Ah, Bristo!

For a city that purports to be one of the most forward-thinking, all-cultures embracing, right on cities of all, Bristol isn’t half rude to outsiders.

Being from Liverpool, I’m used to attracting attention when the question of birthplace comes up. Like New Yorkers, Parisians, and Sharon Osbourne, scousers always glean a knee-jerk reaction: we’re a loud, opinionated, over-emotional bunch from a globally infamous city, both glorious and inglorious in equal measure (if I wasn’t from Liverpool, I’d wish I was).

But when I find myself in the company of the kind of tediously dull folk who think that the world revolves around the BS postcode (ha! It’s a wonder there isn’t a Bristol campaign to take the obvious pun out of that one), the reaction to the standard “where are you from?” question often translates as scorn, derision or downright rude, misinformed thicko behaviour. It’s fortunate, I suppose, that scousers tend to be ingrained with the kind of confidence that allows the constant, ancient jibes about missing wallets and Gerry and the Pacemakers to roll off their thickened skin. But if, in the name of joining in the ‘banter’ aimed at someone from Merseyside, we jokingly call a Bristolian a Wurzel or suggest that only about 18 people outside of Bristol would recognise a member of Massive Attack, it’s walk the plank time for us. In what appears to be one of the greenest (in all senses of the word) and most pleasant areas of the UK, regionalism apparently reigns supreme.

During the build up to the City of Culture awards, when Bristol and Liverpool went head to head in nominations for the dubious acclaim, I expected there to be some minor debates about the issue. But discussions about the eventual outcome didn’t turn out to be any fun. I came across Bristolians who, completely unbidden, loved telling me how and why my home town didn’t stand a chance (illiterate scousers can’t even pronounce the word ‘culture’, blah blah blah) before going on to spend hours expostulating on the renaming of Broadmead - ah, I’ll leave you to work out the irony there. As it turned out, Bristolians are bad losers, too; the added vitriol spawned when the eventual winner took all was second to none. But how could a city so suspicious of outsiders ever be a capital of culture? If Bristol had won, the ‘keep ‘ee out’ wall would no doubt have been erected already (even if, in true Bristol fashion, it’d be called ‘a contemporary art statement’, built by a multicultural collective, using all-organic materials).

To me personally, this is all rather quaint; I don’t give a fig about such behaviour towards people from Liverpool (as we repeatedly prove, we’ll always be okay). What worries me more is that the Bristol attitude to non-Bristolians isn’t only aimed at scousers. Apparently, you lot can’t stand the Welsh, either, and Brummies don’t fare much better. Even Bath – a mere 12 miles down the road! – is written off as ‘snooty’ (crikey, as a self-styled Bathonian that’s a double whammy for me). And yes, I know that such regionalist attitudes exist elsewhere in the UK, not just in Briz. But still, that doesn’t make it okay – racism never is. Can Britain ever get rid of racism for good when even the city we’re born in still apparently defines who we are?

Having some sort of loyalty to your hometown is all well and good, but where we’re born is an accident of birth. For some, it’s a very lucky one, at that; to many more around the globe, that ‘accident’ turns out to be a tragedy. No matter what your views on fate, karma, destiny or whatever, our roots are random. I’ve a friend who was born on an aeroplane over the Atlantic; I’d love to hear what the regulars lined up at the bar of the Hick and Yokel make of that.