My City

  1. The end of the car

    I don't sense that the future of urban transportation has been a hugely pressing issue on this site up until now - but here are some thoughts on the topic anyway. I read something a few weeks ago where it was suggested that we are coming to the end of the era of mass private car ownership. The argument was that with the growth of electric powered and driverless cars there will be less of a need for all of us to own a private car. In future when we need to get somewhere by car we will...
  2. The Festival

    I write a lot about places, and then I fit the people into those places. It should probably work the other way round. For now it’s Saturday evening and we are at the harbour festival. It’s a glorious evening of the kind that we’ve been experiencing all this summer and there’s an old-style reggae band playing on the stage in front of twenty thousand or so people to a backdrop of tall ships and dockyard cranes, while a procession of hot air balloons passes overhead. My partner turns to me and...
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  3. The Divided CIty

    Some explanation of why I started this blog. Three years ago I moved back to my home city of Bristol after an absence of over forty years. For sixteen years prior to the move we had lived in a small market town in the Midlands. This is where our children had gone to school, reached adulthood and moved on into their own independent lives. We lived on the edge of the town, with our garden backing on to open fields and woodland, and from the front of the house we had views across the town to...
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  4. Back to the City

    BACK TO THE CITY Sweet cigar smoke weaving through the crowd at Ashton Gate on Boxing Day. Drooping floodlights illuminate a muddy pitch. I stand next to my father in winter coat, always on the left side for his good ear. Another time we are in the changing room at the North Baths, the sound of children echoing from the high ceiling. There is the reek of chlorine and I am undressed, inadequately dried, thinking of hot Bovril from the machine. The houses on the hills look the same to...
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  5. The American Car

    A brother and sister grew up on a South Bristol council estate in the 1920’s and 30’s and then their lives diverged. For those of us who grew up on one side of the divide it felt as if those on the other side were living a life that came out of a TV screen. When I was young we went to their Christmas parties. My sisters and I would huddle in a corner of the lounge while dad went downstairs to play snooker with our cousins and Uncle Fred held forth, nursing his whisky in front of a large...
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