The Parish of St Paul’s. KylaBorg//flickr.cc(by)
I first arrived in Bristol in September 1994. One of my first encounters from then with a Bristolian born and bred has stuck firmly in mind. While purchasing a fearsome slab of bread pudding, the young woman behind the counter concluded our conversation with the warning: “Don’t go into that St Paul’s”. I failed to follow her advice. Indeed, much of my social, creative and work life has since involved living and working in St Paul’s. But to this day, her warning continues to reverberate. And I’ve seen that her fears are as current now as they were then. Only this year, the choreographer Cleo Lake discovered that none of the twenty plus participants in her Bristol Black History workshop had ever visited the neighbourhood.
St Paul’s remains in the popular consciousness an immutable zone of vice and Blackness, a place where modern white missionaries find meaning or where thrill seekers find adventure. But the St Paul’s I have come to know is anything but frozen in stasis. Its recent history is among the most dynamic in Bristol. From a much fancied ward in the 19th century, it became a zone of transition long before Caribbean settlers arrived in the 1950s and 60s. Landlords turned their homes over to multi-occupancy for lucrative letting to Irish families, European migrants, and people from the Commonwealth.
