What Makes A City What It Is?
I was recently out for a walk along the Harbourside with my sleeping 5-month-old baby when I decided to take a detour via Millennium Square to see if there were any updates on when We The Curious might be reopening after the fire they suffered in April of last year.
I was disappointed to find there was no news; there was still scaffolding up and building work going on. I realised in that moment, how much of a gap We The Curious being closed had opened up in my life since last April. Before then, I would be there most weeks with my 3-year-old son, exploring the interactive displays, animating, playing with bubbles, building with giant bricks, watching a planetarium show or having lunch in their excellent café. It is a place and space which added immense value to my life and more importantly, the lives of thousands of other Bristolians.
The way I feel about We The Curious can also be applied to Bristol Zoo. There is a difference though; Bristol Zoo was 186 years old, far more iconic and significant to Bristol’s history, heritage and culture and inflicts a far bigger loss.
The good news is that We The Curious will be reopening. The bad news is that Bristol Zoo will not. At least, not if Bristol Zoological Society get their own way and receive planning permission from Bristol City Council to sell their historic site to a housing developer to become a luxury housing estate.
The future of the Bristol Zoo site has not been decided yet, despite what many people think and what the Zoo themselves have actively encouraged people to believe. It has not been sold and does not have planning permission for a change of use to housing….yet.
The story of how and why Bristol Zoological Society arrived at the decision to sell the world’s 5th oldest Zoo for luxury housing is not one I will repeat here but you can read about it in the report I wrote documenting the whole chain of events that led to that decision being taken.
What I want to explore here in relation to the closure of Bristol Zoo, is a wider idea around towns and cities, what makes them what they are and what we want them to be in the future. If you apply the Mayor of Bristol’s thinking then pretty much anything is up for grabs to become housing, Bristol Zoo being the prime example. When I wrote to him about the closure of Bristol Zoo, Marvin Rees wrote back and told me; “The fact that we can use the existing buildings for conversion to unique and much needed homes is exactly the right outcome for the site.” Is it the right outcome for the site? Bristol Zoo themselves frequently talk about how proud they are to be building “much-needed homes for Clifton and Bristol.”
If more homes are so necessary in Clifton and Bristol, why not start building on the Downs as well? How about turning Clifton Observatory into someone’s home with wonderful views or even putting up some flats on the Suspension Bridge? Our city parks? Ashton Court? These spaces are great assets to all of our mental health, they help us find perspective in the busyness of modern life.
Bristol Museum, the M Shed, Cabot Tower, the SS Great Britain, We The Curious, the Central Library, Bristol Old Vic, Bristol Beacon or even the Suspension Bridge itself could all gradually disappear if we continue on this road of travel and value building housing and profit above all else.
Where do we draw the line? When do you start undoing what makes a place what it is?
Do we want to live in a city of endless housing developments, shops and cafes where more people can crowdedly live together but with nothing cultural, historic or substantial to give our lives real meaning? More people but with emptier lives.
Surely we can all agree that some places are just too important and valuable - in a strictly uneconomic sense – to be turned into housing? Do we want housing developers whose primary motivation is profit to get their hands on these spaces that belong to all of us?
Bristol Zoo is not officially a public space and the Zoo’s property agent, Savills has classified it as a ‘brownfield site’ but we can all see that it is anything but; it is a botanical garden with some buildings interspersed amongst it.
Clifton Lido and the Everyman cinema on Whiteladies Road are two examples of buildings which were almost lost to housing developers but after lengthy battles were saved. Do we believe it would be better for Bristol and the community that they had become expensive housing? Or do we think that their presence in Bristol adds something more important to the fabric of the city?
There are other examples across Bristol. The City Council’s Development Control B Committee recently voted to approve plans to build 30 homes with some community and commercial space in place of the former Broadway Cinema on Filwood Broadway in Knowle West. Nick Haskins, local resident and campaigner to keep the building from becoming housing said, “We could use that building for arts, boxing, bingo, cinema – there’s a lot of stuff that can be done in that building”.
Ani Stafford-Townsend, Green Party Councillor and the committee’s chair said, “I’d like to think this is the last time we lost a building of significance to Bristol like this. And I hope that going forward, Bristol City Council is much more proactive in supporting communities in saving these assets”.
Another example is in Redfield where hidden within the recently sold Wetherspoons on the border of Redfield and St George is a largely intact Art Deco Cinema. Much of the community want to see it restored as a cinema as opposed to be turned into more flats. A petition has attracted over 10,000 signatures and the petition description says, “We believe this is a huge opportunity for local people to have a community cinema and for the city to preserve a real cultural treasure. To demolish it would be a tremendous waste. Do you want it to be demolished and turned into flats, or campaign to restore it for the local community?”.
