Let's look at the Harbourside a little more closely
Several people have raised some valid points about what is going on at the Harbourside. At first glance, it seems that rich people have moved into a vibrant night spot and are now complaining. Why is it any different from what’s happening at Electricity House (EH) in the city centre and the skate stoppers? they ask.
Let’s stroll back to the events there. Last summer, the council spent £30k of public money to install skatestoppers by the Cenotaph to get rid of people disrupting the ‘nuisance’ to Electricity House residents? It was all very Hot Fuzz.
The Electricity House is a newly refurbished building made into luxury flats by developers Crest Nicholson in 2015. Note that these flats were built and marketed as luxury flats.
In 2017 councillors started trying to deal with EH issues: “we are getting complaints about this area turning into a skate park,” said a Central ward cllr, presumably to an officer. Complaints included noise until all hours, removing benches from their bolted-on locations and lifting slabs to use as ramps. There were also complaints of people trying to get into EH itself.
The council initially assured the residents they were looking to bring in food stands and market stalls into that area to help reduce the noise and nuisance. But the complaints kept coming so in June 2021, the council installed metal strips around the area in order to stop skaters.
How is it different at the Harbourside? Well, for one, the council are not supporting residents who are confronted with the excesses of the night-time economy. Indeed they are promoting and lobbying for those establishments. £50k of public funds pay for a night-time lobbyist, £1.5m of public funds (over two years) pay for ‘crime control’ in the area, and residents pay with their bodies and peace of mind.
Most importantly, the residents were here first. The regeneration of the 6.6 hectares of brownfield site of former docks and gasworks were part of a £120m regeneration project, financed by a mixture of public and private money and begun in 2001; it received over £44 million from the national lottery and a further £44 million from Bristol Council and partners including Nestle.
The point was to bring nature and culture together with the residents of the 664 units.
Some benefits of including nature are listed as follows:
Increase amount of green open spaces for residents
Increase social interaction
Increase well-being
The development was touted for its urban space recovery at the time.
Residential buildings around Anchor Road, Canons Way, Millennium Promenade and Cathedral Walk were built between 2008 and 2013. There were eight in close proximity to establishments at my last count.
Some of them are allocated as social and affordable housing run by housing associations. Cathedral Schools Trust Primary School was opened on Anchor Road in 2015 in line with the local plan calling for more primary school provision. Children from the area attend this school, and they used to attend St George just two roads away, plus Hotwells Primary School a mile away.
The 2015 Local Plan states that student housing was to be avoided in the Harbourside because of the “strong residential context”.
Other uses for the area include “employment development” and enhancement and support of the area which “includes many of the city centre’s most important visitor attractions such as the S.S. Great Britain, M-Shed, Bristol Harbour Railway, Watershed, Bristol Aquarium, the @Bristol science centre (sic) and the most active part of the Floating Harbour, with its popular events spaces and quayside walkways.”
The 2015 Local Plan goes on to say that the focus should be on “working with and enhancing what the area already has to offer while capturing the potential for beneficial change at Cumberland Basin and Hotwells”.
As part of the residential mix, young families with children have been housed in the social housing in the area, and there is even mention of building more family-sized units. The change of use the administration are now promoting, directly affects more than just Invicta residents.
Someone wrote on Twitter, “I think a vibrant nightlife where people around to (sic) stagger around vomiting is an integral part of the use and value of Harbourside”. Now that may be a fair opinion for someone to have but that’s not why it was designed, it’s not why people chose to live here, and it’s not what the local plan had envisaged.
People aren’t complaining AFTER they bought homes next to nightclubs or areas used for vomiting and anti-social behaviour spots, including sites of rapes and assaults. That’s not how it happened. Over the last few years, student housing and the night-time economy have been promoted over the needs of residents.
It’s the opposite of what happened at EH. I suspect, however, the reasons are the same.
Change is being orchestrated around us, and it has a name and it has a purpose.
Who benefits?
The answer to that comes with understanding that “gentrification, both as a term and process, has always been about how housing opportunities of middle-class people are expanded while those of working-class people are restricted” (Slater, 2021).
In Shaking Up the City, Slater points out we need to be asking “who and what makes urban land profitable for (re)development” and “urbanization for whom, against whom, and who decides?”
While there are many areas in Bristol that are facing much worse, what is consistent is that those with few opportunities are facing the externalities of the current policies.
For those looking at Residents Access Only signs and thinking it’s a sign of middle class power, I encourage you to turn around and see the social housing across the road, which doesn’t even have the right to put up a sign.