Is Rita's trying to go upmarket?

Rita's has some new paintwork -maybe it is trying to look more sophisticated and appeal to a broader audience than minicab drivers.



Perhaps it is trying to join the rest of stokes croft up market

 

A new mural has gone up alongside Mayor Ferguson's pub, -one which made the national press, while in the US ABC news claimed that this "breakdancing Jesus" mural was controversial.
 
There is nothing controversial about this, in Stokes Croft it barely merits a mention. More controversial is whether milk from "The best 24 hours" shop is actually safe to drink, or whether a cheeseburger from Ritas or Slix is least likely to give you food poisoning.

[photos are all from 08:15 on a Saturday morning. The city sleeps, the bike lane surfaces, the council staff turn up to start sweeping up the evenings debris and any bodies. This is a car-free early Saturday morning]

Stokes Croft for visitors

A Visitors Book briefly appeared at the bottom of Ninetree Hill last month, dangling from a tree

'

Some people think it's cute, but we know different. It's a new way to catch rioters.

If every hour the police come up and put their name in along with the time, then if there's a riot all they need to do is go to the book, look at who signed it during the riot, and put them away for five year. It's the physical version of facebook. Indeed, it even has the work "book" in there, which is one of those concepts the Daily Mail want to ban, or at least burn.

Fortunately YA55VDY is wise to these police tactics, and doesn't sign the book.

For those readers who don't live in our fair city, it's about time we gave them a view of Stokes Croft, one that shows how it is the areas leading artistic and cultural quarter. Which it is.

At least, provided giant grinning skulls painted by 3dom and Rowdy are things you can cope with. We feel for the people on Dove Street, who have that staring at them out their bedroom windows. How long do you have to live there before it starts talking to you?

Riots, Root Causes and Random Opinions

It became clear during the week that even Boris Johnson was out of his depth. After some final words of advice from Sarkozy -whose strategy of containment doesn't actually work when we have to drive through the areas of unrest, we finally jetted home. And then drove down to Stokes Croft

Tesco is boarded up. It's not clear whether this was due to attacks on it, or the supermarket chain accepting the inevitable and adopting this as their decor. It is still open, providing a reason to park in the bike lane, as KT04TWZ has done.

In the distance there's a woman pushing a fixie along the pavement. Given the abuse of bicycles in the English Riots (to separate them from the Ulster Riots and the regular Scottish "fixtures"), she and the cyclist heading into the city on the road should be pre-emptively arrested.



Further down, the windows of the Croft and Rodak Polish Food at the bottom of ninetree are broken -you can see them behind the bike lane/paveparking van Properbread HK07UKR. If one were to view the riots as either a popular uprising against The Man or a mass looting by consumer-hungry troublemakers, it's hard to say why either establishment was targeted. These establishments are not The Establishment. 

There are other places boarded up, but the presence of quality art by Petro, Epok, Sepr and others shows that this is not recent. Overall then, for the area that is now associated in Bristol and the country's mind as "the first 2011 riot" is quiet and back its normal life. 

On that topic, can we point out that the graffiti covering Annabel's at No 9 actually predates the sex-shop art we covered previously. We apologise to the Annabel staff for this accidental neglect.

People have asked us who, given all the people like Max Hastings are writing bollocks, and David Starkey saying "it is because they is all black", why aren't we being paid to appear on television and spout some random bullshit about the causes of the riots and the measures that need to be taken?

Most of the shallow bollocks has already been written. You can blame thirty years of liberal thought, two years of government cuts, and then make up some opinions on what needs to be done next. When the Evening Post did ask for some opinions we provided some defensible data showing how civil unrest is strongly correlated with economic downturns -at which point they hung up the phone.

It seems that to get the TV and press coverage we deserve, and the appearance money- we need to have an agenda more outrageous, which blames the recent events to some downfall in society. The obvious events are, in no particular order

• Legalising same sex marriages.
• Banning slavery.
• The creation of the NHS.
• Making it legal for two men to hold hands in public.
• Allowing people of different racial groups to settle in the country (ignoring Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Romans, and all other pre-20th migrations except those from Ireland)
• Banning schools from being able to beat children.
• The end of capital punishment.
• The end of internment in Northern Ireland, rather than its rollout across the rest of the country.
• The end of National Service. 
• Rap Music.
• Jazz Music.
• Rock and Roll Music.
• Punk Rock.
• The rollout of 3G networks and the addition of TCP/IP protocol stacks to mobile telephones.
• The World Wide Web.
• Twitter and Facebook. 
• Television.
• The publishing press.
• Widespread literacy.
• The Human Rights Act
• The ending of the death penalty.
• The ending of deportation.

