Temple Quarter -tales of yesterday, today and tomorrow

A blog post from Professor Guy Orpen Deputy Vice-Chancellor, New Campus Development. 

The derelict sorting office is now being demolished bit by bit; not with a swinging ball or major explosion, lest we disturb the rail passengers in their new trains sitting at Platform 15! The old building, constructed in the 1930s and abandoned over 20 years ago, was once a lively workplace on a site with a much longer history – the Cattle Market. Removing the building is an early step of the journey to the new campus. It is also acts as a trigger to reflect on the past of this part of the city and more widely on the part that culture and creativity will play in its future.

University staff and students are gathering the stories of those who worked in the area to document its past. The Cattle Market site was the home of a real market for cattle and other livestock from the mid-19th Century until the 1960s. As you’d expect of Bristol it was also more concerned with the welfare of the animals than most such markets in the UK. Before then, the site was home to John Hare & Co. who were makers of fine decorative cloths and visited by traders from around the world. So, our new campus will be able to draw upon many decades of past enterprise and openness to the world and reflect back those stories.

There are more current stories to tell too – of cultures that have their home in Bristol today. Just across the canal, the women of Lawrence Hill have found the sort of voice we expect to hear more of as the new university community is established in Temple Quarter. To help bring these tales to life we will establish a programme of activities we are calling Twilight Temple Quarter. These will share the knowledge and cultures of Bristol communities and those of the world around us, outside the more formal hours of work and study on a traditional campus.

In these early days of plotting the campus and telling its story we have commissioned artists to tell their tales, inspired by the site’s past, present and future. As a fine example, I commend the poem “Brick Me” penned by Vanessa Kisuule to mark the start of the demolition. Vanessa is one of three Temple Quarter artists in residence, a Bristol graduate and the current city poet.

The new campus will provide venues where the citizens and communities of our great city can share their tales both indoors and out. While the buildings will have spaces open to the public, there will be much larger areas on the Cattle Market site, much larger than Queen’s Square, for us all to enjoy and use for cultural and creative activities. The interplay will not end there. We will look to blend the understanding of the human condition held by creative artists with the opportunities that technologists can create, to generate real, welcomed, societal value.

Artist-in-residence – Vanessa Kisuule

 

Vanessa Kisuule

Vanessa Kisuule is one of three Artists-in-Residence working with local communities on projects to celebrate the regeneration of the Temple Quarter area and document its heritage.

Vanessa is an award winning spoken word artist, recently appointed as Bristol’s city poet. She’ll be sharing her reflections and writing poems which explore the stories of the local area and its inhabitants, collecting memories from the past and hopes for the future. 

 

Click here to share your stories with Vanessa or call 0117 428 2322.

The Sorting Office Site: A Halfway House of Ghost Stories  

It takes a considerable leap of the imagination to walk through the cavity of the former Royal Mail sorting office and envisage a gleaming new university campus in its place. Despite its crumbling frame, there is something irrevocably sturdy about the structure. I can’t quite imagine it giving up without a fight. Even the way it will be demolished speaks of architectural stubbornness: rather than blowing up the structure in one cathartic motion, the contractors must ‘nibble’ away at the site with an extractor that will reduce the building to rubble over several weeks. Though initially disappointed that the building wouldn’t meet its end with a literal bang, I now appreciate the subtle poignancy in this death by slow mastication. It’s fitting that parts be taken away gradually, much in the way the building has decayed of its own accord in the twenty-two years since the sorting office was shut down. It’s the perpetual affliction of a poet to see metaphor in the most arbitrary of happenstance, but I like to hope this idea is striking for others to contemplate as well. 

The archival responsibilities we have to a space, even when we are radically changing it, are fascinating to ponder. As we were escorted around the site, stories of varying plausibility were relayed to us. Some were mostly true with the inevitable garnish of hyperbole, others seemed to be mere urban myths. But don’t the myths we make up become a part of our historical truth in their own way?

As I walked along the pitted floors scattered with pigeon feathers, desiccated carpet squares and endless mountains of debris, I couldn’t help but marvel at the playfulness of the space and how much of an inadvertent playground it has become. To speak of its ‘aesthetic’ would be suggestive of a deliberate curation that is not at play, but there does seem to be an incidental beauty here. I found myself charmed by the asymmetric chunks of tiles making scrambled mosaics on the floor, the walls that boasted meticulous murals and graffiti tags that would not look out of place in parts of Stokes Croft. It’s the sort of environment that media agencies spend thousands artificially creating for edgy networking events and pop up vintage stalls. If the university hadn’t bought this site, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a young tattooed micro-brewer specialising in niche IPAs had instead.  

But this space is not the all too common facsimile of counter culture we’re so used to seeing these days. There is a genuine spikiness here, an authentic deviance that is both bleak and thrilling. One of the old safes is reimagined as the locked entrance to a gay bar, an ominous political commentary if ever I saw one. The tags ‘Le Peng’ and ‘SHN’ recur frequently, the monikers of artists who have flaunted their stealth in getting into the building undetected. I fell a little bit in love with the swaggering aggression of this towering, majestic eyesore, the simultaneous fragility and belligerence of this not-quite-place. As an artist and as a human, I have learnt how to feel at home in the belly of a contradiction, so it stands to reason that this site speaks to me on a guttural level. It’s hard to imagine a time when it was an orderly place of work where things were filed and organised into neat piles and people dutifully clocked in and out. I am interested in these stories of the postal workers, how their regimented schedules may compare and contrast with the street artists who, decades later, scrambled into the husk of this once functioning business to reappropriate it in their own names.  

These stories may not be the remarkable kind that traditional history is so enamoured with. They are not the narratives on which instrumental change hinges. But they are the stories that have character and spunk, that perhaps relate to the communities we are trying so hard to retain as our cities become increasingly modern. The only hope for the survival of these stories is to ask probing questions and seek out those who may have answers, however partial. 

There will be a lot of conflicting opinions about this campus and what it means for the landscape of Bristol. Pertinent and uncomfortable discussions must be had as to who benefits from these changes and who potentially suffers or gets left behind. Whilst emphasising the exciting potential of developments like the Temple Quarter, we must also give space for uncertainty, for fear, for lament and respectful commemoration of what has been.  

I don’t want to be a vessel for glib evangelising for the campus, as brilliant as I think it has the potential to be. This residency, for me, is a chance to think deeply about the stories we tell ourselves about the cities we hope to inhabit. It’s nigh on impossible to disentangle truth from myth, hope from delusion, blue sky thinking from bottom line economics. With the help of my fellow Bristol citizens, I hope to make work that holds this dissonance with humour and care, that understands the trauma that comes with change and also the hopeful progression. Rather than forcing neat conclusions, I hope to make work as messy, provocative, angry, complex, beautiful and compelling as the site itself.