The Sunday Times has published its Best Places to Live guide and some will be happy to learn that Bristol has made the list in the South West. The top spot for the region went to Cirencester, but Bristol got an honourable mention.
However Bristolians will be less happy to discover the reasons why judges deemed the city to be worthy of a place on the guide. This was the entry for why Bristol is considered such a great place to live.
"Bristol has a popularity problem. It’s so good that everyone wants to live here — and with good reason. It has everything: it’s urban and rural, posh and gritty, homely and highbrow. But there are side-effects: terrible traffic and serious grumbles over a Clean Air Zone and the e-scooter scheme.
"It’s the UK’s most interesting and independently minded city, with something for everyone, whether it’s the gorgeous Georgian houses of Clifton, the sensible semis of Henleaze or the terraces in buzzy Bedminster."
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I mean where to even begin with this doozy of an entry. I think maybe with the line I find most offensive, which is: "It has everything: it’s urban and rural, posh and gritty, homely and highbrow.”
I like to think everyone read this with the exact same bemused look on their face that I had, followed by the phrase “what the ****”. Because honestly what does that even mean?
So as a major city we are urban and rural. Please someone tell me where the rural parts of Bristol are. Maybe the judges were thinking of the Downs, Snuff Mills or Manor Woods - basically just counting any green space as ‘rural’.
Whatever their reasoning I think we can agree it’s total nonsense. Then we get ‘posh and gritty’ - I mean what do they think we are a Sunday night BBC drama?
And homely and highbrow I had to Google, but technically highbrow means intellectual, maybe even a snob, so is homely supposed to mean common? But the dictionary definition is cosy - so I’m even more confused. All in all just a weird, lazy and bizarre way to describe Bristol.
If I’m being kind I think I get what they are trying to say - we’re a city of two halves. The haves and the have nots, the areas where people want to live and work and the ones they want to avoid.
The areas that have high streets littered with independent shops, vegan delis and house prices that are reaching the million-pound marker. Then those forgotten about neighbourhoods dotted in between where Bristol’s working class families are just trying to build a life for themselves and a better one for their kids. But honestly the entire description is just offensive to me.
They’re not wrong about the terrible bus service and the Clean Air Zone being somewhat controversial - but these hardly seem like reasons why it’s ‘the best place to live’.
To be fair I don’t expect the Sunday Times’ judges to know the ins and outs of every Bristol neighbourhood, but they then shouldn’t be putting Bristol as a whole on their list.
They should say it’s Clifton, Bedminster or Henleaze. Because let’s be honest those are the neighbourhoods they are actually talking about in this list. And then they describe the rest of the city as an urban, gritty, homely paradise. It all just feeds into this made up idea of Bristol that the rest of the country has about our city - that doesn’t actually reflect its true nature at all.
The same can be said with the ‘independently minded city’ line. Again this description ignores a huge proportion of people who live in the city who have probably never attended a protest in their lives or who would always choose Costa over an independent coffee shop.
The judges have cherry picked what they think are the best parts of Bristol - without any real knowledge about what makes our city, in its entirety, great and actually a brilliant place to live.
And the impact of that is it then encourages a certain type of people - middle to upper class who can actually afford the astronomical rent and property prices - to move to Bristol. But of course it’s not Hartcliffe, Lawrence Weston or Barton Hill they are moving to. But it’s the people living there who are in many ways worst impacted by these kinds of lists and commentaries on Bristol.
Because ultimately as more people are convinced to move to hip, gritty and independent Bristol all it does is push the house prices up. Firstly in the areas they want to live in, that are already so far out of reach for most people in the city. But that price rise then bleeds out to other neighbourhoods which inevitably then also become unaffordable for Bristolians.
They are right about one thing though - Bristol does have a popularity problem. But what they don’t realise is that lists like this, that are based around romantic and ill-informed notions of what our city is, are part of the problem.
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