A Farewell to Bristol
On Skins, finding yourself, and finding home, wherever that may be.
What you have to understand, if you weren’t around to see it, is that there was a time, from around 2007, until sometime after the Tesco riots in 2011, that Bristol was cool. Well, if you were a weird little hippy teenager living in the home counties, it certainly felt that way. But there was undeniable excitement around the city in those years.
I’m not big on Banksy, but I think it started with Banksy. Suddenly, everybody was absolutely gaga for stencil art of rats, and little girls letting go of balloons. The centre of the Banksy universe, of course, was Bristol. Go to Park Street and you’ll see Well Hung Lover, a large depiction of a naked figure hanging, one handed, from the window, whilst a man in a full suit looks for the adulterer, a woman behind him, crossed arms, in underwear far more modern than the suit. If the guy fell from his precarious position, he’d land in Bristol’s small gay district. Some time ago, somebody shot some blue paintballs at it.
Somehow, despite the derivative, and frankly repetitive nature of his work, when you say Bristol, someone else may well say “Banksy”.
As Banksy’s spray-painted star rose, a moral panic brewed over a Channel 4 series called Skins. Named after a slang term for rolling papers, in the context of rolling a big old spliff, rather than a cigarette, it set out to be provocative from the start. Teenagers were in the writing room, and, barring the already-famous Nicholas Hoult as catalyst character Tony, the stars really were unknown teenagers from Bristol too. The plot was ridiculous, a literal teenage fantasy of debauchery and drama. Adults hated it, but us teenagers? We lapped it up. Of course we did.
Skins first aired in 2007, the year I turned 16. That year I was high on reasonably decent GCSE results and the confidence to push the boundaries of the freedom I was given. But I was also desperately lonely. I hated school sixth form, few of my friends had stayed on. The fact I was “uncool” was even more apparent now that I didn’t have to wear a uniform. It turns out that flouting the “business wear” rule by wearing floaty floral skirts and patent green Dr Martens with rainbow laces made you figure of pity, rather than a rebel. I was set to do quite badly because I wasn’t going to school. And if asked why, I’d just tell my teachers that school wasn’t compulsory any more. Which they, of course, read as total arrogance.
Looking back, I was clearly deeply anxious, depressed, and drowning. And so, so lonely.
The first time I saw Skins was on an A level Geography field trip, when we all gathered in the TV room of the Lake District youth hostel to watch the episode where Chris dies. Except I didn’t find out that Chris died until much later, because we were told to go to bed when a teacher came in and clocked us watching that gratuitously graphic Sid and Cassie sex scene. And that was it, I was obsessed. Here were these teenagers living out the life I wanted but didn’t have, except in small snippets when I (riskily, frankly) met up with people from the internet. The cast of Skins weren’t supposed to be the popular kids, but the proto-adult way they lived their lives made them the coolest teens we’d ever seen. And the backdrop to all of these unlikely proceedings? Bristol. A very cool, extremely geographically incorrect, Bristol.
By the time I was deciding where to go to university, I was deep in my hippy phase. Everybody else was an emo, or wore low rise jeans and straightened their hair until it fried. Having failed to fit in, I decided to stop trying. In fact, I decided to do the opposite. I bought a bunch of vintage skirts from eBay, dyed my hair a weird purple (shout out to Schwarzkopf XXL dye), and wore the aforementioned Doc Martens everywhere. I learned to spin poi, and had loud, misinformed views on politics. Once, I put a copy of the Socialist Worker next to the newspapers in the library. I was trying to do the early 90s about 17 years too late, or perhaps I yearned for 1960s San Francisco? I listened to The Levellers and the Grateful Dead. I was solidly, objectively, uncool, and I made every effort to ensure I didn’t fit in. And yet, I still wanted to find a mythical place where perhaps I could be accepted for who (I thought) I was.
Choosing where to go to university was much more about choosing the location of my first foray into adulthood than about the ranking of the establishment. I didn’t have a lot of choice; due to the aforementioned bunking, I wasn’t going to have the A levels to go anywhere “decent” (I’d once dreamt of Cambridge. And then I was predicted CCC.) So, I weighed up the country’s ex-polytechnics, and tried to work out which city might be the most bohemian. I also had this hankering for living by the sea, or at least a decent amount of water. I, predictably, fell head-over-heels, obsessively, in love with the idea of Brighton, with a second choice of Bristol. So I put my applications in to the Universities of Brighton, West of England, Bournemouth, Cardiff, and for some reason I’ve never quite fathomed, Aberystwyth.
