Leigh Woods

Now I live in a home with paintings on every wall but in the Gloucester Road house where I grew up there was, for many years only one piece of original art, hanging above the sideboard in the largely unused front room. It was an oil painting of a woodland scene, all greens and browns and dark shadows, at once both empty of people and yet claustrophobic. It hung there throughout my childhood and stayed there for all the time that my parents were alive. My mother said that it was a painting of Leigh Woods and that the artist had been a friend of my father. She said that it had been given as a wedding present.

 

One time my father walked me through the woods and told me that it was a home for tramps, and people living in wooden shacks who couldn’t find a place to live in the city. It was easy to imagine this, in the gloomy late afternoon woods and, then in the dark corners of the picture that hung in our front room.  Nowadays we would recognise those woodland dwellers as homeless, many with mental health and addiction problems, who have fallen through the bottom of society.

 

Although the woods are only a short walk across the suspension bridge, for a young child they felt a long way from home. When I came back to live in the city I walked the woods with their crowded trails; the young families with their buggies; the mountain bikers, and the joggers. I found it hard to recall the dark and empty woods of the painting and my childhood memory, in the other place that lies behind the world that we see. Sometimes I try to imagine the artist who painted the picture and wonder why he, or perhaps she, never came to see the picture hanging in our front room.

 

Enough of this gloomy stuff. After all, this is a tourist guide of a kind, so you you must go and walk the wildwoods that lie just outside the city, on the far side of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and find the magic for yourself. Marvel at the views across the Avon Gorge and wander around the remains of the Iron Age Fort.  Walk to the far end of the woods and let your dogs swim in the pools of Paradise Bottom, where you can look at the beautiful trees and find the grotto, which has the charm of a bus shelter but great views across and along the Avon Gorge.  Stray from the main paths with their walkers and mountain bikers and lose yourself in the wonderful urban forest that is Leigh Woods.

 

Do not fear, in 2020 the woods are too well policed for the homeless to attempt another colonisation.  No middle class sensibilities will be offended in this place.

 

Bristol: The Unreliable Guide to the Two Cities

 I returned to Bristol after forty years of living away. For some time after I had returned to the city I was obsessed with the extent of the changes to the city over that period.  I was initially overwhelmed by the feeling that we were living in two cities, not one, though whether the separation was in time (between the city of my childhood and the modern day city) or geography (inner and outer city, or, east and west city) was not initially clear to me. We had moved back to a place that was on the one hand quite familiar but in many ways utterly different to the one that I had left to go to college at eighteen years of age. I found this mismatch a source of creative energy and used this in my writing and in my painting. Much of my writing has been either directly or indirectly centred on understanding this dichotomy.

     I was, at the same time, disappointed in the lack of interest in the city’s evolution expressed by our neighbours and new acquaintances. These were mostly people who had moved to the city from elsewhere in the country and they seemed to me to have little interest in the place that they now live in beyond the lifestyle benefits that the city confers on them. They did not know, or appear to care about any of the city’s neighbourhoods that lay outside the middle class bubble of west Bristol; they knew nothing of the city’s football teams and never visited its pubs. Their knowledge of the city’s history was thin and extremely selective. On the very few times that I was asked about how the city had changed in my absence I would begin by describing the city that I left in the mid-1970s as a dull provincial city where nothing much ever happened.  It is fairly obvious to me that most of the middle class incomers that now live in our part of the city can’t or don’t wish to connect with this idea, whether it is true or not. It was rare for me to get any kind of response and many people just didn’t seem to have heard me. It is as if my words refer to somewhere that is so far from their personal experience and beliefs about the city that it cannot be true.  Perhaps my words are too damaging to the sense of self-esteem that they have built up through living in this undoubtedly desirable and popular city. I long to be asked what I mean by that statement, but the questions never come.  My words do not resonate at all. Unlike me they are only interested in the present day city, and in all honesty I am not sure whether I have any right to criticise them for this.  The fact that I am living in their city, and at the same time in the older one of my memories is my problem, not theirs, and the reality is that I am talking about a place that few of those incomers ever saw; a city that is lost to time, truly alive only in the memory of those who were there. For me it is the city that lies behind the one that we can see today, and I am trapped somewhere between these two places.  While my neighbours see only the current day city, perhaps I still see and feel too much of the old city. Much of my writing is about how I reconcile the Bristol of my memory with the city that I live in today and that does not always provide for a straightforward narrative.

    It is quite possible that my ability to see the two cities simultaneously has not solely arisen out of my long absence from the city. My grandparents also had a tendency to see an earlier city, the city of their youth, so perhaps it is a function of age as much as physical absence. At times my grandparents appeared to only be able to experience a location in the modern city by referencing back to what was in that place in an earlier time – “yerrz ago”, or, "in my time", they would say, and I often find myself speaking in a similar way, to the confusion and frequently the disinterest of others.

    Most of all, I suppose, this blog is about how I reconcile the Bristol of my memory with the city that I live in today and that does not always provide for a straightforward narrative. There is no thesis to explore and there is no resolution to the tension between the two cities.