Within 2 days last week, we had the latest pair of proposals from a member Bristol’s great and good and a London property developer to try and turn the city into somewhere else.
On Monday last week Bristol 24/7 carried a story entitled “Bristol… the ‘New Orleans of the UK’?”.
According to the article, local businesses are being urged to help elevate Bristol to a world-class centre for jazz and blues music as part of Mayor George Ferguson’s ambitions to make the city the ‘New Orleans of the UK’.
By the end of the week, apparently plans had shifted from trying to turn Bristol into a city founded by French colonists in 1718 on the banks of the Mississippi to property developers and their scheme to convert some of the city into Shoreditch, now an inner city part of London in the borough of Hackney, which was originally named after Edward IV’s mistress, Jane Shore, who was reputedly buried in a ditch in the area.
This news appeared on Bristol Business News, which reported as follows:
Verve Properties, the niche developer behind Bristol’s highly-successful Paintworks creative quarter, has started work on the first speculative office refurbishment in the city for five years as the market recovery continues to gathers pace.
London-based Verve said it saw a gap in the Bristol office market for trendy office workspace of the type now common in the Shoreditch/Tech City area of East London that would appeal to the Bristol’s vibrant creative sector.
What I like about Bristol is precisely that it is Bristol. It’s quirky, diverse and has its own unique features not found anywhere else, like the centuries of architectural variety on display on Old Market Street and West Street, the City Docks and the wealth of green, open spaces which the public can enjoy, even in the city’s less prosperous parts.
Where attempts have been made to turn the city into somewhere else, it’s been a disaster. One only has to look at Bristol’s so-called ‘Shopping Quarter’ – Broadmead, Cabot Circus and the Mall Galleries – to see the result: bland and unedifying. The area is filled mostly with identikit local branches of national retail chains. Rearrange the shops and you could easily in another large UK town or city.
I like Bristol because it’s Bristol and it should furthermore be left to be itself and not try to be somewhere else.
One has to ask the question: do those who profess to love the city but want to turn it into somewhere else really love the city; or do they actually hate it?