HOW CLIFTON VILLAGE GOT ITS NAME
A JOKE THAT STRUCK A CHORD 50 YEARS AGO
THE man who invented the name ‘Clifton Village’ as a joke 50 years ago this week said he was amazed to return and find it’s an official area of Bristol now.
Ian A Anderson came up with the term to put on a poster for an ailing folk music club in early February 1970, as a cheeky nod to Greenwich Village in New York.
But while the rebranding ultimately didn’t work for the club – it closed a few years later – the name stuck.
Clifton was, of course, once an actual village. But that village was centred around the main road that became Whiteladies Road, and no one had ever called anywhere ‘Clifton Village’ until a young folk guitarist and singer called Ian Anderson and John Turner, a young manager of a folk club called The Troubadour, were having breakfast in February 1970 and decided they needed to do something fresh to promote their little club.
A tiny club by today’s standards, the Troubadour was already fairly legendary as the 1960s ended and the cold light of the 1970s dawned.
It was set up in 1966, as a wave of folk music swept the country, and had been hugely popular.
But its owners sold up in 1969, and John Turner was the manager, living in the flat above, with Ian A Anderson, a Weston-born guitarist who played there regularly, kipping in the spare room.
At its height, queues went round the block to get in, but the 1970s wouldn’t be kind to folk music, and the two were bouncing around ideas on how to rekindle interest among Bristolians.
They decided to create a new poster. Ian, then 22, joked it should say ‘Clifton Village’ instead of just ‘Clifton,’ as a cheeky reference to Greenwich Village.
“I had a lightbulb moment about echoing the famous beatnik Greenwich Village folk scene in New York
from whence the 1960s commercial folk boom, Bob Dylan et al, had originated, and came up with the idea of putting the address as Clifton Village. It seemed cute...” said Ian, 50 years on.
They put it on the poster, and also included it in their regular address from then on.
A couple of months later, the pair set up a record label called The Village Thing, which produced and released around 24 albums by folk artists and bands in and around the
Bristol scene, and further afield, including three by Ian himself, like the 1970 release Royal York Crescent.
In the early 1970s, Ian says most of the grand Georgian houses were crumbling, the place was very much not the haven for the wellheeled it is now. It attracted a bohemian crowd able to afford the cheap rooms.
“Car parking wasn’t a problem,” remembers Ian. “The shops were unremarkable. The old Victorian Arcade hadn’t been rediscovered and re-opened. Estate agents weren’t thriving.
“There were none of the range of fashionable cafes that you’ll find today, other than a friendly coffee house called Splinters tucked in the corner of an unloved small concrete shopping precinct that also housed a WH Smiths, now a derelict, boarded up eyesore,” he added.
By 1973, The Bristol Troubadour Club closed its doors for the final time, and Ian Anderson moved away from Bristol.
In the late 1970s, and into the 1980s, this part of Clifton experienced a resurgence and the Clifton Village name started being used outside of the folk scene. Ian’s joke was picked up and carried by a residents’ society, who held community events in 1978 and 1979 and called them the ‘Clifton Village Fayre.’
In 1980, a local writer called Michael Pascoe penned a guide to
Clifton, and alluded to the term being more widely used. “Today the term Clifton Village is often used to describe the heart of Clifton,” he wrote.
“It has been dismissed as an estate agent’s term, but there is more than a grain of truth in the description”
In the 1980s, there was a new influx of people from London.
This time they had money rather than guitars and beards - and began to fix up the big houses of the Georgian terraces as estate agents cottoned on to the Clifton Village tag more and more.
Ian A Anderson had no idea about the Fayres, the Clifton Guide and the estate agents using his term. He was away in Surrey and London, carving a career as a folk musician, writer, record producer and radio presenter.
He performed at the very first Glastonbury Festival, and the very first WOMAD, and is one of the legends of the British folk music scene.
John Turner, the club manager who agreed to go along with Ian’s joke in 1970, stayed in Bristol and became a radio presenter at BBC Radio Bristol in Whiteladies Road – not in Clifton Village – for almost 30 years. He retired in 2007, and died in December 2018.
In 2010, Ian returned to Bristol, and discovered the Clifton Village phrase he’d created was now official.
“It wasn’t until I moved back a decade ago that I discovered how the term had become ubiquitous,” he wrote on his website.
“Quite a surprise! It was sonamed on road signs, printed maps, bus routes, numerous business names and eventually a residents’ parking zone. You couldn’t look in a local estate agent’s without seeing references to it, and that it was ‘desirable’ and ‘sought after’!
“If only I’d had quarter of a percent royalty point from the increases in property values that have derived from my idea down the years, I’d probably be very rich!” he said.
“In the early 1970s you could buy a whole town house, all four floors, on Royal York Crescent for 10 grand. Nowadays, all split into flats, you’d get little change out of £2.5 million. A rare, probably unique example of disreputable folk musicians pushing up property prices!”
Today, a cursory trip down Princess Victoria Street would see the van for the Clifton Village Pharmacy parked outside the Clifton Village Fish Bar. For a while, in the 1990s and 2000s, there was still a bit of resistance, perhaps. People continued to dismiss ‘Clifton Village’ as an invention of estate agents.
But the 2010s saw Clifton Village fully recognised.
The biggest acknowledgement came from two very official sources.
In 2012, Bristol had its first directly-elected mayor, George Ferguson, who set about dealing with the parking nightmares of the city, with controversial Residents Parking Zones. Clifton was too big a ward to have just one parking zone, so Clifton East – around Whiteladies Road – was created, and the area between the bridge and Hotwells was called Clifton Village.
More recently, First Bus streamlined its often confusing routes for the number 8 and number 9 bus. The number 8 now has the words ‘Zoo via Clifton Village’ on the front, on the timetable, and on the route illustrations on the inside of the bus.
In 2016, Bristol Civic Society acknowledged the site of the old Bristol Troubadour Club in Waterloo Street with a blue plaque. And that blue plaque acknowledged the club had been the first to use the phrase Clifton Village.
“I appear to have accidentally invented what is now the name for the area of Bristol where I’m back living,” joked Ian.
Ian is, at 72, still very much enjoying his music career. He and his nonrelated musical friend Alistair Anderson are performing at St George’s Bristol on Thursday, March 12.
With the same dry wit that created Clifton Village, the concert has been billed as ‘Not The Anderson Twins!’
A rare, probably unique example of disreputable folk musicians pushing up property prices! Ian A Anderson