Visitors
should be aware that any map of the city is likely to be just as untrustworthy
as my memory and should not be relied on as a way of navigating the present day
city. Visitors are advised to place no
more reliance on the city maps that are currently available than they would on,
using a map of Tolkein’s Middle Earth to navigate around the South West of
England. Unfortunately these city maps have a regrettable tendency to change
at each iteration and edit. The reason for this is not because of the rapid
pace of redevelopment in some parts of the city making maps quickly redundant,
nor is it due to the rapid growth of urbanisation at the urban fringe. On the
contrary, it is largely down to how the city’s many neighbourhoods are defined
and constantly re-defined by the imaginations of estate agents and residents.
The city is in such a constant process of evolution that any map published will
hold good for a matter of days at the very most.
The phenomena can be explained
through a closer examination of two of the city’s largest neighbourhoods:
Horfield in the north of the city, and Bedminster in the south. I am familiar
with Horfield, having spent the first eighteen years of my life there, and it
does to me appear to have shrunk somewhat since I was a child, nibbled away at
the edges by more desirable areas. In my
memory Horfield extended most of the way down Gloucester Road, but now the
Horfield Prison, which is about half way along the road’s length, lies at the
very southern limits of Horfield and seems in danger of being swallowed by the
estate agent’s creation of North Bishopston. It goes without saying that these
days a Bishopston address is far more desirable than a Horfield address. Within
the next few years it is almost certain that the cramped and insanitary
nineteenth century prison will close, and when it is redeveloped for housing, as
it inevitably will be, I doubt very much that those houses will be advertised
as being located in Horfield. In many people’s minds the name of Horfield is
now associated only with the Council estates that were developed in the open
country beyond the Victorian terraces in the 1930s, not the Victorian core of
the area, along the Gloucester Road.
The same process can be seen at work in Bedminster,
the former centre of the tobacco industry and one of the city’s white working
class heartlands. Bedminster is under attack on three sides. To the west,
Ashton Gate, once just the name of a football ground is now a neighbourhood in
its own right that has annexed Bedminster’s North Street. To the east,
Bedminster is threatened by the newly resurgent Totterdown with its hipster
bars and cafes threatening to invade Bedminster’s solid terraces.
To the north of Bedminster an area called Southville
has emerged. Southville is hardly mentioned on historic maps, being the name
for an area of just a few streets on the south side of the New Cut, around St
Pauls Church, but it has now it taken ownership of all of the more desirable
streets along the Cut, from the Bedminster Asda, all the way through to Ashton
Gate. There is even a story, hopefully
an urban myth because I would not want it to be true, that estate agents once
attempted to rebrand this area as Lower Clifton in order to capitalise on the
appeal of the Clifton name. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, I hardly
dare mention Clifton, lest its army of braying public school boys and girls,
and entitled university students attempt to invade the whole city, but it was
itself once subject to a rebranding exercise. In the 1960s and 1970s Clifton
was not the place that it is now. It was a place of crumbling Georgian and Regency
terraces and cold and damp student flats, and old ladies hanging on in
Victorian mansions that they could not afford to maintain. The then low
property prices made it allegedly a creative hub for artists and musicians. In
the early 1970s a group of folk musicians, in an attempt to enliven the local
music scene hit on the idea that if New York had its Greenwich Village,
then Bristol could have a Clifton Village. In the long term the rebrand
probably didn’t do much for the local folk music scene but it was taken up by
estate agents who saw it as a useful tool in their attempts to up-market the
area and the name has stuck. Clifton remains the most successfully and
completely gentrified neighbourhood in the city.
I am sure that the process of mutation that has gone
on in Horfield and Bedminster is apparent elsewhere in the city. In the east of
the city I sense that Easton is expanding as Eastville fades away, following
the old stadium into memory, though it will be saved from utter oblivion by its
wonderful park. I sense that St George is in decline, shrinking as Redfield is
born and grows. In the south-east, Sandy Park has carved a space for itself out of the mass of Brislington. Small wonder that map
makers find themselves with an impossible task.
In the absence of reliable maps the best way to know
the city is by walking it. Your mind will form its own maps, without paper or
digital assistance, but even then you may find that the most pleasure is to be
found in ignoring all the maps and allowing yourself to become lost in the many
geographies and histories of this multi-layered city, just as I am.
