Working with Destination Bristol

The 2012 guides of Visit Bristol have been printed and they are now available in relevant venues across the city and beyond.

Old Market has got a prominent role and you can sneak into the publication and check what is being said about it.

Historic area, specialised shops, it seems a very nice place to visit! Very soon we will present a new heritage map and visitors will be able to know more about our history while shopping in Old Market and West Street.

Create art

Arts West Side, a new art venue

There is a new temporary space at the Stapleton Road Tavern in the following months. This project will allow a number of artists to create, exhibit and experiment new ideas. We are looking forward to seeing things coming to life.

Of course Trinity Community Arts is an important organisation in Bristol and while its focus has been mainly around music they have now a new venue in 6 West Street which aims to provide space for art and crafts projects.

Just off Old Market, Barton Manor, there is a workspace where Sophie Howard and her family work at sculpture and paintings. Certainly worth a visit.

Informal art galleries

The Whole Baked Cafe offers free exhibition space. Please contact them to enter in waiting list because they have already exhibitions ready for the next few months.
The newly re-opened and refurbished Volunteer Tavern are also starting to offer space for artists. They are now at their second exhibition and they have been both very interesting.

The Bristol Bear Bar have always excellent artwork on their walls, but entrance to the venue is permitted only if you are 18.

Empty West Street bus lane

URGENT for all traders and residents in West Street

There is a consultation for a Traffic Regulation Order in West Street. The TRO will make the bus lane enforceable 24/7.

This consultation ends on February 16, 2012.

During the AGM we have agreed that this proposal goes against our vision for Old Market, which we have confirmed at the Prince’s Foundation workshop with many of our stakeholders. We have agreed that we want to make West Street a two ways road with a bus lane active only in peak hours, and used for parking otherwise.

• The bus lane is unnecessary outside peak hours, because traffic flow is scarce and vehicle speed is too high.
• Traders would be adversely affected because also a short stop in the bus lane (2 mins) could lead to a ticket for customers and suppliers.

We have agreed to object but we need that traders and residents object to this proposal too.

How to Object

Objections to the proposal, together with the grounds on which they are made must be sent in writing to the Head of Legal Services at the address available here or by e-mail to tro.comments@bristol.gov.uk quoting reference number CAE/RGW/P-745 by 16th February 2012. Please include your name and address and note that all representations received may be considered in public by the City Council and that the substance of any representation together with the name and address of the person making it could become available for public inspection.

• There is a very famous private archive, of which many photos have been published in books http://www.reecewinstone.co.uk
• Online of course Flickr is the biggest resource and you can have a look at our Flickr group where  we are tagging all photos around Old Market.  http://www.flickr.com/groups/1724458@N22/ You will find that the most interesting photos are at the end of the stream (found before).

One of the best Bristol photo collections is maintained by Paul Townsend (nickname brizzle born and bred) and he can be contacted very easily if you need to request for permission to use the photos.

• Then there is the Bristol Records Office and apart from general photos that you can search just with keywords there is a new postcard collection in which there are beautiful and rare photos of Old Market.

“Vaughan postcards online: An exciting addition to our online catalogue http://archives.bristol.gov.uk/dserve/  is the Vaughan postcard collection, containing over 9000 digitised images of local places and events. To view the postcards, search for RefNo. 43207.”

• Last you should look at “Know your place”  http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace/ (install Silverlight) where there are beautiful images of the area, from an earlier period (XIX century).

Newsletter – The Pie Poudre (Low quality for screen viewing)
Newsletter – The Pie Poudre  (High quality for printing in A3)

Paul Bradburn, chairman of OMCA

Well, it has been pretty much a year since OMCA has been under ‘new management’ so it seems like a good time to let you all know what has been going on. As this is all new to us we had a lot of learning to do and we were on a pretty steep learning curve.

We started by trying to hold as many open meetings as we could with the aim of trying to establish what jobs we needed to tackle within Old Market. We gathered as many opinions from traders, residents and stakeholders as we could and also began working with Eva Stuetzenberger from Destination Bristol with the aim of trying to regenerate the ailing retail sector in the area. It soon became obvious that Old Market had many long running issues (the new word for problems) and it wasn’t going to be a simple task to tackle them.

We also knew that we needed to improve many elements within the organisation if we were going to influence the decision making of organisations such as the Council, prospective developers and the media. With help, a new website was constructed, our Facebook page was created and managed, a Twitter account is functioning – a tireless work to report all the good things that would otherwise remain hidden.

