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 a wonderful 1oth century minster church. For many British people this will sound idyllic and I suppose that we had a lifestyle that many would aspire to, but after sixteen years my wife and I were ready to move on.

It had been great while the kids were growing up and we both had a daily escape to work in a nearby city but that ended when I stepped down to part time work and later into full retirement. I often found myself walking around a town that was empty of people until the evening, when the commuters returned, and trying to engage in community activities with people who wanted nothing to change. Their every other word was "heritage", and it was quite clear that they felt the best days were in the past. In my work I had led many projects to improve peoples lives in disadvantaged areas and as time went on I found the air of self satisfaction and resistance to change in our home environment quite difficult to reconcile with my personal aims and beliefs.

In a city, change is ever present and all pervasive and I find this a source of great creative energy. After the move I became aware that I was living in a city that in some ways looked like the one I grew up in, but actually was completely different. The buildings' might look the same but their insides had been stripped out and scoured to create homes for different lives. Like many cities it has become a divided city to an extent that was not evident in my childhood - a city divided by age and wealth and race: the original inhabitants, the people that I grew up with, pushed by the housing market to the periphery , where they are almost out of sight. In spite of all this, the city has a vitality and its people have a dynamism that was completely missing in the declining seaport that I grew up in.

My growing understanding of the changes became increasingly evident in my writing and also in the oil paintings that I started to produce. I wrote a large number of pieces, reflecting on my experience of growing up in the city in the 1960s and 1970s and also about the tensions that I observed in the modern city. Later, I begun to explore the lives of the many and diverse people that the city is now home to. I have submitted a number of these stories to competitions, with no success at all to date, and now, for the first time I have posted two of the pieces on this blog.