Bristol has a reputation for radical politics; a reputation that stretches back to the riots of 1831 and the 1793 Bristol Bridge riot. Some might even say its radical history dates back even further: in the 11th century, Bishop Wulfstan made it his mission to end the practice of selling Christian slaves to the Vikings Ireland and spent months preaching to the people of Bristol against the practice.
This radical tradition is continued by a new piece of street art which has appeared on St Mark’s Road in the Easton district in the last few days and clearly emphasises the area’s attitudes.
Saturday 6th January saw the first Barton Hill community litter pick of 2024.
The December event had been rained off at the last minute. However, this time the weather gods were beneficent and the sun shone.
All told five volunteers turned up, tidying the Ducie Road area, including its council-owned car park. In meetings with the council, your correspondent has been informed in the past that the car is supposed to be visited and cleansed by street cleaning crews once a week, although this appeared not to have been done well – or at all – in recent times.
Bags of swag
In one hour we managed to collect over 6 bags of general waste and recyclable materials for collection by Bristol Waste, after which three of us had another one our of usual interesting chats over tea and biscuits at the Wellspring Settlement before going our separate ways until next month.
As per usual, many thanks to Shona for organising and my fellow pickers for turning out on a cold morning. 😀
In the general torpor that obtains around this time of year, the proofreader at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth, otherwise know as the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live (a Retch plc publication. Ed.) has been caught in flagrante delicto asleep at his/her desk.
Today the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live published a piece on its website of great interest to price-conscious followers of fashion that would enable them to save hundreds of pounds, as per the screenshot below.
A saving of £1,288? That’s Hugo!
I’ve never heard of Huge Boss myself, but the paper’s author Emma Grimshaw clearly has as the name appears not just in the headline, but in the copy itself.
Primark fans are rushing to buy the chain’s ‘retro’ black dress. The £12 item also looks very similar to a Huge Boss outfit, but costs a fraction of the price.
Your ‘umble scribe has, however, heard of Hugo Boss AG of Metzingen, Germany which like its rival Huge Boss as per the Post/Bristol Live also sells ‘luxury‘, i.e. overpriced, clothing and fashion accessories.
In the world of intellectual/imaginary property, Huge Boss’ behaviour is known as passing off, i.e. misrepresenting the goodwill of an established company.
If the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live ever gets round to reporting the trade mark dispute between Hugo Boss AG and Huge Boss, your ‘umble scribe hopes it employs someone who knows how to proofread copy to do the job!. 😀
Further evidence arrives today of the continuing decline of journalistic standards at Reach plc titles – already a bar so low it’s in danger of touching the ground.
The proof: the author of this piece in today’s Bristol (Evening) Post/Live cannot even spell one of the title’s favourite clichés – much-loved – opting for a Bristolian sounding but meaningless much lover instead.
What is even more surprising is that the author is an award-winner within the journalistic trade.
If the qualityu control for press articles is as low as that down at Bristol’s Temple Way Ministry of Truth, your ‘umble scribe wonders just how much lower it must be where gongs for hacks are involved… :-D.
Lawrence Hill station (LWH), the first/last stop into and out of Bristol Temple Meads on the Severn Beach line, has been serving the travelling public since 8 September 1863 when services began on the Bristol and South Wales Union Railway to New Passage Pier north of the city on the banks of the River estuary.
For most of that time, services would have been hauled by steam locomotive, so there was more than a whiff of coal smoke, steam and nostalgia when your ‘umble scribe alighted from the bus to see a steam-hauled special complete with rolling stock in British Railways brown and cream livery pull up at platform 1.
Earl of Mount Edgcumbe steam locomotive at LWH
The train had been reversed up the line – note the rear red lamp on the front of the locomotive – so that the steam locomotive – the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe – could be turned around to haul the coaches back into Temple Meads one mile away.
The locomotive starts to haul the carriages back towards Temple Meads.
Eagle-eyed readers will note that the front of the locomotive in the second photo is showing a white light, not its previous red lamp.
Bristolian may exist as a dialect with its own idiosyncrasies, but within the city and county of Bristol itself, there’s one place where English is used in a peculiar way: the Counts Louse (as pronounced in the local vernacular; some call it City Hall – or a variant thereof – after its renaming by the then Mayor George Ferguson in 2012. Ed.).
In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote the following:
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Down at the Counts Louse, the English language has been used to conceal what is really going on behind its mock Georgian façade, particularly where funding cuts and redundancies are planned, usually couched in terms such as redeployment, restructuring and the like.
Perhaps the most famous use of such obfuscatory language occurred in 2013 when it was discovered – as reported by The Bristolian – that £165,000 in cash was missing from the council’s loss-making markets department (a department that’s supposed to make money for the local authority. Ed.). This was duly recorded in an internal report as ‘material income misappropriation‘.
We ordinary mortals have a much more succinct phrase than material income misappropriation. We call it theft.
That infamous bit of council-speak has now been joined by another phrase by Councillor Craig Cheney, the elected member in charge of the city’s purse strings, which was duly reported by the Bristol Post in relation to the evacuation of Barton House in Barton Hill due to structural defects.
