Bristol: Networks champion the unorthodox

A history of ingenuity, creativity, social reform and environmental justice provides a promising platform for future growth

In a devolved era, a key to city success will be to “find out who you are and do it on purpose”. As many cities write strategies which include creative quarters, innovation districts, and measures to build a greener economy, and transform social outcomes for residents, Bristol has an advantage — it has a legitimate claim to a relevant track record in its local history.

Bristol would be an ideal testbed for many of the recommendations of Networked Heritage. It already has networks which can transmit ideas to local groups such as the Neighbourhood Planning Network and a new Heritage Forum. Engaging Bristol and neighbouring cities and communities in the wider city-region requires going beyond a cursory treatment of the historic environment, to encompass the inherited values of distinct places.

Underneath central Bristol are traces of settlement stretching back millennia. Bristol was a town in Roman times and one of Britain’s larger medieval cities, and a trading port with connections to Ireland and Europe. Entrepreneurs and business people petitioned Edward III to create a new county in 1373; ‘Bristol’s original City Deal’ according to former Mayor George Ferguson.

Bristol boomed in parallel with England’s transatlantic endeavours, and by the 19th century Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the first modern passenger steamship in the harbour, connected the growing city by rail to London, and masterminded a daring suspension bridge at Clifton.

Today Bristol is a city of 450,000 which has outgrown its administrative boundary. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) calculates the continuous built-up area to encompass 720,000 residents — the 13th largest in the UK. In most directions, Bristol abuts open land protected as green belt. According to one civic entrepreneur and campaigner, Bristol is “compact and constrained. Its identity is defined as against neighbours”. At its centre, land around the floating harbour has been repurposed since the commercial docks closed in 1975. This combination of industrial heritage, natural heritage and layers of social history helped Bristol score second among England’s ‘core cities’ in the 2015 RSA Heritage Index — and in the top 25 percent of all districts in England.

During recent decades Bristol has earned a reputation for offering a high quality of life alongside a relatively prosperous economy. As a council-commissioned report on cultural strategy concluded in 2010: “The single strongest, overriding characteristic that unites and influences all aspects of Bristol’s personality is the spirit of innovation, creativity and unorthodoxy.”’ The word ‘unorthodox’ was a common characteristic of Bristol offered by our interviewee, exemplified at standout heritage organisations like Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust. Many residents in the city today are energised by the engineering ingenuity and social activism of Bristol in the past, with explicit heritage programmes in place to strengthen this link.

Playing with devolution

Bristol, like other major English cities, is in the throes of exploring new approaches to governing itself. It opted in 2012 to elect a mayor, making it the largest English city outside London to have this position. Yet the relationship of that position to place-shaping powers is complex.

The mayor has no legal power beyond the council leader role, which was replaced. One of George’s eight priorities was to demonstrate “the importance of cities being devolved giving much greater freedom and flexibility’. Bristol agreed a ‘devolution deal’ from central government in the 2016 Budget. It has been late to the party, despite the likely returns to the Treasury from increased investment in a strong regional economy; and the need for additional powers to improve housebuilding and transport provision, which are widely identified as priorities. The creation of a ‘metro mayor’ and a ‘West of England’ Combined Authority across four local authorities will bring those powers, but has brought loud objections from several corners.

George Ferguson himself has a background as an architect and developer, purchasing and renovating an old tobacco factory and a brewery in Bristol. As mayor he focused on highly visible activities. A Fairness Commission asked “what kind of city do we want to be?”, though this effort was largely detached from a debate about what Bristolians value from their heritage. In the vision for the city, successful neighbourhoods are defined by “a strong sense of identity and belonging” and,

…the streets are alive with activity, and where every citizen and community participates in the cultural life of our city…we celebrate and champion the diversity of our population and every individual, organisation, business and community is encouraged to play an active role in the life of the city.

— Vision for Bristol, 2013

Mayor Ferguson successfully achieved European Green Capital status for 2015, which included £2m ‘neighbourhoods and small grants’ funding and funded several projects with a strong heritage component such as Bristol Loves Tides and engaging young people with the River Avon. Mayor Ferguson’s plea to council officers had been to “say yes first, and then try and explore the practicalities”. In recent years exhibitions and festivals have made a particularly profound impact by reimagining the city’s iconic historic spaces — including a temporary slide on Park Street and a pyrotechnic dance music festival in Queens Square.

Through more open initiatives such as Ideas Lab, Bristol citizens have made suggestions included restoring old warehouses as community assets, using the abandoned Parcelforce building as a public art installation, growing a network of city elders, and highly creative references to maritime history.

But one critique holds that Bristol’s efforts to shape its future add up to less than the sum of its parts due to a historic leadership deficit.

