Bristol street art

Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall - it’s wet.

So says Banksy, Bristol’s most famous (and anonymous) street artist. Banksy now has an international reputation and the city of Bristol has been converted from eradicating graffiti to preserving and encouraging it (within limits). The “naked man” painting is a case in point - it adorns a (rather inaccessible) wall along Park Street immediately across from the Bristol City Council (clearly an in-your-face move) and down the road from the Wills Memorial Bldg where I work (more about this building later). The naked man was painted in 2006 (and later defaced by another graffiti artist). The City Council threatened to paint over it but refrained when the public clamored to keep it. They have since changed their mind about street art, in large part because of an enormously popular exhibition at the Bristol Art Museum (right next to the Wills Building) entitled “Banksy vs. the Bristol Museum”. The Dorothy poster (“I don’t think we’re on canvas any more”) was one of the posters for this show (and one that I decided I needed to own). The “versus” says it all... amazingly, Banksy negotiated with the museum for free access to the museum, to convert as he saw fit.

Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it’s a tool. ‘I’ll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite the wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw.’ I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?

Bristol apparently has a long history of city vs. graffiti artists. In the 18th and 19th centuries, chalk was the offending medium. Chalking was criminalized in 1837 with passing of the Encroachment Act, with additional strengthening laws enacted in early 20th century, aimed at the militant women’s suffrage movement who chalked slogans on the pavement. But street art in Bristol extends well beyond graffiti. One example revolves around a statue of William III in Queen’s Square. It was built in early 18th century and, symbolically, William III is clothed in Roman warrior garb! Apparently the statue was draped in mourning cloth in 1795 as a protest against acts aimed at limiting free speech that were passed by the government of Pitt the younger, who suspended habeas corpus. And then during the reform riots of 1831, a French tri-colored hat placed on statue. Queens Square remains a gathering place for protests.  

Later the public art in the city was apparently driven by historic enmity between the Merchant Venturers, who lived in Georgian Clifton (still the high rent district of Bristol) and the Whig/Liberal industrialists (the Frys of chocolate fame and the tobacconists, the Wills) who lived in south Bristol. Communities to the south and north of harbor merged to form the city of Bristol around 1900. This merger provoked a competition for control of commemorative landscapes in the city.  As a result, Frys/Wills group commissioned a statue of the MP Edmund Burke in 1894, a Whig MP who is now remembered as the founder of modern conservatism. The Merchant Venturers promptly commissioned a statue of Edward Colston, which now stands close to that of Burke (although I don’t have a photo - his contemplative pose is not as amenable to decoration as Burke’s outstretched hand!). Because I didn't have a picture of the Colston statue, I have included some other street art photos, including my favorite piece that sprouted up near the train station for a few weeks this winter. It is called "Shoot and Leave" (by street artists Filthy Luker, Pedro Estrellas and Jak Hardpoint), with reference to the popular British book on punctuation, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" [if you don't know this, look on Wikipedia for the story behind the title]

The Merchant Venturers then went on to erect Cabot’s tower in 1897 to mark the spirit of mercantile entrepreneurism in the form of a tribute to John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), who sailed the Matthew to North America in 1497 (apparently there is also a Cabot’s tower in Newfoundland, where he landed). Cabot’s tower sits on top of Brandon Hill, which I traverse every morning when I walk to work. A couple of weeks ago I was greeted with the appearance of numerous “tree cozies” [a play on tea cozy, for those of you who are not British]. These form a particularly entertaining type of street art - are apparently constructed and installed by stealth knitting groups... they may also adorn lamp posts or guard rails or last year I saw an entire narrowboat that was covered in a knitted “cozy” (even the life ring was covered).

To finish the story, the southern industrialists retaliated several years later by building the Wills Memorial Building (home of the School of Earth Sciences), which is 100 ft taller than Cabot’s tower and much grander... [the history of Bristol street art was excerpted from Banksy: the Bristol Legacy  edited by Paul Gough]

 Other examples of impromptu street art include the "fake moon" that appeared in front of the Cathedral for four nights in a row as part of an art festival. It was described on line as "a perplexing apparition in the night sky. Rising slowly, an intense ball of light illuminates the city skyline, casting long shadows across the grass".

And then of course there is my local artist/sailor Rupert, shown below applying a stencil that he made for me with my boat's name... which is Aeolus, the wind god of the Aeolian Islands, which means, of course, that he is also a volcano god: the islands are all volcanic; the Greeks thought that volcanoes were places where the Earth's internal winds could escape.

And finally a random selection of street art, beginning with the 'sanctioned' graffiti street art overseen by the paint drip man (Pouring Paint  by Nick Walker: