Western Daily Press (Saturday)
City experiments with new method for moulding its future evolution
TRISTAN CORK reports on how a West council has changed tack on trying to sell the idea of controversial development plans to sceptical residents. But is it being disingenuous and how much is it all costing?
THE last time anyone from Bristol City Council officially came to the area around the Cumberland Basin to talk to local people about its future, it was the mayor, facing a church full of 250 fairly hostile people.
This time, it’s hard to imagine a more different set-up.
This time, the local people were divided into very small groups over the course of a whole day, and enthusiastically invited to play with Plasticine and different shapes of wood, while writing on little flags.
Yes, this was the first attempt at a creative workshop approach to begin the process of public engagement in working out what should be done to the Cumberland Basin.
It’s called Harbour Hopes and is being run by a range of consultants, engagement experts and creative companies – all paid for by Bristol City Council.
There had already been similar workshops in Lawrence Weston,
Easton and Knowle where, it seems, people were invited to take part and given some expenses for their time.
These were not particularly highly publicised, and effectively were private events that largely involved groups of older people brought together through already-established community group networks.
Just before the final day of this part of the process, the city’s mayor wrote a blog about why it was done like that, and the stage was set for the first attempt to engage with the people who actually live around the area.
The stage itself was actually a few large tables under some gazebos in the yard at the front of the Riverside Garden Centre last Saturday.
The sessions lasted an hour and a half and appeared to involve a maximum of 14 people, with groups of split into seven.
As a keen observer, I obviously booked into the first session on Saturday morning, and it turned out there were only about eight people, so we split into two groups of four.
Malcolm, who introduced himself as an actor from the city’s Easton neighbourhood, was our guide to this new way of asking the community what it wanted done to them.
He was more CBBC presenter than Bristol City Council strategic planner, enthusiastically handing out goody bags of Plasticine, flags and shapes.
On the table in front of us was a big sheet of paper with a huge blue circle. We had to think of three places that were important to us in the area, and then all 12 were jiggled around inside the circle so there was a map of landmarks of sorts.
Everyone had to say what they had chosen and why. My group contained a chap from up the Hotwells hill in Clifton, and a naval man who had built his own boat at Underfall Yard and loved sailing on the Floating Harbour.
Then there was me, a local resident and the impishly cynical figure of Christine Townsend, the recentlyelected councillor for Southville, whose ward included the garden centre car park we were now sitting in.
The choice of location was important. When the council last attempted to engage with local residents, it was with a series of maps to reveal various options on how to replace the ageing Plimsoll Swing Bridge, the vast late 1960s dual carriageway that sweeps over both the end of the River Avon New Cut and the locks at the end of the Floating Harbour, taking thousands of vehicles from Ashton Gate to Hotwells and the Portway, and vice-versa, every day.
One of those shortlisted options involved building a new bridge and a new dual carriageway that would carve its way right through the Riverside Garden Centre car park – effectively closing down the entire business – then between the two landmark bonded warehouses, and even demolishing a few homes at the Cumberland Basin, before roaring past the Nova Scotia and the Pump House pubs into the heart of Hotwells.
But there was no talk of road routes just yet; we had Plasticine to mould. And right now, the lovely Malcolm had asked us to create a figure of ourselves, to place among a new set of landmarks we had created out of other bits of Plasticine.
The late September sunshine was getting unseasonably warm. Dog walkers, cyclists and scooter riders were chattering as they ambled from Greville Smyth Park to the Ashton Swing Bridge, and behind me, in one of the creative areas that formed part of the workshop area, someone began playing the guitar and singing a Beatles song. Immediately behind me, I noticed that someone else hired by the council’s consultant’s creative team, was drawing a sketch of the four of us playing with Plasticine.
It suddenly dawned on me – I’m actually paying for this.
I’ve paid my council tax and some of it is right now paying someone to draw a picture of me playing with Plasticine that I’ve also paid for, because an actor who is also getting paid to be my new friend has asked me to.
I turned further around and saw that not only was someone drawing a picture of us around the table, but several other people were listening and watching intently, taking notes and recording the session.
People appeared genuinely interested in the fact I’d chosen the Ostrich pub as my favourite harbourside pub (it was a close-run thing), but that quickly turned to frustration with the nagging sense that we were playing with Plasticine while some very powerful investors were already eyeing up the land we were sitting on, and the green spaces nearby.
That frustration appeared shared by my fellow Plasticine players. The naval chap with the boat waxed poetically about how much he loved the serenity of the western end of the Floating Harbour, and spent much of his life chilling there. He then kept trying to repeat how it would be a travesty if this area had a dual carriageway ploughed through it.
But we still had creative play to play. We had to line up the next set of important harbour landmarks in our lives in order according to when they had been built, and one thing became obvious, if it wasn’t before.