“Lots of people are doing creative things. Is there vibrancy and energy in city? Lots. Is there coherence and direction? It’s all over the place. It’s difficult to move anything on. We haven’t had the power base to follow the same direction for years [as in Manchester].”

— Senior leader of heritage sector organisation, Bristol, May 2015

Bristol has struggled to deliver on the fundamentals like new rapid bus services — in development since 2006. By contrast, Greater Manchester has had a vehicle to come together as a 10 authority coalition for 30 years, adding over 40 stations to the network in the last 10 years.

The challenge comes back to Bristol and its neighbours. Centre for Cities has called relationships between local councils “uncertain”; while the RSA’s City Growth Commission received submissions referring to specific failures among Bristol’s neighbours in the legal ‘duty to cooperate’ in making decisions about housing development for a housing market which spans beyond the city into surrounding towns.

Several senior figures with different roles in Bristol’s civic leadership recognised that the desire for a mayor was in part a response to “a real desire to have leadership, beyond the cut-throat warring regimes. Wars have dominated activity. Relationships are awful, we can’t get consensus.”

However, Bristol has seen consistency across the council, businesses and communities in understanding the importance of its cultural scene and the health of supporting organisations. Heritage provides the distinctiveness of neighbourhoods, providing qualities that have helped to define the city’s appeal to both residents and visitors according to Bristol’s Core Strategy (section 4.22.4). A core set of institutions has gradually colonised repurposed buildings around the harbour as “ideas spaces”, hosting an annual Festival of Ideas; “in the mercurial world of regeneration — temporary urbanism and meanwhile usage is a really big deal. It is fair to say that Bristol is one of the leading cities in the UK, in terms of this” according to regeneration expert Andrew Dakin.

The coming together of arts and creative industries is particularly promising as a source of economic dynamism. As previous HLF research has shown: “historic buildings are particularly attractive to new business start-ups, especially in the creative and cultural sector”, and Bristol has borne several innovative media products with heritage sector applications.

“Strong cultural, creative and digital clusters is the right mix for the 21st century and Bristol has an edge on others with its lifestyle and activism. Just be curious, work collaboratively, don’t let rules slow you down, and back the talent. I think the key factors have been seeing ourselves as enablers and not being too worried about who gets the credit; the focus is on doing stuff, doing it quickly and being honest about what has and hasn’t worked.”

— Dick Penny, Managing Director of Watershed, interviewed in 2014

The value of coherence in identity

As Bristol gains confidence on a national, European and global stage, it must strike a delicate balance, familiar in ‘place branding’ debates elsewhere. As Councillor Simon Cook told our audience at Heritage Question Time: “We don’t want to have a kind of mega-culture offer that swamps neighbourhood identity.” At an earlier RSA consultation event there was inevitable consensus that: “Bristol is a patchwork of multiple heritages, not a single story.” The following unattributed quotes summarise the differing views:

“Bristol has an audience and it depends what they expect to see or what they want… in what is a very competitive scenario. So how a city communicates its USP and to who, is very important.”

“When we talk about communication and audiences we need to focus this back to the people on the street — they are the community that we should be focusing our work towards.”

“We are getting into this area of the world that is place-branding and it turns my heart cold. This kind of corporate caricature of a city — rather than something authentically part of the city.”

“I do think there is a difference between trap lines without integrity, and those with. I appreciate there is a problem with place making and branding — but I think the most successful cities around the world are those that manage to design their product and set themselves apart as something different.”

A further question troubling many civic leaders relates to the equality of opportunity people have to record and articulate their heritage, within the popular imagery of Bristol in the imagination of Bristolians and those beyond. Prevailing images of heritage “are one of its greatest barriers” in creating equal relevance to all of Bristol’s citizens and neighbourhoods.

“What we try and do is engage people on the excitement of heritage in place, with your surroundings, so that the built environment is something you can have an opinion about and something you are involved in.”

— Christine Davis, Centre Manager at the Architecture Centre

“It is the intangible heritage that is embedded within communities that needs unlocking — to help to recognise the value held within those communities. When you work with people it is not always the stuff around them that excites them, it is the stories that come out of them. As soon as you start to show them things they open up and start telling these fabulous stories. Unlocking that is a challenge. Heritage is the ankle bite that gets people involved in place making.”

— Peter Insole, Senior Archaeological Officer at Bristol City Council

“Stories, gatherings, activism, performance and events, sometimes leave no trace. Alongside scars of once standing community buildings, the swimming pool, pubs and schools. Intangible heritage struggles without a tangible legacy. In Knowle West the only heritage we’ve got for young people is what we tell them what used to be here. It’s difficult to get young people interested in their heritage if there is nothing left.”

