Business as Usual in Stokes Croft

Summer arrived in Bristol on Saturday.

Which meant that the first ever Stokes Croft Street Festival went well, if you like that sort of thing. We prefer driving down to Cabot Circus for a bit of shopping, of course.

This was not your ordinary festival, though, as it was done without closing roads. Which allowed us to drive up and down, checking out what the Great Unwashed get up to (and there were many of them, yuk...).

Here we see Turbo Island filled with street drinking revellers, or we would do if the 4x4 in the ASL hadn't stopped in the view.

In fact, ASLs seemed a very popular as a viewing area for the "festivities", as RF55AMO demonstrates.

And here, WR57WZE, checking out the activities taking place in the Canteen in Hamilton House.

In fact, the ASLs proved so popular that they even attracted visitors from abroad, as Polish BMW KTT86LT demonstrates.

It wasn't all about stopping and looking, though. For instance, the driver of car L14OUT parked up on the pavement was there for the sound system near the TO LET shop. Outside "Feed The Children".

Which may be why, just opposite, the food outlets were still open for business, as GY53FGO parked on the double yellow lines in the cycle lane illustrates, whilst the driver nips into Slix for a quick burger and chips whilst ignoring the hand-made BBQ offering from the Canteen.

All in all, though, the festival took place without interfering with the traffic. Which we liked.

Unfortunately, the organisers needed one real intervention which was ad-hoc crowd control to limit pedestrian access to the Bear-Pit.

Here in North Street this was, in true PRSC creative fashion, done using a white van, KV07KJK, which doubled as a delivery vehicle for the Blue Mountain Club. Outrageous!

Anarchists, all of them, apparently.

Based on our observations, we'd recommend our readers to avoid Stokes Croft until they stop having these sorts of festivals (unless Tesco manage to open a store there, of course).