Take a walk along City Road in St Paul’s today, the area of Bristol that gained notoriety following serious riots in the 1980s, and the fried chicken joints and mini-markets give way to something less expected: estate agent signs bearing the message “Sold”.
The property website Zoopla has included St Paul’s alongside two other Bristol neighbourhoods in its Top 10 Hipster Hotspots Across the UK – the areas to have seen the biggest growth in property prices over the last five years. Something, apparently, has changed.
“I remember in the 90s when people were scared to go into St Paul’s,” says Oona Goldsworthy, chief executive of the United Communities housing association. “Now we’ve got houses just off Portland Square and it’s crazy what’s going on. It’s a bonanza.”
According to the report, property in St Paul’s has gone up by 38.5% over five years to reach an average price of £261,300. With its proximity to the city centre, decent transport and grand Georgian town houses, St Paul’s is succumbing to the forces that have transformed the other two areas on the list, Montpelier and Stokes Croft.
For the local newspaper, the news has confirmed all its worst suspicions. “It’s official,” declared the headline in the Bristol Post. “Hipsters are to blame for soaring house prices in Bristol.” The paper went on to state that, “All three areas are now dominated by men wearing beards and women riding bikes complete with the mandatory wicker basket on the handlebars.”
While the Montpelier district, with offerings such as the gin, cheese and cake emporium Cox & Baloney, has long been established as a gem of gentrification, Stokes Croft is a more recent addition. Described by one local as a concept rather than a place, Stokes Croft is little more than a single street, its decidedly humdrum collection of high street shops and takeaways transformed in recent years by the arrival of popup artisan bakeries, disco barbers and eateries bearing names such as the Love Inn and Kale & Kettle. The property prices match the fare: Montpelier has seen a 39.9% rise to an average of £494,158 over the last five years, while in Stokes Croft properties have gone up by 37.1% to an average of £317,800.
Like many in St Paul’s and the wider city, Goldsworthy’s organisation is struggling to cope with the impact of gentrification on an area that has a strong sense of community. “Just because an area becomes successful it doesn’t mean poor people can’t live there once it gets an artisan pop-up bakery,” she says. “We’ve never had artisan bakeries before but now we have, property developers have noticed and moved in.”
One such developer, Gary Sheppard from Helm Construction, told the Post that credit should be given to the hipsters. “These districts had been rundown, neglected and avoided since they began to decline after the [second world] war. No other agency had managed to stem that decline. But the hipster generation has succeeded in bringing the life back to previously deserted streets.”
The hipsters, of course, are people too: many are students who have graduated from Bristol’s booming universities and simply chosen to stay in the city, while others are young professionals escaping London’s high prices – and bringing them to Bristol. For Adam Cantwell-Corn, a coordinator of the Bristol Cable media co-op, “hipster bashing is obscuring the real causes and culprits behind the housing crisis”.
He shows me the site of the Chocolate Factory, a relic that has been the subject of a fierce battle between residents, developers and the city council. The Chocolate Factory is in Easton, where the appearance of organic cafes and groceries in the modest terraced streets marks it out, Cantwell-Corn says, as “the thin end of the wedge of what we know to be gentrification”.
Back in St Paul’s, Aileen Edwards stands in her second-floor office in Brunswick Square and points to a recently developed building on the other side of the square. Spick and span, and rather tasteful, it offers a blend of office space and residential living close to both the retail expanse of Cabot Circus shopping centre and the boho dreamland of Stokes Croft. It is an offer that Second Step, the homelessness charity Edwards runs, would never be able to match.
“I don’t know how long we’ll be able to afford to stay here,” she says. “This area is changing, there’s no doubt about that. Inequality is increasing, the private sector is buoyant because of the gentrification and affluence but it’s having a terrible effect. People are finding it harder and harder to get social housing or private sector rents that are affordable, so they are being pushed out to the margins of the city. With gentrification you lose the personality of the place.”
As the city council’s cabinet member for homes and communities, Councillor Paul Smith has helped set up a gentrification commission, an initiative of the city’s new mayor, Marvin Rees.
“It isn’t the fault of the gentrifiers but of the housing market,” says Smith. “People want to live in St Paul’s to be part of a diverse community, but that community moves out. When I was young St Paul’s was seen as an Afro-Caribbean area largely, although it was always a majority white working-class area. It is still a very mixed community but it is changing. The council blocks anchor it a bit. If they weren’t there you could see it gentrifying much quicker.”
Rees, who spent part of his childhood in St Paul’s, addressed the dangers of gentrification in his state of the city speech in October. “Our fundamental challenge is that while Bristol is getting wealthier, inequality is increasing and the city becoming ever more unaffordable,” he said. “Affordable housing is also an element in the tough challenge to ensure gentrification does not inexorably change the look and feel of our city and reduce its diversity.”
Amirah Cole is vice-chair of the Malcolm X community centre in St Paul’s, set up after the 1980 riots. There is a sense that she feels the organisation’s sense of purpose is dissolving as the community it was formed to serve disappears.
“A community centre should serve its local community,” she says. “So if it’s not doing that because the community isn’t interested, you have to ask what its purpose is. Most people now think only about themselves, and that’s the whole thing about gentrification, destroying communities. I guess it’s social cleansing.”
In a cafe on Cheltenham Road, opposite a Tesco Express that was the scene of the last riot in the area, in 2011, the woman serving coffee at the counter calls to three young men seated on pews at one of the wooden tables. “Guys, you’re washing’s ready,” she says.
Rachel Walker takes a break from distributing coffee and laundry at the At the Well Cafe & Launderette, one of the quirkier examples of gentrification in the area. “I’m at the forefront of gentrification,” she says. Walker was living in St Paul’s, paying £430 per month for a share of a four-bedroom house, but had to move out because she couldn’t afford the rent.
“It was very St Paulsy,” she says. “There were council buildings either side, there were lots of drugs and drunks, but it didn’t feel dangerous, just surreal. It’s central, it’s interesting, I love the cross-cultural aspect of it all. There are beautiful houses that could easily become a Notting Hill-like area. It feels like everyone in the entire country knows that Bristol is a nice place to live. The secret’s out. It’s an alternative to London.”
THE HISTORY OF ST PAUL’S
1780s The Georgian townhouses and squares of St Paul’s are built – but it never attains the fashionable status of Clifton.
1948 After wartime bombing, housing is cheap and the Windrush generation of immigrants move in.
1968 The first St Paul’s Carnival. It grows to rival Notting Hill as a celebration of black culture.
1980 After a police raid on a cafe, social tensions erupt in the St Paul’s riot.
1999 Banksy’s Mild Mild West mural appears on Stokes Croft, next to St Paul’s. There were plans to cover it in glass to protect it from vandals, but it is now maintained by local activists.
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