Stokes Croft Gentrification Alert!

Save Stokes Croft

The clubs, pubs, cafés, squatted centres and artists’ studios of Stokes Croft have been the core of Bristol’s underground music and art scene for decades. This is the area that brought us Banksy, Roni Size, The Wild Bunch, Massive Attack, the famous Bristol club, free party and punk scene and all the other things that have made Bristol an exciting place to live since the 1960s.

Now all this is under threat as Bristol City Council and property developers such as ‘Urban Creation’ are joining together to culturally cleanse the area in the pursuit of profit. They say we really need housing. They say they want to improve the area with offices and shops. Bollocks. They’re not doing it for our benefit, they’re not even doing it for the stupid bastards who are going to buy their over priced yuppie boxes. They are doing it because the property prices are high and they can make a load of money out of it.

More shops? They’ve just built the biggest and ugliest shopping centre in Bristol’s history. More shops? We are sick of more shops, yuppie flats and offices. Stokes Croft is our place, it’s where we party, where we make music, where we produce art and where we want to be. They don’t want us doing this anymore. They want us buying music from their shops, they want rich trendies wandering around art galleries on Stokes Croft buying the latest Banksy print and posh types discussing the latest share prices whilst eating sun dried tomatoes on chiabatta drizzled in fresh virgin olive oil flown in from Tuscany, in a fake twee café. They want us out of the centre of Bristol and back in our areas where we won’t cause their wealthy customers any trouble.

Lakota, Clockwork, The Blue Mountain and The Junction are all under threat from the developers and their sickening puppets in the council. There are numerous planning applications on other properties in the Stokes Croft area, as every two-bit landlord and developer (who’d slit their grannies throat for a fiver) tries to get their hands on a bit of the action. Make no mistake, they want to sanitise Stoke Croft, to take our culture away and replace it with an empty plastic consumerism.

We made this city great. All round the world we made Bristol famous. Drum and Bass, Trip-hop, Techno, Reggae and even Crusty have all radiated out from Stokes Croft and the surrounding neighbourhoods of St. Pauls and Montpelier to make the ‘Bristol Sound’ famous the world over. This is what makes a place, its underground culture, the real living breathing heart beat of a city, not the banality of endless chain stores and yuppie rabbit-hutches filled with bored consumers.

Time is of the essence. This is how councillors and developers work, letting us know the truth five minutes before they smash our communities to the ground. Over six thousand people have joined a blog on Facebook in a couple of weeks. We have to get this energy on to the streets, it’s meaningless on the internet alone.

What you can do….

1. Get onto the streets. Come to the protest on Stokes Croft at 11.00am on Saturday 12th April and make your presence felt.
2. Object to the planning applications.
3. Let everyone know what is happening.
4. Write to your local newspaper or Venue and let ‘em have it.
5. Let your local councillor know what they have to do to get your vote in the May elections. And if they don’t agree tell them you will see them in the streets.

If we do not act now we will wake up in a few years living in Milton Keynes. Think about it….

Who are we?

We are not a political party or any such nonsense. We are just bunch of people who have lived and partied on the Croft for years and are angry about the future that is being decided for us by lying politicians and greedy businessmen.

Contact us at: savestokescroft@gmail.com