Interestingly, almost all of the landmarks – the cathedral, the coloured houses, Ashton Court, and so on – dated from the medieval period up to the Victorian age.
If I hadn’t put the Lloyds Amphi
theatre down, and someone else hadn’t put the M-Shed, there would not have been a single one from the 20th century, let alone the 21st. This showed us all, as if it needed saying, that people’s sense of place comes from the history that is around us.
And then finally, an hour and a quarter after we sat down, Malcolm asked us what we thought would be important things to factor in when shaping what happens to the Cumberland Basin.
And then everyone listening around us listened more intently as many of the same things people said at the Hotwells church meeting back at the start of 2020 were said again: the future of the Cumberland Basin should be people and communityled, not just apartments for a certain demographic of twentysomethings.
It should be car-free as much as possible, and with the bonded warehouses – the historical landmarks of the area – the focal point.
And with that, we were done. Quite how much of that will ever reach Bristol City Council, we’ll never know. Quite how much they will take on board even if it does, remains to be seen.
It was an interesting exercise to take part in, but it was clearly a way of asking angry people what they think about something in such a way as to filter and deflect their anger.
If the mayor of Bristol was brave to front up to a room packed with people telling him he’s wrong, then this was the polar opposite of that confrontational setting, because while the conversations we had were grown-up and interesting, it effectively treated the angry residents in a childlike way – very clever. And maybe not such a bad idea?
So what does it all mean?
The mayor and those leading this project are at pains to now say that everything is a blank sheet of paper when it comes to the ‘Western Harbour’ project.
Whether or not that fresh start is really true depends on how cynical you are about the way in which this project – and the dozens of others that have gone before in Bristol – was, is and will be managed.
The ‘Western Harbour’ is probably potentially the biggest thing to happen to Bristol’s city centre area in a generation – well, since the docks around Canon’s Marsh were cleared and the flats and bars of Millennium Square, Porto Quay and the amphitheatre were built in the late 1990s.
So it is important to the whole of Bristol what happens. Get it wrong and our children will be left with more dysfunctional planning to add to the list of post-war blunders. Get it right, and it might be a lovely addition to Bristol’s (shudder) ‘quarters’.
The council and the mayor’s handpicked group of worthies have a huge job on their hands convincing anyone living in Hotwells, Spike Island and over the river in BS3 that they mean it when they say they will work with them – it’s hard to underestimate just how badly the process has gone up to this point.
It’s a process that began with the mayor travelling to China and the south of France in 2017 with a brochure that renamed their community ‘Western Harbour’ and advertised it to global investors as a place ripe for investment because rents are continually going up in Bristol, so they’ll always make a profit.
That was the first people in the local area knew of a plan for as many as 3,500 new homes on their doorstep, and they were surprised about the rising rents advert from a mayor elected to fight the housing crisis.
Then there was the presentation of the Western Harbour project to the people who live around it as primarily a road remodelling scheme. When residents told the mayor they accepted the need for new homes but did not like the road plans, he
told them it was all to do with the housing crisis. Then there was the selection of 18 people, led by John Savage, the man who had led the transformation of Canon’s Marsh 25 years ago, to be on a group advising the council on its plans. While there was only one representative from the community itself, local residents pointed out that the rest were people closely aligned to the mayor personally, or from the world of business and development, or both.
Then there was the mayor’s ‘bridges and balloons’ comment. He was trying to make the point that while people and heritage organisations were up in arms about the apparent threat to the classic views of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and how much this would ruin Bristol, for most people in Bristol, that view and the Suspension Bridge and the balloons and everything else that is ‘Instagram famous’ about Bristol, wasn’t part of their daily lives, and meant little to them.
While that is a point and the subject of a debate that has been more widely had – this ‘tale of two Bristols’ idea – the mayor’s made that observation personal too, saying the ‘bridges and balloons’ trope meant little to him either, growing up in Lawrence Weston and Easton – two communities which, by astonishing coincidence, were chosen to host the first invitation-only creative workshops on the new ‘city-wide’ consultation on the Western Harbour project.
The mayor was elected and reelected largely on his personal appeal and story, but in this case, dismissing the shrieks of horror at any redevelopment of the Cumberland Basin from a personal standpoint did little to stop residents fearing he and the council were itching to cover the area with dual carriageways and apartments.
The council announced it would be going back to the drawing board earlier this year, and the Plasticine modelling and talk of ‘a sense of place’ is only the start of this.
There will, no doubt, be more formal and traditional settings in which people can tell the council what it wants to see happen at the Cumberland Basin, on Ashton Meadows and at Winterstoke Road, in Hotwells and the end of Spike Island, but if you’re going to start somewhere, why not start back in the infants class?
It is important to the whole of Bristol what happens. Get it wrong and our children will be left with more dysfunctional planning to add to the list of post-war blunders TRISTAN CORK