My Brighton offer was one grade lower than my UWE offer, so Bristol was suddenly completely off the table. I got into Brighton, and spent 3 years embroiled in student politics, occupations, culturally appropriative hairstyles, and a burgeoning fourth wave of feminism. I got a decent degree in Geography too. But by the time the degree was finished, I was done with Brighton. Others made plans to stay around, but it didn’t feel like an option for me. Financially broke, as I always was at University, I moved back home, except it wasn’t really home. Whilst I was studying, my family had cracked and crumbled. My parents were divorced now, my mum with a new man and living in Essex. My sister had dramatically fallen apart too, and, kicked out, now lived on the sofa at my dad’s. So the “home” I returned to was not the home of my childhood. And again, I became bitterly unhappy.
I’d studied Geography because I’d adored the BBC’s Coast series, being, also, pretty obsessed by Coastlines themselves. But, perhaps deeper than that, I’ve always had a bit of a thing about places. My memories are very spatially linked, my brain able to recall the minutest details just by thinking about where I’d been. Deeper still, perhaps, I think that in my late teens and early adulthood, I was desperately searching for somewhere I felt at home. The real issue was that I wasn’t at home in myself. I couldn’t understand why I did the things I did, why others perceived my actions so differently to my intentions. But, not understanding this, I constantly sought home outside of myself. It is only now, happy and comfortable in my own skin, with labels which give me an understanding of myself few are afforded, that I realise home can be wherever you are. As long as you can be yourself, and feel content within yourself.
But, let’s return to that post-university time, when I was still adrift. I began wondering about Bristol again. Skins had not long finished, its 3rd and final generation of teens a disappointment to just about everyone. The year before, there had been riots in Stokes Croft, an area of Bristol which at that time had two large clubs, and a slightly edgy vibe, over a proposed Tesco Express. As much as I’d loved Brighton, it hadn’t stuck somehow. It was the right choice for then, but maybe Bristol was the right choice for now? I was still left wing, but my style of dress had settled into a vintage-inspired, slightly brighter approximation of what everybody else wore. I was constantly looking for work, working temporary office jobs, and finally spending a wonderful 6 months by the sea as an outdoor instructor. And when that finished, I would move to Bristol.
I wouldn’t move to Bristol for another 3 years.
Whilst working in Dorset, I’d met a boy on dating site who was finishing his degree in Bath, and this felt serendipitous to my Bristol-based plans. I fully intended to move to Bristol, but my scattergun approach to job applications got me a job with the council in Bath. And so that was where I moved. It wasn’t Bristol, but it was close enough.
18 months on, the relationship ended, and I realised I’d picked completely the wrong career. I’d gone into environmental science because that was just what you did with a geography degree, and I felt so proud to be working in the field I’d studied. Until I started to hate it, mostly because the people I worked with at a water company regarded me as some sort of alien sent to irritate them at lunchtimes. Realising a latent wish of mine to work with children with additional needs probably was my actual vocation, I left Bath for Weston-super-Mare. And the year after, I got into Bristol for my masters. The actual University of Bristol this time, not the West of England. And so the time had come, I was finally doing it. I moved to Bristol with agency work set to begin in September, and some exciting Tinder messages on my phone.
I wouldn’t say finally moving to Bristol was where my troubles began, but it didn’t help.
The agency work never really materialised, and every job I enquired about wouldn’t guarantee me a Wednesday off for my studies. I was now in a different city to most of the friends I’d made in Bath, except for my housemates, a couple, at that point my best friends, who did not turn out to be healthy people with whom to live. And, alas, not in a chaotic, Skins-esque sense, it was all much less glamorous, of course.
And the guy from Tinder began a campaign on my self-esteem that very nearly broke me, until I emerged, blinking, somehow back in Weston-super-Mare, four years later.
I still live near Bristol, and so much of my personal narrative is tied up, psycho-geographically, in its streets. Every time I return, something surfaces, even though my time in Bristol feels murky, unsavoury, best forgotten.
Let’s take a walk.
We’ll start at Temple Meads, the largest station, curiously offset from the town. Below the departure boards, in front of the barriers, is where I fatefully met my Bristol ex for the first time, travelling together to a trans pride fundraiser in Bath.