We began to contact and meet with other organisations that could give guidance to us as to the best approach to take with our new goal of improving Old Market. New faces and representatives of other organisations were actively encouraged to attend all our monthly meetings and give their input to our debates. We began forging better ties with members of the council, planning advisers, Bristol Civic Society, friendly architects, councillors, business owners, local MPs, the press, the Neighbourhood Partnership – the list goes on.

With the help of Eva, from Destination Bristol, we carried out several workshops with the traders and retailers to try and get the best approach to help kick-start the ailing shops and business, especially in West Street.

We carried out a special ‘deep clean’ in Old Market day. We guided several walkabouts through the area with issues such as traffic, policing, planning/conservation, environment, health, the state of the retail sector and the dreaded central bus stop system.

For Bristol Open Doors Day we opened the Barstaple Almshouses, which had one the highest single day attendances. Over 400 people turned up to see just one of Old Market’s valuable heritage buildings!

A heritage walk map has also been created and will be printed soon with the intention of promoting more people to come here just to experience the wealth of wonderful buildings and the rich history that goes with them.

We began working collaboratively with the Village Business and Residents Association (VBRA) who represent the gay community and businesses within Old Market. We now work more closely with Emma Harvey and her team from TheTrinity Centre – especially now that they have their wonderful building at 6 West Street. We collaborate with the Dings Community Association, we follow the work of the Somali Forum and have been in contact with many of the relevant charities and organisations that are in or have a foothold in Old Market.

I know this just sounds like one big long boring list but from our point of view it is working with all these people that will literally put us back on the map. We have tried from the beginning to have a positive and all inclusive approach to anything that we have done to help improve Old Market and we need as much help as we can get. This said, it was pretty obvious to us that we had so much to try and sort out that we needed some professional help, which we obtained through the Neighbourhood Planning Network and ESHA Architects, who advised us to ask The Prince’s Foundation For The Built Environment if they would consider aiding us in creating the basis for our neighbourhood plan.

This is something that, if the Localism Bill becomes law, will give communities such as ours the potential to have more say in how decisions are made in terms of the built environment around us. The more input we provide for the creation of our plan, the closer it will be to what we as a united group want the future of Old Market to be. Anyway they agreed (hooray!) and a three day workshop was organized and held at the Marriot hotel and in a room in Old Market. I have to say it was a really positive experience in many ways. We had invited all the people that had a bearing on what could be done for our part of Bristol. Tom Perry (from the Foundation) and his team held the workshop and lead us through the process of focusing all our woes and concerns into a workable set of solutions. This was then presented as a short report in the Marriot on the final day of the workshop. Everyone agreed that all the ideas would have a positive influence on Old Market if we could get them implemented over time.

I won’t go into detail about the report (you can read it at this link – it‘s worth it) but the biggest problem…sorry, I mean issue, was highlighted as the traffic system…no surprise there. There were many other elements that needed attention but we considered this as our Achilles Heel that is holding back the regeneration of Old Market.

So with this in mind we began seeing how best to get the road system changed for the better. We met with the manager of the Neighbourhood Partnership to find out how to allot some of the available section 106 money for Old Market specifically to the alterations to the roads. We also arranged to present our case to transport leaders for Bristol at the Council House. We did this only last week and it was a very positive outcome. We argued our case strongly and got the agreement that ‘Old Market needs some help’. This may not sound like much but none of our proposals received a negative response from the transport team and we now stand a much higher chance of something good actually happening to the traffic system in Old Market.

I wish I could tell you that from that one meeting they gave us £3,000,000 and said ‘get on with it’. However there is still much lobbying, e-mailing, meeting attending, door knocking and debating to do before we get a solid ‘yes’ to our proposed solutions.

I know that it seems that nothing is happening to improve Old Market, some of you are fed up with the lack of action from the council when you have been complaining about the state of things for years. I am on totally the same page, but over the past year as Chairman I have realised that Old Market has never really had a collective voice to represent the people who live and work here. Yes initially it fought the application for an extra lap dancing club and won but that was just the beginning. The hard work began when we decided to be less of a reactionary group and to try and be constructive about regenerating Old Market.

That really brings me to the point at which I write ‘so now it’s up to you’.

