Pie Poudre

Vice Versus Virtue, a study by Rebecca Gibbs

At the beginning of February we were contacted by Rebecca Gibbs with a very kind email.

“My name is Rebecca and I am a third year graphic design student at the University of the West of England, Bristol. I’m currently undertaking an extensive study in prostitution for the final five months of my degree. I was introduced to your project through a few thisisbristol.co.uk news articles, which discuss your aims as a community to improve Old Market’s “seedy reputation” and to support the regeneration of the area.

I am very interested in the work you do, in particular reference to the abundance of massage parlours and sex establishments that are located in the Old Market area. It appears that many people in the community feel quite strongly about Old Market’s current image, and it’s great to see that you have residents who are passionate and willing to put time and effort into their local community. I would love to meet and speak with someone from your community association, to gain more of an insight into your work.”

We invited Rebecca to join our meetings and she has produced a very comprehensive work on Old Market Community Association and its relationship with the sex industry.

We really want to thank her for “Vice versus Virtue”, which is a great account of what triggered the birth of our association.

Bristol Lord Mayor

We have invited Bristol Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress to visit Old Market on Saturday the 31^st of March, and we feel honoured that they were pleased to meet our community.

Our ward Councillor Margaret Hickman and John Hirst will also be with us to highlight our one year long collaboration with Bristol City Council and Destination Bristol in the Retail Project, led by Eva Stuetzenberger; our work together is changing Old Market and we have got many more people being active and committed to make this a great place to live in for all the different communities who share Old Market and its immediate surroundings (i.e. our historic traders, new and old residents, the gay community and all ethnic minorities). In the last year, embracing a real community spirit, we decided to exploit our main asset, over 60 listed buildings, by organising events and publishing a heritage trail map; after a successful workshop with the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment we started campaigning for a safer and more pleasant high street and the Council supports our aspiration to have our local Neighbourhood Plan. New shops and businesses are opening every month and a positive buzz can be perceived at all times.

The visit will start at 2pm from the Stag and Hounds, and we will follow our new Heritage Trail which is now published as a leaflet with map and available in most Bristol Information points and local businesses. We will stop at Kingsley Hall, the Headquarters of 1625 Independent People, to learn about their work with over 1000 young people annually who are at risk of, or actually homeless. This is just one of more than thirty businesses with social objectives at the heart of our economy. Another break will be made at Hydra Books, a recently opened bookshop, café and event space, in a site with nearly 350 years of history as a almshouse. During the walk we will join the volunteers at Arts West Side, the new initiative of Trinity Community Arts, also officially launched on the 31^st of March with an exhibition of the photography of Khali Ackford.

Everybody is welcome to join the walk, led by our Chairman Paul Bradburn and our heritage expert Matthew Winterbottom, to tell Lord Mayor about the work of businesses and people of Old Market.

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.

In its long history Old  Market is certainly not a place where arts have succeeded. However there is a growing number of spaces where we can enjoy art or create art.

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.

We are distributing a few paper copies of our newsletter to inform people in the High Street who are not online or are not in our distribution list.
It contains a letter from our Chairman Paul Bradburn and on the other side the poster of our vision for Old Market. You can download/view the pdf at the following links and please display it if you can!

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

• Growing identity, sense of community and network
• Strong voice across the city
• Many positive media stories and a gradual change in reputation
• High interest in the area and support from local MPs, Cabinet members, Councillors, Neighbourhood Partnership, etc.
• A variety of new businesses
• Great re-furbished and re-opened pubs
• Two great new community organisations, Arts West Side and Hydra Books
• Cleaner streets
• New signage to the area
• A beautiful foot route from Cabot Circus into the heart of Old Market (and hopefully soon to Temple Meads)
• Clear recognition of issues and path towards resolving them
• Workshop with the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment
• Active participation in the planning system
• Old Market history map and trail
• 400 visitors to Old Market on Doors Open Day in September

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.