Let’s leave the station, and stop at the bottom of the hill. Turn right, and you’ll find the places we lived. I spent my lockdown in Totterdown, 20 minutes up the hill from the station, in one of the colourful houses you see from the train. Winter solstice, 2020, I knew my relationship was over, and I’d stormed from the car and kept walking down the hill, stopping only to collect a bundle of “solstice blessings” from the hippy florist. I clutched this in my hand as I sobbed and walked to the Wetherspoons by the station, back where we started.
We’re turning off before we get to Totterdown though, and walking through Bedminster. (Interestingly, somewhere between Totterdown and Bedminster, you’ll find the house of Tony and Effie from Skins). I’ve always had a soft spot for East Street, despite it being run down, full of pawn shops and pigeons. At the end of East Street we’re passing the bus stop I sat in once when I couldn’t take being berated any more. I wish I could see that sad, cold, inappropriately-shod figure and tell her not to go back. But she’s not at that bus stop any more, and I am thankful every day for that small mercy.
If you carry on past the McDonald’s and the pink-fronted brothel, you’ll find the tiny, mouldy, ridiculously warm flat where my sanity slowly ebbed away. But we’re not going there. Turn left, and left again, and walk up the hill until you find the river. Cross the river, walk down the steps, and you’re at the harbourside. Always my place of solace when things were too difficult for me to bear.
In the immortal words of Cassie in that first episode: “I like boats, they go places”.
I don’t know why I find water so calming, I always have. My happiest memories in Bristol mostly took place on the harbourside, but they’re all tinged with sadness. Sitting in the sun, drinking a shandy and eating crisps on the way back from work sound idyllic, until I remember how much I was dreading returning home. The hot day when the ska band Imperial Leisure played a guerilla gig from the top of their tour van, I was sat filling a notebook with things I presumed my ex would want to hear. I lived to appease, but never could.
Walk along the harbourside, towards the centre. Go up Park Street and you’ll find College Green, somewhere I always assumed would feature much more heavily in my Bristol life. Can’t think where I got that idea from (Skins. It was Skins.) Look to your right, and there’s the gay club which always gave me panic attacks, but which I was forced to enter anyway. And there’s that blue-splattered Banksy.
Trudge up the rest of the hill, and there’s the Wills Memorial building, where, against all the odds, the insecure work, the coercively controlling relationship, I graduated with a distinction. Unfortunately, my ex is indelibly part of that day. When we had our photograph taken, the photographer had asked him to put his hand under my own, which was holding the fake scroll. This, said my ex, was very apt. To talk to him, you’d think he’d done my degree for me, written all the essays and been the supportive, perfect partner. The fact is, he’d agreed to pick me up from the library just once, and had only once helped me with an essay. That culminated in him telling me he wouldn’t bother again, as I clearly didn’t want his advice. The truth was, I’d become so stressed that I’d cried in a Starbucks, and one of his youth work clients saw.
I got that distinction in spite of it all.
Walk across a bit, past the hospital, and down the hill again, and here’s Broadmead, the shopping district. For ages after I’d moved away, I was uneasy here. Partly due to the increasingly evident societal breakdown, but mostly because I worried I’d see my ex. Broadmead features very little in Skins, or really anything which is filmed in Bristol. It wasn’t part of the Bristol of my imagination, but very much became the Bristol reality. Only when I discovered my ex had moved away did I feel I could breathe in the city again. But I didn’t start to like it any better, until very recently.
Get on the number 8 bus. Return to the station. Go home, wherever that may be. You don’t need to be here any more.
As I edge closer to a change of scenery so drastic that it involves a 24 hour flight, I have been considering my ambivalence to Bristol. I wanted it to be a place where I could be myself, yet instead it became the place where I became the furthest from myself. But, despite the terror, there are parts I’ll miss. The harbourside, the Avon Gorge, the view of the city from Brandon Hill Park. Ironically, the things which drew me to Bristol in the first place.
Bristol didn’t just lose its shine for me personally. It is a city in decline, as many cities are. Antisocial behaviour plagues Broadmead and Castle Park. Despite being the UK’s 8th largest city, it visibly lags behind in infrastructure, and things to do. Skins remains a cult classic of the teenage genre, but I’d not want to be a teenager in Bristol these days. The big clubs in Stokes Croft, Lakota and Blue Mountain, have shut down.
The Tesco Express, just up the road, is well-patronised, and exists unbothered.
And me? I’m not a Bristolian any more. I don’t think I ever was.
Although I’m never going to drop the habit of referring to things as “lush”, am I?