— Penny Evans, Assistant Director, Knowle West Media Centre

Commonly felt across different cultural sectors, inequality in participation is often an acute concern among those who work or volunteer in heritage. Reflecting on this frustration in a socially and ethnically diverse city like Bristol, several interviewees shared difficult reflections on the perennial challenge to ensure heritage assets and activities are inclusive.

Furthermore, there is a concern that some communities that forge Bristol’s vibrant and assertive identity are unable to profit or benefit proportionately from the city’s growth and prosperity. Every place and every person ‘has’ heritage, but the ability to capitalise upon heritage is unequally distributed, and at the local level might depend on existing wealth and income. Engagement with ‘heritage economics’ are under-theorised in the UK. In a city with the heritage assets and socio-economic polarisation of Bristol, difficult decisions lie ahead:

“Those who know Bristol well are struck by the tension between what the rest of the country sees as a dynamic creative place and the city’s own sense that too many citizens miss out on its creative opportunities.”

— Peter Boyden, Chair of the Arlnofini, writing in 2010

“A lot of ‘our’ problems are really the problems of disadvantaged communities, and their neighbourhoods, which are consistently under-invested in by the city. That makes it hard. Those populations contribute a huge amount to the vibrancy of the city and have done for a long time — with things that Bristol holds as hugely important, like its music scene.”

— Ursula Billington, Project Manager, Superact CIC

“Heritage and culture are an economic driver, but for whom? In the heritage sector, who do we service? Do we risk gentrification and displacement of those whose heritage it is?”

— Workshop participant, May 2015

“We shouldn’t be scared of making decisions with economic drivers in mind. But we should ensure that people can make their views clear on where relative values lie.”

— Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, RSA

“We have too many Georgian terraces, too many historic ships, to have the energy — literally — to preserve them all.”

— Matthew Tanner, Chief Executive, SS Great Britain Trust

Feedback on early iterations of the RSA’s Heritage Index highlighted that for Bristol’s civic leaders, obtaining data at the neighbourhood scale was the priority. Bristol already surveys residents across the city to produce data at ward-level about quality of life, which goes into detail on perceptions of safety, local services and local environment. To better inform decisions about heritage in each of Bristol’s neighbourhoods, additional data on identity, belonging and local history could also prove helpful.

A new scale of identity

In Bristol’s own vision for a wider city-region, ‘history’ is identified as one of five typologies which can bind an economic ‘powerhouse’. There is economic logic to this. For example, when it comes to professional identities at a city-wide level, a sense of confidence in who you are, where you’ve come from, and what you hold as deep qualities is key in being able to articulate and promote an authentic brand to those outside the locality.

For many years Bristol’s tech sector, while self-consciously knowledgeable, well networked, and collaborative, tracing a lineage back to the 1970s, was neither promoted effectively nor understood nationally as a strong local cluster. This becomes a barrier to business growth, undermining potential finance from investors outside the cluster.

A rich local history of social action, cultural creativity and innovation in the knowledge-led sectors provides inspiration to attract, retain and develop future generations of investors, workers and activists in Bristol. Heritage can make a more conscious contribution to defining a distinct social and economic orientation for Bristol. Commensurate with and enabling this, Bristol’s civic leaders need to invest in heritage, and integrate heritage into their programme of work to shape Bristol’s future.

A sense of place is not trivial; it offers instrumental as well as fundamental value. A sense of shared fortunes, shared endeavour and common interest yields an economic dividend, as firms which share a collective identity interact more, bringing competitive benefits to industrial clusters.

The open question relates to the scale at which people associate their lives with the lives of others. Given that central government is compelling localities to coordinate across existing governance boundaries, this should be of urgent interest to those across the four authorities which come under the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership area. In early 2016, the pursuit of a Great Western Cities initiative with Cardiff and Newport served to distance Mayor Ferguson from near neighbours.

Elected in May 2016, Marvin Rees’ mayoral term in Bristol, through until 2020, promises a number of strategic opportunities. The devolution of powers is the most important; shared between neighbouring local authorities, as powers over economic development and governmental agencies, seeking to match the functional geographies of the city-region in its labour markets and public service delivery.

A city-region formalised under a combined authority should see it as imperative to cultivate a sense of common identity, which a deeper engagement in local heritage brings into focus. Local plans will become subsidiaries to city-region plans. Engagement is harder at broader spatial scales, as acknowledged in the current consultation on a draft spatial strategy for the ‘West of England’ area (Bristol and its three neighbouring authorities):

Statutory plan making can be a complex and detailed process and it can be challenging to ensure everyone engages in the process particularly when it is at a strategic level and not dealing with specific local issues.

