Bristol: a snapshot

Upon arrival at Clifton, be prepared for your SatNav to demand that you perform an immediate handbrake turn, rather than pay the £1 to cross the Clifton suspension bridge. Ignore the increasingly preachy pleas, and you'll be rewarded with a rather nice bit of engineering and design, which makes a super exploitation of a topographic pain in the arse. Bristol is lucky to have something like this. It's of course by Brunel, as is everything else in England west of Paddington, and it's technically treason not to like Brunel. This is a good introduction to Bristol.

The city at this point turns into a Mario Kart track, all improbable hills and one-way systems. It feels like the sort of place that Birmingham and Croydon might have ended up, if they had insane volcanic geography. A SatNav is pretty much essential for a visitor to decipher the roads, especially if s/he whimsically wants to sail across the vertical segregation of the Temple Way roundabout-underpass-walkway fantasy. Cor.

You can't say magenta without saying 'mmm'.

The original planner's model, from the days when there were only eleven cars in Bristol.

There is no discernable centre to Bristol,  which gives it the feel of a proper,  grown-up city. There is a wodge of shopping,  running from the Westfield wannabe Cabot Circus in the east,  through some pleasingly-liked 50s squares, up to an Odeon cinema so stridently 30s that it looks like an 80s pastiche.  Somewhere across town is a Vue omniplex, which might end up looking kitsch in years to come, if it's lucky. 

ZOMG faience.

Then you will inevitably get lost, and end up on the hotch-potch mess of Colston Avenue (which somehow ties itself into a roundabout). It looks to be half-redeveloped, but that's still not much of an excuse. 

Periscope / exhaust.

Round there somewhere is the Bristol infirmary. At least the ludic PoMo is sensically used to denote the children's ward. 

But the dirty, dingy mess next to does its very best to be unloveable. Yuk. That turquoise bit of Peckham library out front is fooling no-one.

The Floating Harbour, which looks and feels like a canal, is a successfully pretty place, using the water as an excuse to provide some enticing restaurants and boozers. Contrast this with, say, Reading or Norwich,  which mainly lined their waterways with yuppy-flats, jealously guarding their views from public consumption.

Publc realm / chain restaurant fantasy.

The Millennial Square is an exercise in tickbox zeitgeist; new-build plaza for public otium, a decorative water feature, some 'art', a huge silent LCD TV, a café serving babychinos and organic tiffin, a really very shiny-shiny globe thing (apparently a planetarium, but let's not allow the fact that it has a function to detract from its joyful superfluity), the Explore@Bristol branding tying the place down as irrefutably of the internet 1.0-era (Myspace, pre-hashtags, 44k modems). I quite enjoyed it.

It also serves as an interesting contrast to the barren public realm/dusty voids which are described by the joyless and adjacent TSB Forum, which Jones The Planner describes as 'a dessicated Beaux-Arts curve' and from the other side looks like a workmanlike pastiche of Farrell's Vauxhall Cross, done by someone who hates people.  Pompous.

Back somewhere to the west is Clifton Cathedral is an amazing Brutalist confection, making superb performative use of mass (haha) and void and light. 

In many ways,  Brutalism is a natural partner for divinity (if you're into that sort of thing). Sublime, in the Romantics' sense. But is has been determined by groupthink that concrete is incapable of poise or gravity and must therefore only be used in carparks and flyovers and as the hidden core of new-build flats. 

So, no more of this blast-pit piety, and another thing for Bristol to be proud of.

There's also something to fans of Victorian folly. On Brandon Hill stands the charmingly pointless pink stone phallus of Cabot Tower. At free, it's technically infinitely cheaper than Monument in London, and technically affords lovely views over the surrounding countryside (although, when a bit overcast, it all goes a bit grey).

Delightfully, there's loads more in Bristol (again, a proper place) - like Temple Meads station, the gold-clad lustre of Colston Hall, Hopkin's tent thingy, the Arnolfini Art Gallery (which has a mega exhibition on post-war architecture in Bristol), and cider.  But no trip would be complete without a tour of the milky-white 90s Galleries shopping centre, a mindnumbing riot of neutral white and silver and escalators and no shops that anyone wants.  The utterly incomprehensible geography of the place suits Bristol quite perfectly.