There is a Buddhist parable about a king tasked with sorting out warring groups; each one convinced they were right. He gets together a group of blind people and takes them to an elephant.
“To some of the blind people, the assistant presented the head of the elephant, saying, ‘This is an elephant.’ To others an ear of the elephant, saying, ‘This is an elephant.’ To some he presented a tusk… the trunk… the body… the foot… the hindquarters… the tail… the tuft at the end of the tail, saying, ‘This is an elephant.’
Once they were done, the king approached those blind people and said, ‘Tell me, blind people, what is an elephant like?’
“Those blind people who had been shown the head of the elephant replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a water jar.’
Those blind people who had been shown the ear of the elephant replied. “An elephant, your majesty, is just like a winnowing basket.’
Those blind people who had been shown the tusk of the elephant replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a ploughshare.’
Those blind people who had been shown the trunk replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a plough pole.’
Those blind people who had been shown the body replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a storeroom.’
Those blind people who had been shown the foot replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a post.’
Those blind people who had been shown the hindquarters replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a mortar.’
Those blind people who had been shown the tail replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a pestle.’ Those blind people who had been shown the tuft at the end of the tail replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a broom.’
Then, on realizing its significance, the Lord uttered on that occasion this inspired utterance:
Some recluses and brahmans, so called,
Are deeply attached to their own views;
People who only see one side of things
Engage in quarrels and disputes.
Those of us on social media know this to be a universal truth. We are also deeply attached to our own views. But how can we say our views are wrong? To us, they are right and reflect our realities. They also reflect the consequences we face from our realities.
‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ (Upton Sinclair).
So let’s look at what those views are and how they are formed. Whose livelihood depends on the night-time economy?
Some clues comes from arguments on Twitter. The ones that surprised me are from people who tell me their views of my part of the city are right and I am wrong.
As a resident of one small part of the city centre, I inevitably compete with others who also want to and can use it. It feels like a part-public part-private location, which is also a benefit. We pay council tax (£208 a month) and a service charge for our building and part of the Harbourside (£202). There’s a mixed-upness to a city that I like.
I have children who go to school nearby and further out, I breathe the air for longer periods of time than visitors do, and I live most of my life in this area. I spend ~97% of my year/life within a mile radius of BS1. Things that happen here affect me and my family.
Other residents and non-residents of BS1 also use the area. The non-residential use can have consequences on residents, but mostly, that use is brief. They are tourists from other parts of Bristol.
One big consequence is the crime rate in the city centre; it is the highest in the whole city. Our tiny location is part of the only Cumulative Impact Area in Bristol, which is a zone within which bars are further restricted from setting up because of the crime already caused by current licensed premises. This is an attempt to protect residents from the behaviour of others.
But even in the city centre, the rates of crime are not consistent. While near the Harbourside and Park Street the violence and anti-social behaviour are clustered around the weekends, in Broadmead and Stokes Croft, the events are daily and constant.
The blind group of people could only see one part of the elephant at a time. If they had seen the whole elephant, they would have come together with a new notion comprised of many perspectives.
In the same way, if there is only one perspective constantly transmitted by the media and by business, then that becomes the warped version of the elephant.
So what gets prioritised about the night-time economy in Bristol and what gets hidden?
Every single time I complain or say anything about the clearly documented negative effects of the night-time economy, I am told to move. Seriously. People say, If you don’t like it, move.
I have lived in BS1 the entire time I have been in Bristol, since 2005. I lived near the BRI for five years and then in Harbourside. When I moved to our current home that I share with my children and husband, our street had an M&S, an art gallery, one Pizza Express and a bar at the end. Just one bar at the other end.
Over the years there has been a Triathlon shop, a fancy dress place and an ice cream parlour. We had a Hooters for a while too but not for long.
The other reply I get is ‘you knew what the area was like when you moved there.’
The Harbourside was not like this when I moved here in 2010. It simply wasn’t. It was residential, just-built and aimed at a whole different demographic than now. For example, there are three schools around us, including two across the road.
Almost 20 years of making a home means nothing to people whose only solution to the negative effects of an area is to tell the residents to move. We are the commodities in their use of our (shared) area.
These days, in 2023, every single retail unit in our tiny stretch has been turned into a licensed premise. Every single place is somewhere people go to drink.
If you tell people that they are being loud, rude, violent or racist, you are told to move.
And who says this? people whose only involvement in the night-time economy is to either profit or participate. But come and be a Malaysian young woman walking by the bars on a Friday night towards home, as my fellow resident is. She spoke up at licensing about how she has been not only sexually harassed but racially abused outside her own home. Frequently.
The bulk of the elephant
The change to our area has come recently with the Labour administration, which has prioritised the night-time economy over residents. Some clues about the forces involved in this come from the creation of a post of night-time tsar.
“The night-time economy is worth millions. Lots of people work between 6pm and 6am.” Sound Diplomacy
The night-time lobbyist was meant to be funded by ‘industry’: Deeley Freed, Lakota, Motion, People for Places Capital Limited, Bedminster BID, Bristol City Centre BID, and the University of Bristol.
In the end, the public ended up paying for her. The £50k a year salary comes from the public health budget and the growth and regeneration budget.
Deeley Freed are the developers who want to redevelop the Galleries. Motion is a nightclub. Lakota is owned by Marti Burgess and her brother Bentleigh Burgess although he and their parents have been disqualified from being directors at any company for the next few years.
When the company running Lakota, Teton Events, failed to pay their debts in 2017, it was dissolved. This follows the previous liquidation of a company running the nightclub. In 2002, Beatdraw, which included the Burgess parents, went into liquidation owing £253,685 to creditors, including £66,857 to HM Customs and Excise and Inland Revenue, and £18.5k to Bristol City Council local taxation.