Engagement is critical in translating strategy into impact. One interviewee felt that “development control policies are only effective if the community is mobilised enough to hold developers to account”. The process of developing a place always means negotiating trade-offs. During the course of our research, proposals to develop the Chocolate Factory building were amended to minimise demotion. Delays to infrastructure for Bristol’s MetroBus network have arisen as some protest associated tree-felling.

Inspiration from historic activism

Bristol’s economy has proved resilient through recent recession and recovery, but, like other cities, a proportion of Bristol residents — persistently those from certain neighbourhoods and socio-economic circumstances — are not well-equipped to capitalise on opportunities in business and work, which have focused on the city centre.

Heritage is often the reason for young people to visit a city centre, and has the potential to help build a sense of ownership and citizenship, connecting people to the efforts of previous generations to shape and build their city. The SS Great Britain issues children on school trips with a ‘golden ticket’ which entitles them to return for free with a parent. The challenges in attracting the breadth of Bristol’s citizens run deep. Given the harbour’s association with the slave trade, the SS Great Britain struggles to overcome the perception, especially among black Bristolians, that any grand old ship in Bristol must be connected to that painful history.

‘Empowerment’ is an over-used word among public servants and think tanks which seek to influence them. History tells us that real power shifts more often through being seized than gifted. Bristol’s own social history is itself a resource. In 1831 the Queens Square riot represented a significant public disturbance in support of more proportionate representation in parliament, with four directly killed protesting and four rioters later hanged.

The 1963 boycott by black Bristolians of the city’s bus company was successful in equalising employment opportunities on the buses, and influenced the creation of the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, making discrimination illegal.

In the 1970s, a local environmental movement gained momentum in Bristol. Organisations like Sustrans were trailblazing in their campaigns and actions to repurpose old industrial infrastructure (disused railways and canals) as routes for walking and cycling. Other aspects of the movement in recent decades include renewable energy and the revitalisation of local food networks. Bristol has been ahead of the curve on sustainable living — something which all cities globally are now grappling with. Bristol’s models of engagement, for example on it’s river, could prove valuable for export.

In building a sustainable economic future, this heritage offers an identity which provides impetus to Bristol’s strategies to remain on a progressive path towards a truly sustainable economy. This impetus is reflected in Bristol’s imminent planning decisions; as one of our interviewees noted: “New buildings can be a strong statement. Brunel’s Engine Shed, in its time, was frontier to the New World. If the new arena looks like Birmingham, we’ll have failed.”

New initiatives like Happy City seek to unlock this potential, creating an emotional connection to drivers of quality of life. According to co-founder Mike Zeidler, Happy City wants to help Bristolians go beyond being “enthralled to the story of our times: consumption”, and help people develop perspective on a “system [that] is designed and built for people to see things in a certain way”.

New digital platforms are stimulating the creation of the next generation of heritage engagement approaches.

By combining big data and data mining approaches, local universities and employers could help create a sense of Bristol identity beyond the city, building a Bristol diaspora, for example through alumni networks. This can be understood as a valuable heritage resource: hundreds of thousands of individuals with a strong link to the city.

In Cleveland, Ohio, promoting in-migration of talented workers, focusing on university graduates, has been a key aspect of economic development. A ‘Boomerang Initiative’ used data analysis to establish patterns and flows in return migration through national tax records. This helped the city and local employers target promotion and recruitment initiatives, actively marketing to those who moved away from the metro.

Links to a city, made at and through university, are an asset to incentivise graduates returning later in their careers. This can help address skills shortages, identified as a key constraint in Bristol’s growth.

All great city development strategies transform their deficits into advantages. In Bristol’s case this might be to appreciate the benefits of operating under decades of creativity fuelled by indirection. Independent and self-generating networks can flourish, finding productive and pragmatic operating modes, under political stalemate and minimal or ineffective direction. The benefits of such entrepreneurialism are paralleled in conservation:

“Benign neglect is a great gift to conservation. Underused, unexpected, undefined, undesignated. These bits of ‘un-heritage’ are our hidden assets.”

— Richard Guise, Context4D Urban Design

To realise the power and potential of heritage in shaping a better future for Bristol’s citizens, a multitude of relevant people and organisations must play an active part in what we call ‘networked heritage’. At an early RSA workshop in Bristol, participants set themselves a five-year challenge: to have an ‘umbrella organisation’, group or individual driving a change in perceptions of heritage, towards a concept that is something which everybody can engage with, related to place, well-being and identity.

The power of networks is to inspire new practices, provide support and encouragement and challenge. Across the UK, our research has found organisations facing similar struggles and sharing common aspirations but without means to connect to those who can help them improve. Through a new Heritage Framework, Bristol has made an impressive start in scoping the potential institutions that can and should lead this effort. The city seems to have the humility to reach a consensus that “no one’s got the holy grail, but together we have”.