Barton House. Image courtesy of Google Street View.
What Cllr. Cheney said to the local press while commenting on Barton House included the sentence below.
There’s perhaps not as much concrete as there should be.
Give yourself a pat on the back, Cllr. Cheney; that one sentence alone deserves its own special place in the annals of British understatement. 😀
In less light-hearted reporting on Barton House, it has now emerged that the government warned Bristol City Council in 2017 – six years ago – about the condition of Barton House and four other tower blocks built using the LPS building system and perhaps more scandalously that no structural survey of Barton House had been conducted since 1970, i.e. over half a century ago. Municipal neglect of the city’s infrastructure is endemic down the Counts Louse. 🙁
One of the many bridges that crosses Bristol’s city docks is Pero’s Bridge which spans St Augustine’s Reach, formerly St Augustine’s Trench. It is a pedestrian bascule bridge, linking Queen Square on the eastern side and Millennium Square on the west.
It was opened formally in 1999 by Paul Boateng MP, then a Home Office minister.
The bridge is named after Pero, also known as Pero Jones, who lived from around 1753 to 1798, arriving in Bristol from Nevis in the Caribbean in 1783, as the slave of the merchant John Pinney (1740–1818) at 7 Great George Street.
Hundreds of people now attach padlocks – so-called ‘lovelocks’ – to the bridge as a sign of affection to each other. This is a practice that began on the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris.
The city council does not technically allow padlocks on the bridge, but they are not routinely removed, and over the years hundreds – possibly thousands – have been attached to it, which could just affect the proper operation of the bridge.
Your ‘umble scribe wonders if those who attach padlocks – a means of confinement and restraint -to the bridge have really thought through the implications of their action. It is, after all, named in memory of an enslaved person.
Moreover, your correspondent is not the only person with misgivings.
A petition has been launched by Helen Tierney calling on the Mayor of Bristol to order the removal of the padlocks and to ban any more being placed on there. The petition reads as follows:
To Marvin Rees, Mayor of Bristol. In the heart of Bristol is a pedestrian bridge crossing the harbour. The City Council agreed the name Pero’s Bridge to honour a young enslaved African, Pero Jones, who in the 18th century was sold into slavery aged 12 & brought by his ‘owner’ to live in Bristol. Pero was never granted his freedom & died enslaved. A tiny plaque by the bridge tells this story.
Pero’s Bridge is now defaced with thousands of padlocks, so called ‘lovelocks’ locked on to its structure. The keys most likely dropped into the water below. Only a few steps from the bridge is the place where, in 2020, the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was thrown into the harbour.
I call upon the Mayor & City Councillors of Bristol to remove these hideous padlocks, not symbols of love at all but of oppression down the centuries, of enslaved people chained & padlocked with the keys thrown away, those people disrespected still today in the very place where they should be honoured.
Beneath the petition, Ms Tierney has added: “Pero’s Bridge is named after an enslaved person, someone our city chose to honour by naming the bridge for him. To have it weighed down by the very symbols of oppression disrespects his memory“, to which your ‘umble scribe would add that those affixing padlocks to the bridge have clearly considered the implications of their action.
In what clearly counts as an instance of buyer’s remorse, today’s inews carries a piece about two Britons – one in his thirties and from Bristol, the other a pensioner from Winchester, who both voted for Brexit and now seem surprised they cannot get visas to live permanently in their respective properties, as per the screenshot below of the report’s headline and byline.
Both are now suffering remorse and a feeling of betrayal (remember all those smooth-talking right-wing politicians who lied to the public saying nothing would really changed in our relationship with the EU and its member states? Ed.).
As defined by the dictionary, the phrase buyer’s remorse has two meanings:
a sense of regret or uneasiness after having purchased a house, car, or other major item; and
a sense of regret after having committed to an endorsement, policy, plan of action, etc.
Either of both of those definitions may be applicable in these two instances.
These stories have a moral, i.e. think before you vote (bearing in mind that all politicians lie. Ed.) and always remember the law of unexpected consequences.
Barton Hill’s monthly community litter pick took place last Saturday.As usual, we assembled outside the Wellspring Settlement (formerly Barton Hill Settlement. Ed.) at 10 am on Saturday to decide where needed our attention most.
We then tackled some of the Urban Park before proceeding to Cobden Street and its associated public open space and picnic table, a favourite spot with locals for drinking beer.
This month saw the biggest turnout for several months – 5 in total; and whilst we were in the Urban Park organiser Shona took the email address of another prospective volunteer to add to the mailing list.
At the end of one hour’s picking in pleasant, warm sunshine, we posed for the obligatory group photo before heading back to the Settlement for a well-deserved hot drink.
Here’s the swag we collected divided into recyclable materials (translucent bags) and general waste (green bags) awaiting collection by Bristol Waste.
Once again, many thanks to Shona for organising the event (as well as for the photos above. Ed.) and my fellow volunteers to turning out and working so willingly.
Bristolian may exist as a dialect with its own idiosyncrasies, but within the city and county of Bristol itself, there’s one place where English is used in a peculiar way: the Counts Louse (as pronounced in the local vernacular; some call it City Hall – or a variant thereof – after 
