds, and purpose-built facades (suggesting the clean machine ethic of racked server towers).  Even those original dockside buildings that remain have been spruced up to become the carriers of blandly inspirational texts, or to incorporate an actual large video screen.

It occurs to me that the two most overtly favoured forms of architectural expressions at work in contemporary Bristol thus appear to reflect the city's commercial drive across the centuries, over any more civic aspirations.  This is as true of the rapacious sea-faring mercantilism evoked in the picturesque legacy of heritage Bristol, as it is of the race to monetise services and, above all - information, that informs its most recent manifestations.   

Freemantle Square, Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Reflecting (quite literally, in certain cases) on all of this, is fascinating, but there's another, perhaps less expected Bristol too - as demonstrated by most of these images.  This is the often arbitrary intervention of certain jarring elements of twentieth-century Modernism, or else - a kind of supremely quotidian functionalism, into the mix.  Thus, I could wander through picturesque Cotham, arriving at the charming (and personally nostalgic) Freemantle Square, only to turn a corner, and be suddenly confronted by a series of startlingly antithetical blocks of tawdry Brutalist public housing.  Clinging to the edge of Kingsdown, as it descends to Stokes Croft below, these feel like ramparts, from which one might survey wide tracts of the city as if from a disconnected, parallel timescale.  They're like a point of chronological fracture, or alternative history - just as they represent a rupture in physical and architectural space.

Clifton, Bristol, April 2019

Elsewhere, I found found myself pausing, on the steep climb from historic Park Street - and up to Clifton (that pinnacle of old, moneyed Bristol), only to find myself peering through concrete slats into a basement car-park so baldly functional as to seem totally decontextualised - like a pocket of parallel reality, or a portal through which one might leave the world outside behind.  A little further, a battered steel box, aspirated noisily through the slatted grille occupying its front face.  It was unexplained by its surroundings, and ignored by all other passers-by, and I'm left wondering exactly what kind of hidden subterranean realm might by served by such a ventilation duct.

Clifton, Bristol, April 2019

High Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Another, similar, basement space was to be observed, screened behind security gates at High Kingsdown.  This is part of a self-contained realm of modernist estate housing, inserted into the older and more organic surrounding neighbourhood, in another incidence of arresting architectural juxtaposition.  Possibly planned to provide staff housing for the nearby hospital (I'm guessing), the stylistic contrast with its neighbouring areas is so marked as to suggest it might even be some kind of independent micro-state.  I passed through freely, in the event - but expected to be challenged for my papers at any moment.   

Sir James Barton, Roundabout, Bristol, April 2019

Overlooking the rim of 'The Bearpit' at St James Barton Roundabout (itself, a whole other story - almost resembling a kind of post-apocalyptic anarcho-shanty town, these days), I found a grid of shabby mirrored windows in whose bleak signage, the commercial property boom seems to have been reduced to a kind of panicky fire sale. Nearby, a disability access lift has been inserted into a narrow aperture - resembling nothing so much as some kind of transporter unit - from which one might be beamed onto to the surface of a different planet altogether.  However, the broken bottle shards, alongside, and clearly compromised 'safety' barrier, are hardly reassuring - a situation unalleviated  by a few runs of hazard tape, inexpertly applied to the lift itself.  Would one's scrambled atoms ever be successfully reassembled in their correct configuration by such a dubious-looking unit? - we might ask (Scotty).

Sir James Barton Roundabout, Bristol, April 2019

Perhaps the most dramatic juxtaposition of all comes in the form of The Bristol Hotel & Conference Centre.  It's a building I've always found thrilling in its breathtaking incongruity.  With historic Queen's Square to one side, and the repurposed industrial archeology of the old Floating Harbour, to the other - one can only stand before its stark, pre-cast grids, and the even more dramatic latticework of its carpark facade, and marvel at the misguided conviction of its architects - that theirs' was the real future to build.

Of course, such buildings are generally regarded as little more than a pernicious blight, these days.  It's amazing just how many have already been swept away around the country, and I can only assume this one survives because it's prime city centre location has caused the hotel it houses to thrive as a business.

The Bristol Hotel, Narrow Quay, Bristol, April 2019

Much has been written about how the Modernism of the post-war twentieth century, and the brief moment of social(ist) consensus it represents, now feels indicative of a kind of future that never was.  Such ideas have spawned much of the recent pop-cultural re-imagining of the idea of Hauntology, as well as the awakening of a kind of alt-heritage impulse amongst Leftists, the self-consciously design savvy, and those inclined to embrace irony, or contrarianism.  But I think it would be disingenuous not to allow that there's probably a significant element of good old fashioned nostalgia at play too.  For some of us, of a certain vintage, such buildings represent a world we were born into - one whose naive Utopianism might have suggested the beginning of a more idealistic age, but which now seems, instead, to mark an end to innocence altogether.

If the main impulse behind my little West-Country excursion was a degree of autobiographical reprocessing (as I think it was), the meditations above are really only part of a more personal emotional journey.  They definitely represent certain familiar ideas that I've connected with in different cities, over recent years.  But, perhaps because of the even more dramatic architectural juxtapositions at play in Bristol, they seemed to swim into even sharper focus at various points during my brief stay.  Also, whatever cod-philosophy I might dress it all up in, you already know how much I love to photograph those straight edges and formal geometries, as well as all that delicious bleakness  - don't you?