Bertel Martin introduces the Port City Writing Project with Edson Burton’s thoughts on modern life in Bristol
What’s so special about Bristol? What’s so special about living in a city which has a port? A number of cities in the United Kingdom and abroad are port cities, but is it possible to claim they are each unique while at the same time saying that they have common experiences?
The Port City Writing Project is a website that enables you to contribute your views and read the opinions of others on these and other issues relating to living in a port city.
The project is part of Arnolfini’s literature programme. Three writers – Edson Burton, Philip Hoare and David Batemen – have been selected to write a personal perspective on Bristol, Southampton and Liverpool respectively. The writing covers the past, present and future of their city, and the people who are living there. The essays and the discussions that follow are then posted onto the website.
The site is very similar to Wikipedia and allows members of the public to contribute their views to the discussions, or start a new line of debate. It’s part of project.arnolfini, an online experimental production and management system that’s linked to the physical spaces and the curatorial 
programme of the Arnolfini.
Edson Burton, poet and playwright, ( pictured left. Photo copyright Paul Bullivant) contributes these thoughts on Bristol…
NOT YET A NATIVE
I came to Bristol in 1994 to start a PhD at the University of the West of England. Ideally I would have deferred a doctoral programme until I had become physically decrepit, but my post-MA life – kitchen hand on mortuary-warm industrial estate – had lost its appeal. The reality of my relocation struck me when on my first day in the city the driver stopped the bus in order to buy a box of fags. This, I realised, was not London: Bristol has its own unique cadence, somewhere between a strut and a stroll but rarely a sprint.
I have grown fond of Bristol, of its pace, its manageable scale, its variety, its quirky beauty, its grit and remnants of grandeur. It has reconciled my warring impulses towards romanticism and realism, flight and laziness. For that I am eternally in its debt. Yet I stop short of adopting the city out of sheer frustration with its divisiveness.
In my first week in the city, a sweet-faced Bristol girl in the baker shop, warmed by my impersonal politeness, ended our conversation with the warning, ‘Stay clear of St Pauls.’ The coded message: ‘I wasn’t like the black folk who lived there and would do well to stay away from that lot.’ In direct parallel, my first real conversation with a black Bristolian centred on what survival strategies I had used to survive living south of the river. How I had managed to escape a beating from the ‘crackers’.
Both encounters articulate the stark division between Bristol’s communities and continue to shape my lived experience. These divisions are in the first instance physical. The Avon creates a north/south divide as it winds it way through the heart of the city; the steep climb westward up from the waterfront creates a splendid isolation between patrician Clifton and the rest; the M32 has cut the once cohesive communities east of Bristol into separate entities.
Geography has compounded socio-economic division. In common parlance, for example, south of the river is Bedminster, a sprawling mass of homogenous white working-class communities, while the inner city St Pauls and Easton wards are overrun by exotic brown people.
(above: The Avon creates a north/south divide as it winds its way through the heart of the city. Photo copyright Peter Hunter.)
These divisions are of course part of an imagined Bristol. In truth, Bedminster is but one of a hotch potch of diverse wards that make up south Bristol. South Bristol is predominantly white but that is the limit of its homogeneity. The various wards vary in character from the überdeprived new estates of Knowle West and Hartcliffe to bohemian Windmill Hill and Southville. Elsewhere, clusters of white suburban poverty can be found throughout the city but these attract far less attention. Similarly, black inner city St Pauls is one parish among the highly diverse Ashley ward. Furthermore, belying its reputation as a dodgy black area, the African Caribbean population of St Pauls is less than 30 per cent. First-, second- and third-generation migrants have either moved or have been dispersed further afield, albeit mostly a mile or so across the motorway to Easton/Eastville. They now stand to bear the mantle of ‘dodgy black areas’.
Division has bred territorialism. Each population claims volkish rights of residential ownership and with that the right to be irked by foreign invaders, be they from abroad or other parts of the city. Yet this too is largely built upon a myth. Few families can recall distant ancestors that have lived in the same area generation after generation. Slum clearance has displaced former white working-class populations from the inner city to either suburban sink estates or high rises. Recent migrant communities have also been stricken by the territorialism bug. Current anxieties over the gentrification of ‘black’ St Pauls forgets the fact that black settlement is only a half-century old. Moreover, that St Pauls is a perfect example of the cyclical nature of housing fashion that has seen the rise and fall of inner city living.
The dockland has the potential to unify the fractured city, though on the surface it highlights its divisions. The dock has long ceased to be a working concern. Waterfront apartments reclaim the land left over from the decline of the shipping industry. The new dockland settlements epitomise Bristol’s reputation for reinvention. Crucially, unlike the shipping industry, these departments are divorced from an industrial ecology. At night, the waterfront becomes a crowded playground. Music auteurs, the musically indifferent and art aficionados find their niches in the clubs and centres that line the harbour. But despite the clamour, there is little in the way of meaningful interaction.
It is in psychic terms that the waterfront has the potential to connect Bristolians. The waterfront recalls a period when the destinies of working and commercial classes were bound together by trade. While that intimate relationship has ceased, it has been replaced by heritage celebration. But over the last eleven years I have witnessed the challenge to the public adulation of Bristol’s maritime past. A plethora of white and black voices have spoiled the maritime party by pushing Bristol’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade centre-stage.
In 2007, an awesome amount of energy was expended in Bristol over whether the city should apologise for the transatlantic slave trade. To my mind, the entire debate pointed to the deeply dysfunctional relationship between white and black, in particular in their relationship to the city. For white Bristolians, to besmirch the city’s maritime history is to lose an anchor in a city where belonging has become so fragile. For black Bristolians, the question is more to the point: how we can claim belonging without first acknowledging the historical and contemporary fractures within the city.
Guilty by association, the waterfront evokes too many painful memories to become a space for reconciliation. With available routes blocked I am tempted to ask, how does one offer an alternative vision of Bristol? How else can we speak of the city in a way that marks its diversity of race, class, geography, tradition? Perhaps as writers, artists, thinkers, open-headed people, we must simply view our myths with suspicion, reach across, up and above to form new alliances, and most importantly remain tuned to reality.
To join the discussion about this essay and to read the other essays, visit
http://project.arnolfini.org.uk, click on the tools tab, and then on the Wiki tab.
The Port City Writers’ project is part of the larger Port City art project. This is a large-scale contemporary art project exploring themes of mobility and exchange. It incorporates a range of different art forms, including an international touring exhibition, a programme of live art performance, context-led interventions, participation projects and platforms for critical debate.
