A petition has been started to turn the top floor of a Bristol city centre car park into a rooftop venue. The top floor of the Trenchard Street car park, which can also be accessed from Park Row, is an open space with views out over the city.
And according to the owner of local café chain The Crafty Egg, the space would be perfect for a bar. The chain, which has two cafes in Fishponds and Stokes Croft, has now started a petition calling for Bristol City Council to make this happen.
Ben, who owns The Crafty Egg, says he has been asking the council to use the car park roof as a venue for five years. He is now going public with his idea.
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"They're such nice places to sit and enjoy the sun. It's just a waste of a space, and in a modern society, a modern city you want to use spaces like this rather than just letting them fester," he said.
He said in 2017, he approached the council with the idea to transform the space. He wanted to see a bar installed, as well as street food vendors and entertainment, using only local suppliers.
However, Ben claims he did not receive any response from the council. He says he chased them without any progress, until the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, when he decided to email the office of Bristol mayor, Marvin Rees.
He says the council then began communicating with him, and it seemed his vision could be realised. He claims everything was organised, and Bristol Beer Factory was on board to set up a bar there, but the plans fell through.
According to Ben, despite many at the council being supportive, there were too many obstacles around licensing and health and safety because it was a rooftop space. And he said that the council's parking services team were not keen to give up the income from the top floor, despite the council being offered a share of the profits or a flat fee from the new venue.
He said they offered him an alternative space at the top of the West End car park near the Clifton Triangle, which reopened this year after closing in 2019 for repairs, but he did not think that this space would be suitable. "It needed everyone at the council to support it, not just one department. It needed a lot of different areas together to make it happen, but I didn't have all those areas," he said.
But Ben added that when he visits the top floor of the car park, it is often empty, and he feels that the space is being wasted. "The first time I went up there, you go up to the top of that car park, and it's like 'oh my god'. It's such an amazing view of Bristol.
"There's no better view of Bristol, and it's empty, it's vacant. It's not being used for anything, so why not use it?"
After the petition went live and The Crafty Egg posted about the plans on social media, some people in Bristol's skating community raised concerns about losing a valuable space. Instagram user @longboardvosps wrote in a post: "As much as having a rooftop bar area would be great for many people, it would take away one of the only suitable skate spots in Bristol.
"As a longboard dancer, rooftop trenchy is a really important spot and I can't communicate how sad this makes me." However, Ben said that he is keen to work with the skating community to make sure they can still use the space, and that only around one third of the roof would be used for the bar which would leave space for skaters.
As well transforming the space into an all-new Bristol venue, there were also plans to use it to re-home the statue of Black Lives Matter activist Jen Reid which briefly sat atop the Colston plinth, after the slave trader's statue was torn down and dumped into the river. Ben said he had connections with the people who were storing the statue, and he thought that it would be a powerful symbol to have the protester's statue looking out over the formerly named Colston Tower.
He added: "I thought it would have been stunning to have that look down on Colston Tower, it would have been a new home for it so soon after it was taken down." However he said the council voiced concerns about the statue being targeted.
In spite of the setbacks he has faced, Ben said that he is hopeful that the new petition can encourage the council to reconsider his plans, and he believes the venue could open by summer 2023 if he gets permission.
He added: "I'm really hopeful that something could happen. There's so many local companies that could be on board, it doesn't need to be one person or one business organising the whole thing."
Bristol City Council has been approached for comment. Click here to view the petition.
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