There’s lots to love about our great city
There’s lots to love about living in Bristol(Image: John Myers)
I moved to Bristol in March when my girlfriend dragged me kicking (not literally) and screaming (sometimes literally) from Melbourne after she got offered her dream job here.
In the six months or so I’ve lived here, I’ve seen a lot of the good and the bad the city has to offer. Here are some observations that are mostly not intended to be taken incredibly seriously.
There’s a lot going on
Gromits. Balloons. Forwards. Three very different spectacles which gave me an early insight into the character of the city. It was heart-warming to see how invested people from Bristol and beyond were in the Gromits trail – at times over summer it felt like all anyone was talking about was how many sculptures they had managed to visit. The challenge of getting to as many Gromits as possible myself was also the perfect motivation to explore many different corners of my new home town.
Gromit Unleashed 3: a great introduction to Bristol(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach PLC)
The Balloon Fiesta was a unique event, capped off by the surreal sight of a giant dinosaur randomly floating over the city. Dancing on the Downs at Forwards was a joyous way to give the summer a send-off, and I was struck by the varied nature of the crowd, with you just as likely to see a young child having a dance with their parents as you were a group of mates in their 20s getting stuck in. Aside from the big ticket occasions, the amount of smaller events offering comedy, music or other entertainment on any night of the week is seriously impressive.
Not a sight you’d see in many other cities
Bristol is a victim of its own success
“Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over,” as Tony Soprano says to his therapist. Moving to Bristol in 2025 has at times evoked similar feelings.
Many Bristolians of an older vintage would say the city being gentrified is hardly a recent phenomenon, but the relentless pace of development and the extortionate cost of housing – factors only accelerated further by Covid – threaten to permanently erase what makes Bristol such an attractive place to live for so many.
The city maintaining a unique identity can’t be taken for granted as the cost of everything keeps going up, more and more people are priced out of their own neighbourhoods, and independent venues close while shiny new high-rises are put up in their place.
Additionally, who gets to be a part of modern Bristol? Long-standing communities being forced to the peripheries of a city they helped build as people from elsewhere move in is not a problem unique to Bristol, but it is especially galling to see it happen to people who helped make the city so appealing to outsiders in the first place.
It’s an uncomfortable conversation to have as a recent arrival as I am very conscious that I am a part of the problem, but the tension between old and new elements of Bristol is everywhere. A small but notable manifestation of this is how people refer to London; it seems to be either somewhere people have escaped from or a place people talk about as if it’s on Mars.
The restaurant and pub scene is superb
Back on a lighter note, the options for drinking and dining in the city are genuinely fantastic. There is an absolutely incredible breadth of choice when it comes to cuisines to enjoy, and the overall standard of eating out has to be one of the highest in the UK. I was outraged to learn that no Bristol watering hole had made the Good Food Guide’s list of the 100 best pubs in the country. We have an astonishing number of good boozers in the city, from cherished longstanding community pubs to newer fancy establishments and everything in between.
Getting around is a nightmare
As a born and raised Bristolian colleague pointed out to me recently, nothing marked me out as new to the city more than when I declared I had faith a bus would arrive at a certain time. Delays and ghost services plague many routes in the city.
Driving is similarly difficult, not aided by the council’s insistence on carving parts of Bristol into separate zones in the name of making neighbourhoods more “liveable”. Elsewhere in the city, steep and narrow roads, often with cars parked on either side, mean Bristol is no place for the unconfident driver. Good job you can rely on just hopping on a bus instead…
Bristol is a complicated place
If anything, my first half a year in this wonderful if flawed place has just served as yet another reminder that no big city can be neatly shoehorned into one particular descriptive box. Before moving here I was probably guilty of reading a bit too much into Bristol’s reputation as a “woke” enclave, whatever that means, which is coincidentally the same reputation Melbourne has in much of Australia. The truth, as always, is far more complicated, and for every part of Bristol that plays up to the stereotype there is another neighbourhood that completely subverts it. And the city is a much more interesting place for it.