'It's The End Of The World As We Know It...'

All Images:  Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

I recently spent a couple of days revisiting some of my old haunts in Bristol - mostly in search of fresh sights, and perhaps - a general battery re-charge.  There was possibly also an element of processing my long-term past - with certain mixed emotions, I'll admit.  However, the overall experience was a positive one, and I returned with a camera full of new images, notebook pages of scrawled ideas for possible writings, a stack of tempting new books (purchased for a song), and a head full of competing ideas.  

It was fascinating to see how much certain areas of Bristol had changed since my last visit (nearly a decade ago), but also just how unchanged much else was - even since I lived there from 1981 - 87.  It always felt like a city of almost polar opposites - hiding behind a generally benevolent facade of slightly scruffy gentility, and if anything - those dichotomies feel even more magnified in the twenty-first century.  Thus it is that the complacency of serious wealth sits cheek by jowl with genuine deprivation, startling (almost Science Fiction-grade) redevelopment faces off against tracts of near dereliction, and aspirational lifestyles butt up against zones of experience resembling something close to the post-apocalyptic.  

It was also intriguing to witness how engaged Bristolians appear to be with the whole Extinction Rebellion phenomenon, blowing up in the public consciousness, of late.  I've yet to encounter a single piece of E.R. publicity material here in Leicester - whilst significant tracts of Bristol are positively wallpapered with it.  Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised.  For all of its somewhat laid-back demeanour, Bristol is, after all, a major economic and cultural powerhouse in the south of England, and generally much further ahead of most curves than anywhere here in the somewhat retrograde East Midlands.  I'll confess to feeling like something of a provincial hick as I collected the various examples here (all bagged within a few hundred metres).

I'm also struck by how stylish and genuinely design-conscious E.R. posters tend to be.  If we really are witnessing the end of environmental days - as many far cleverer folk than I, clearly believe - should we be genuinely thankful, or slightly perplexed, that those seriously engaging have found time to attend to the quality of the graphics?  Is that, in itself, another sign of our species' slightly skewed priorities - or should we be glad that someone understands the importance of effective communication techniques in getting a serious message across?

As can also be seen in certain of these examples, the burning issues under discussion must still fight for our attention, amongst the myriad other meanings and messages layered onto the physical street.  Exposed to the elements (however acidic or super-heated), paper  posters will do what they always have - becoming gradually absorbed into the mulch of information accreting on urban streets, in the kind of found collage my camera can never resist.  Given the overriding theme of extinction - I guess that's only appropriate, really.