The OMCA annual general meeting is on the 6^th of February and we need more help. We can only do so much. We have many events and projects that need people to come forward and get involved with. We intend to have an Old Market Celebration/Festival in June where we close down the main Street and have a proper market and celebration of the arts. We want to have stalls, music in pubs, arts events and much more to show what our community has to offer Bristol.

This is a call out to all of you reading this that feel they want to get involved with something worth spending time and energy on. It can be hard work but it can also be very rewarding. If you are interested in helping in any way, even just coming to the meetings to meet some of your neighbours please try to come to the AGM or contact us through the website.

There is so much more I could tell you that has been going on but I think that is enough for now. We hope that all the hard work done in the past year will begin to show some results in the next but it would really help if you as the community could write, e-mail or even speak to our councillors or MP about any of the issues you have with Old Market. The more we get you the community to back us, the more the people in the positions of influence will pay attention and things will start to happen… honest.

As my Nan said ‘anything worth having is never easy to get’, Old Market has been waiting 50 years for its time, I believe that is now.

Good luck for 2012!

Paul Bradburn – Chairman (at present) of Old Market Community Association

Old Market Street, 1900, a lost successful shopping street

Last Thursday two statements were presented at the Cabinet meeting of Bristol City Council asking the Cabinet, all the Councillors and the wider community to support our plans to change the traffic system in Old Market where, every day, lives are at risk for the traffic and livelihoods are undermined by the economic consequences of a road which keeps people away from our shops.
Our Councillor Brenda Hugill presented and read our statement, while Tony Dyer, Bristol Chair of Living Streets presented a supporting statement where he reminded of his family links to Old Market.
This generated a lot of media interest and you can read the articles published before by Bristol24-7 and then by the Evening Post.

“The Hawkins Street site is a hugely important development for Old Market therefore the Old Market Community Association is keen to see that any application is of high quality and has the potential to be a great asset for both the developer and the community alike.

Upon first appraisal the submitted drawings go a long way towards delivering that goal and we applaud the architect for reusing many of the existing buildings that are an important historical reference to the industrial past of the area. The scheme shows a good reference to the architectural diversity that exists in Old Market with a mix of styles, materials and elevations.

We believe that what looks like being a good scheme at the moment, could with a few design changes, be a top level design that would raise the bar for other developers to aspire to.

Old Market is in desperate need of more family orientated living spaces. We would like to see more provision for 3 and 4 bedroom dwellings within the proposal and a better mix of affordable housing provision.

We also think that, considering how many people will be living here, there is not enough access to an open green communal space. The developers also own the Post and Press building which has a tract of under-used garden space next to Hawkins Street. This would present an ideal opportunity to integrate this space with the proposed development and create an open area for this new community to enjoy. We are looking at the long term sustainability of any new proposals, it has been proven that access to communal green spaces are a great benefit to health and the wellbeing of people who use them.

We would also love to see provision made for some live-work spaces within the proposal. The site was originally industrial and it makes total sense to regenerate some work spaces or enterprise workshops that bring a better mixed use and vibrancy to the area.

It would also be good to see some stronger architectural pieces within the proposal. The corner of Unity Street and Hawkins Street would benefit greatly from having a building that mirrors the scale and presence of some of the Gardiner Haskins buildings. A statement building, that would create a much more impressive gateway into the development.

If the developers and their architects would take on board these constructive suggestions we believe that this would achieve a very high quality development. That, backed by the planning officers making sure that the scheme is delivered as per the design drawings would create a valuable future legacy for Old Market.

The owners of the site have been based in Old Market for many decades. The area and its community have provided well for them. We can only hope that they will see fit to do the best they can for a community that deserves the best it can get.”

Old Market in 2015, copyright ESHA Architects

On the 6th of February we will have our Annual General Meeting to renew our Committee and decide the priorities for the current year. It will be held at 6pm at the Stag and Hounds, Bristol.

We would like to give the opportunity to everybody to have their say on this process and we have set up two surveys to share the list of our current work packages.

The first survey lists all general work, projects and proposals of collaboration. More information  in this spreadsheet.

The second survey is a list of topics that could be followed to promote Arts, Heritage and Historic Environment in Old Market. We are already working to several of them and more information can be found in this spreadsheet.

We would like to find people that could take ownership of individual items, so please come forward!

Note: We wish to thank ESHA Architects for the image above, coloured by our Chairman Paul Bradburn.