Be In Bristol

Whiteladies Road, Bristol, August 2024

I’ve just returned from another of my regular short trips to Bristol. Over the last couple of years these have been largely dedicated to collecting material for what has slowly coalesced into my ever-expanding ‘The Basin’ project. That ‘ever-expanding’ quality explains why progress has been slower than originally envisaged (as is so often the case when I dig myself into something). Fortunately, ‘steady’ is also an applicable adjective, and the project continues to feel both relevant and rewarding.

However, it’s definitely time to stop ceaselessly collecting visual raw material, and imperative that the project should now solidify into a more tangible statement. A number of posts on here have featured first drafts of the written ‘chapters’ around which the project is to be structured, and pleasingly, I’m now starting to see some distant glimmers of light at the end of that particular tunnel. Consequently, this most recent trip featured relatively little photographic action around the Cumberland Basin site itself, and rather more general daytime drifting around a wider sweep of Bristol territory, with a few writing hours put in on the laptop once back in the hotel room.

As is inevitably the case, (indeed - the whole point really) drifting leads to observation, reflection and unpredicted leaps of imagination. Here then, are a series of random musings, separate from ‘The Basin’, and connected only by the serendipitously found text appearing in these images:

• Reflection: To simply ‘Be in Bristol’  involves a three-hour motorway drive each way, plus the price of a mid-range hotel room and sundry refreshments. The cost implications of making the state more permanent are intimidating. As one walks away from the estate agent’s window, the undeniable attractions of these streets exerts itself all over again. The old cost-value/quantity-quality dilemmas crash in. 

• Irony: When I was here, in a previous life, education was supported and my income dependant on hand-outs. Housing support covered the rent on a cheap room, at a shabby address, in a charming quarter. It was another century.

• Memory: The landlord carried a replacement refrigerator on his back, up three flights of stairs.

• Cartographical Reflection: Slight diversions reveal the fractal details of the street plan. Hidden lanes, tiny cottages, the obscure climb up to the World’s End.

• Irony: Such newly-uncovered places lie within the shadow of previous homes. It has required intervening decades and a conscious recherché to unfold them from the map.

• Reflection: The economy of this place appears to function through refreshments, relaxation, and the deferment of mortality. Every neighbourhood offers a choice of coffee, tapas, running gear, and beauty fixes. Nail maintenance and the Pilates Zone are readily accessible. Those not drawn in there appear to be renovating heritage properties at a leisurely pace. The suspicion is that far more lucrative flows must operate through subterranean channels.

• Observation: A middle-aged woman on the table adjacent. Exhaustive/ing account (in clipped tones) of her daughter’s recruitment to a rapidly-expanding digital start-up (the interview process, starting salary, share options, possible relocation to New York). In production of what? She’s clearly what they were looking for but the drive to an out-of-town HQ may prove tedious.

• Observation: A man in his dynamic years, with suit jacket over one arm. The other extends a phone to his ear. Street food, cocktails and coffee are imbibed around him in early evening sunlight. Indifference to the detritus building at his feet. Negotiations last longer than the ordering and consumption of several meals.

• Physical Accomodation: At a certain age, the knees of the flaneur require endless perambulation to give way to the cafe table with street view. Close the paperback and laptop for the second coffee. Simply Allow the city to come to you through an open window.

• Observation: The two nearest tables are dedicated to accounts of recent trips and the planning of the next (the perfect Air B&B, the secret restaurant, etc.) On the third, a man in late middle-age scrolls through his screen and quietly dictates the salient points into his phone. The subject is inaudible despite the proximity. His murmur layers into the ambience.

• Observation: At 11.00 am, the vast majority of tables (at all venues) are occupied by ranks of the active elderly (see above). Loose sleeves, khaki shorts and sun hats predominate. The proximity of the first cataract operation make sunglasses obligatory. They settle-in and business booms. Early-release funds and property portfolios have been generous.

• Danger! Irregular Terrain: In this city one always looks up or down. Perspectives become contingent upon elevation. Cliffs and abutments of pastel facades stack overhead. Roofs cascade down the hillside below. The intended goal lies beyond the fugitive crest of any given street. Progress comprises a series of stumbles, jars and barely-internalised curses, amongst arbitrary cobbles and irregular steps. Certain slabs appear to function as trapdoors. One might regain lost fitness or equally succumb to injury here.

• Observation: Pause for expensive beer at an unsteady pavement table. Two legs stand on an irregular iron cellar hatch. Each passing pedestrian footfall creates a seismic event - clattering my glass loudly.

• Observation: A paint spattered decorator emerges onto the pavement, agreeing by phone to terminate his leisurely pub lunch. He crosses to the most bourgeois hardware shop imaginable (situated opposite between Japanese food and smart coffee). 90 seconds pass. He emerges, clutching a single one and a half-inch glossing brush. The artisans handle themselves somewhat differently in this neighbourhood. 

• Reflection: Glimpsed between facades, or at the point where an elevated street curves away, certain distant windows suddenly catch the eye. Teetering attics are stacked amongst precarious roof-scapes. How does the city appear from that vantage? Could one be in that room? 

Acknowledgement:

The influence of Georges Perec on this post cannot be overlooked - both as a master observer of the everyday, and a noted conoisseur of urban spaces. Between composing these fragments, I consumed numerous chapters of:

Georges Perec, 'Species of Spaces and Other Pieces' (Ed/Trans. John Sturrock), London, Penguin, 1974/1997.