In March 2020, the same stakeholders and directors in Teton Events, set up new company Swift River LLP. Marti Burgess now also became a director.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/OC431127/officers
Bentleigh Shaun Burgess was banned from acting as a director for 3 years from 1 August 2022; Beverley and Vincent Burgess were banned for 3 years from 15 March 2021.
Why is this relevant? Marti Burgess is co-chair of Bristol City Council's board Bristol@Night, and sits on various boards including the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership, the Bristol Music Trust, Bristol City Council's Economy Board, the City Centre Resilience Board, and on the Western Harbour Advisory Group.
She’s also a Merchant Venturer as is David Freed from Deeley Freed.
Deeley Freed are a development company currently delivering the 819-bed student accommodation development at the Metal Works in Bedminster, the c.£550m GDV development of the existing Galleries Shopping Centre along with LaSalle Investment Management (subsidiary of JLL), and the Cribbs Urban Village alongside Taylor Wimpey.
Cribbs is an important location because that’s where the Bristol arena has been moved to after a Cabinet report by elev8’s director Nigel Greenhalgh recommended stopping the project. Two of elev8’s current clients, Deeley Freed Estates and Taylor Wimpey, own green belt land at Cribbs Causeway. YTL are heavily involved in building a whole new town there. YTL were also given planning to set up their own arena in the area after our mayor was treated to flights and hospitality in Malaysia at their expense.
The University of Bristol has a £100m+ capital investment project, which sees it buy up lots of Bristol, and it is also setting up a new campus in order to teach and house thousands more students. The cost of the campus has been quoted as being between £300m and £1 billion.
People for Places are involved in the new ‘regeneration’ development Frome Gateway.
When Labour were confronted about their £12.5m slush fund for developers, two budgets ago, cabinet member for planning Beech said it’s not up to her to tell residents what to do in their areas.
Unfortunately, this isn’t what the Labour administration are saying to those in the Western Harbour. The advisory group Rees’s administration set up, and valiantly defended, includes Marti Burgess, JLL representatives, property estate representatives plus John Savage from Business West as chair. The group also included many officers from Bristol City Council, including current chief executive Stephen Peacock.
The night time lobbyist and the Western Harbour have been rather illuminating endeavours. We know which interests the administration protects over others. Residents get sidelined while capitalist interests get promoted.
I watched a presentation recently about the ‘Everyday Integration’ project, which is a cooperative effort between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol. Marvin Rees, mayor of Bristol, introduced it and he began by talking of the challenges he faced when the statue of Colston was torn down. He’d heard that a football firm were organising a countermarch to BLM and he went to speak to the head of the firm at the man’s home.
‘Marvin, our city is changing around us,’ the man is said to have told him.
Rees replied, it is changing but it’s not because of immigrants. The problem lies with developers coming into our city and determining what happens.
Which is right but it’s also strange to hear it from the mayor who supports developers so much he has one cabinet member whose only job is to deliver housing.
The point is that what my fellow residents and I see as the unpleasant, dangerous and abusive behaviour of the night time economy, is really the end-product of a big elephant made up of developers, nightclubs, politicians and universities. We get the sharp end of the tusks and they get the profits.
That elephant’s name is gentrification. People with more power and money are determining how others live. At each step, we are shown whose needs get met and whose don’t.
Instead of being heard by the people we pay our council tax to and vest our power in, those politicians defend themselves against the charges of being gentrifiers.
In this video above, Rees talks about gentrifiers complaining about gentrification. This is an accusation Labour often level against the Greens. He obviously picked it up on one of his many trips to New York as he talks of Puerto Ricans being displaced. In NY, there is a big community of NuYoricans who just like Greek-Australians in Melbourne, are numerous enough to form their own culture; there’s some great literature. Of course, Puerto Ricans weren’t first either.
What a world! Whether you’re right or wrong, as long as you’re strong, you’re right.
Piri Thomas
Either way, there aren’t many Puerto Ricans living in Bristol.
But in Canons Marsh where we live, and in most of the Harbourside, we are the first wave. These buildings were created in 2006 and we are only the second owners of our flat. Many of my neighbours are the first owners.
In a similar display of disinterest towards residents, in an interview, Rees speaks of not caring that the Western Harbour plans will destroy communities of people who’d lived there for decades.
The elephant of the night time economy is not made up of just revellers and residents. Sometimes we are both. The interests forming our city, however, are capitalist ones.
Elephants are big and powerful. To only see the profits and parties the NTE elephant brings is to ignore the crime and destruction it leaves behind. The elephant of gentrification comes to shake up the city and it doesn’t come alone. The night-time tsar position is supported by lobbying groups such as Sound Diplomacy who are in turn funded for some work by L&G.
L&G are an insurance company who also build housing and conference centres, and who work alongside Homes England to change cities. They were given planning permission to build housing in order for YTL to get permission to build an arena.
Each time I complain and someone tells me to move, I know they are a tiny part of the mouthpiece of those in power. They are the natural conclusion to gentrification.
Gentrification is all about the money. Those who have more power benefit, while the rest of us don’t.
“Moving people involuntarily from their homes or neighbourhoods is wrong. Regardless of whether it results from government or private market action, forced displacement is characteristically a case of people without the economic and political power to resist being pushed out by people with greater resources and power, people who think they have a ‘better’ use for a certain building, piece of land, or neighborhood. The pushers benefit. The pushees do not.” — Hartman, Keating and LeGates (1982), cited in Tom Slater’s Shaking Up The City
“There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
Thanks for Sharing Joanna much appreciated 🙏
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