Many of these have been covered by other commentators. Even so, these are mostly symptoms. The root cause hasn't been addressed, namely that we aren't able to execute people based on verbal evidence from a single witness. If we had that, all the criminals would have been dealt with a long time ago.

That's right: since we stopped executing people for alleged witchcraft, Britain hasn't been the same.

Bring back Burning Witches based on hearsay! It's the only way to save the country!

Fraternal Greetings from Stokes Croft to Waltham Forest

While this site has tended to document the Walthamization of Bristol -the transformation of parts of the city into little parts of the elusive Freewheeler's London district "Waltham Forest", today we are pleased to see the flow of urban features has reversed, and Waltham Forest is now a little bit of Stokes Croft.

People of Waltham Forest: Welcome to our city! There are many other aspects of Stokes Croft you may wish to copy! With bars, cafes, bicycles drugs and paid-for-sex, it is Britain's mini-Amsterdam!

Kingsdown RPZ parking opportunities

Good to see that there are still some parking places hiding away in Kingsdown, like on Fremantle Square.

Although there are double yellow lines on each of the corners with Thomas Street, if you park your car right in the middle of the bollarded route, as BF02FVK has done, you aren't on any. It appears to be legal to park here. Why the bollards? Its a cycling city route, see.

Incidentally, for anyone who thinks that Kingsdown is now upmarket, what with the residents parking, we disagree. The Cotham Porter Stores pub is its very own bit of darkest Somerset, while Thomas Street boasts its very own Banksy. Here it is, framed.

Opposite, on a side of road that will soon apparently get yellow lines, that other sign of city life: someone has broken the window to steal something.

Question is, was it the classic -satnav- or was it one of the new resident permits?

Anarchist Hippies

It's happening all around the world, apparently.

Graffiti. Just plain wrong.

Banksy vs Bristol Traffic

Has anybody seen the Banksy vs Bristol Museum exhibition?

Graffiti is wrong. We all know that.

But the exhibition is, in fact, not a series of witty or political statements of a 'Bristol lad made good'. Nor a comment on society as it stands in our green and pleasant land. Or even a celebration of Bristol City Council's ability to not know that a major crowd-puller was being installed under their noses. On their premises.

No. In true Banksy fashion, it was just a ploy by the 'artist' himself to inconvenience Bristol's drivers.

Vandalism

Those vandals at the Council have removed one of my favourite pieces of Bristol street art. By installing new cycle parking.

North Street will never be the same again. Unless someone reading this still has the stencil.

More visitors to the PRSC

"Mr W" points us a lovely flickr photo of some people coming to Stokes Croft for a photoshoot

Question is, what are they trying to photo?
1: The lovely painting in the background, ruined by an ugly car on the pavement in front of it
2: The fact that it's OK to park your car on the pavement in Stokes Croft
Follow up issues to consider is if this is used in any advertising campaign, does the copyright holder of the artwork have any say in the matter, and are there any issues with parking illegally in the act of creating a car advert. Let's wait and see. I

Tourists come to the People's Republic of Stokes Croft

This is such a surreal event id deserves a mention. First, traffic. The astra with the broken brake lights is legitimately in the ASL, as it had pulled forward during the green light; it did not drive out when the light turned and so was actually being thoughtful. The car in front had pulled out on green and is now stuck in the middle of the Cheltenham Road/Ashley Road junction. Which, as it doesn't have hatched lines, is acceptable. It will, sadly, block traffic coming out of Ashley road, and hence Picton Street. Whatever has happened up the A38 is propagating through the city. Neither vehicle is blocking the pedestrian crossing; they are all crossing on the green man. Very, very unusual.

Who are the people? That is the profound thing. These people are Tourists! Walking round the area taking photos of the walls. This group are making their way from Xen's birds on nine-tree-hill, and off to snap some of the work on Ashley Road. There was an escort at the front to keep them out of trouble.

Amusingly, if they had wandered away from their escort, further east, they would have actually met one of the artists, Kai, busy decorating the boards outside a shop to flat conversion going on on Lower Cheltenham Road. But that might be a bit too dark, a bit too edgy.