There must be countless other spaces like these in Bristol where people take their children to after-school clubs, sing in choirs or dance in Zumba classes to name but a few. Spaces which everyone can contribute to and share which knit communities together and contribute to our lived experiences. A lot of these places would no doubt be perfect locations for property developers to buy up and turn into more housing at great profit to themselves. Is that what we want for Bristol?
Bristol Old Vic was very close to being lost before a mass fundraising appeal in 2007/8. The Bristol Cranes, such a notable part of the city’s skyline were almost sold off by the council in the 1970s. The outer circuit road proposed in the 1960s would have destroyed much of Montpelier, Cotham and Clifton and was only averted late in the day after increasing public outrage, but only after more than 500 terraced Victorian houses and businesses in Totterdown were demolished in preparation for a huge new roundabout that was never built. Bristol has a history of avoiding huge mistakes at the eleventh hour. Bristol Zoo can and must be another of example of the city doing the right thing on the eve of doing the wrong thing.
I recently listened to Steven Spielberg’s Desert Island Discs and when asked about whether cinema-going had a place in the 21st Century in the age of streaming and whether the same magic is possible on a laptop, he said;
“Yes, a great story can get you on your iPhone but I prefer a super-size screen because what you get with that experience leaving home to go out to the movies is, you get basically to be with civilisation, to sit with strangers, who probably in real life don’t agree with anything that you agree with. But it doesn’t matter because you may agree on one thing and that’s what’s coming off the screen, what’s coming out of that soundtrack, the themes, there may be common ground found in movie theatres between people and ideologies that are so far apart in everyday life but all come together to share one single experience. You can’t get that at home on a television screen, you can in a movie theatre.”
I think you can very easily extrapolate that argument to Bristol Zoo. Visitors at Bristol Zoo represented a genuinely diverse cross-section of society and gave everyone in Bristol a reason to visit Clifton. Just like Steven Spielberg says about cinemas, at Zoos, strangers with different ideologies, backgrounds and experiences, people you may not agree with anything else about in life, can share and be united by the same experience of making eye contact with a roaring lion, a munching gorilla, a playful seal or a cheeky meerkat. In that moment, you have common ground and frequently look at each other and smile. You can’t get that at home on a television screen watching a David Attenborough documentary, no matter how good it is.
If Bristol Zoo moves to the Wild Place in South Gloucestershire, access will be limited to people with cars and who need to make a difficult and off-putting drive out of the city.
Closing Bristol Zoo is erecting barriers for many people who live in the city – young and old - who may otherwise have visited the Zoo in Bristol.
Sir David Attenborough once said:
“No one will protect what they don’t care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced”.
Taking the Zoo out of the heart of Bristol can only mean that in the future, far fewer people from Bristol will have the chance to experience amazing exotic and endangered wildlife and consequently, will not want to protect it.
There are nine members who sit on Bristol City Council’s Planning Committee A. They are the people along with the planning officer who are entrusted with this historic decision. Do they want the decision to turn this hallowed ground; 186 years of history, botanical gardens, unique slice of paradise woven into the fabric of the city, a phenomenal juxtaposition of natural and urban, of people and wildlife – do they want the decision to turn this, into a luxury housing estate on their conscience for the rest of time? How will history judge that decision for Bristol?
If the Clifton Suspension Bridge Trust suddenly announced that they were struggling financially and it was going to make more sense for them to dismantle their iconic bridge and remove it from the city’s skyline so they could build a much more modern and cost-effective bridge somewhere else, would we all just say, “yes, good idea, there’s no choice?” Or as a city would we say; “Clifton Suspension Bridge is far too important to our history, heritage and culture to just give up on it, even if it doesn’t make economic sense”.
Valuing what can be measured. A narrow spreadsheet-based approach to life versus a much wider and deeper view of human existence will always choose financial expediency over culture, profit over heritage and greed over history.
What about valuing things that are sometimes intangible yet as humans we all know to be true and what really matter; what we feel, what brings us joy, what evokes emotion, what inspires us - what it is to be alive.
Sometimes in life you see something, and you just know instinctively, you feel deep down, that it’s not right. You just know. Going to Bristol Zoo in its final few weeks before it closed was like that.
One of my son’s friends recently said to me, “I miss the Zoo.” So do I. And I want it back. Together, we can make that happen.