Culture of Bristol

Bristol is a city in south west England. As the largest city in the region it is a centre for the arts and sport. The region has a distinct dialect.

Sport

The city has two significant football clubs: Bristol City F.C. who play in Football League One and Bristol Rovers F.C. who play in Football League Two. The city is also home to a Rugby Union club known as Bristol Rugby, who have won promotion to the Guinness Premiership, a first-class cricket side, Gloucestershire C.C.C. and a Rugby League Conference side, the Bristol Sonics.

Events

In summer the grounds of Ashton Court to the west of the city play host to the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta, a major event for hot-air ballooning in Britain. The Fiesta draws a substantial crowd even for the early morning lift that typically begins at about 6.30 am. Events and a fairground entertain the crowds during the day. A second mass ascent is then made in the early evening, again taking advantage of lower wind speeds.

Ashton Court also plays host to the Ashton Court festival each summer, an outdoors music festival which used to be known as the Bristol Community Festival. The annual Bristol Harbour Festival features displays of ships and musical performances.

Theatre

The city's principal theatre company, the Bristol Old Vic, was founded in 1946 as an offshoot of the Old Vic company in London. Its premises on King Street consist of the 1766 Theatre Royal (400 seats), a modern studio theatre called the New Vic (150 seats), and foyer and bar areas in the adjacent Coopers' Hall (built 1743). The Theatre Royal is a grade I listed building and the oldest continuously-operating theatre in England. The Bristol Old Vic also runs a prominent Theatre School. The Bristol Hippodrome is a larger theatre (1981 seats) which hosts national touring productions, while the 2000-seat Colston Hall, named after Edward Colston, is the city's main concert venue.

Music

The music scene is thriving and significant. From the late 1970's onwards it was home to a crop of cultish bands combining punk, funk, dub and political consciousness, the most celebrated being The Pop Group. Ten years later, Bristol was the birthplace of a type of English hip-hop music called trip hop or the Bristol Sound, epitomised in the work of artists such as Tricky, Portishead, Smith & Mighty and Massive Attack. It is also a stronghold of drum n bass with notable bands like the Mercury Prize winning Roni Size /Reprazent and Kosheen as well as the pioneering DJ Krust and More Rockers. This music is part of the wider Bristol Urban Culture scene which received international media attention in the 1990s and still thrives today.

Bristol's musical pioneering spirit continues as the home to one of the largest and most diverse DIY music communities in the UK. Artists such as Gravenhurst Chikinki and New Rhodes have revived popular interest over the past few years. Other highly influential cult acts include Wall Planner, Pricktaster, Snakes On A Plane and November's Ashes In The Rain. A dynamic community of bands, artists, promoters and music fans has developed around the Choke forum, named after a popular fanzine and club night which has championed underground music from Bristol and beyond since 2001.

Bristol is home to many live music venues, of which The Old Duke is perhaps the best known. Internationally recognised jazz and blues musicians active in Bristol include Eddie Martin, Jim Blomfield and Andy Sheppard. St George's Hall, on Brandon Hill, is notable for its classical, jazz and world music performances, and the Carling Academy Bristol is part of the national touring circuit for rock bands.

Museums

The Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery houses a collection of natural history, archaeology, local glassware, Chinese ceramics and art. The Bristol Industrial Museum, on the dockside, shows local industrial heritage and operates a steam railway, boat trips, and working dockside cranes. The City Museum also runs three preserved historic houses: the Tudor Red Lodge, the Georgian House, and Blaise Castle House. The Watershed Media Centre and Arnolfini gallery, both in disused dockside warehouses, exhibit contemporary art, photography and cinema.

Media

Stop frame animation films and commercials painstakingly produced by Aardman Animations and high quality television series focusing on the natural world have also brought fame and artistic credit to the city. Bristol is where the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has its regional headquarters, and BBC Natural History Unit. Bristol is also the birthplace of the actor Cary Grant.

Bristol is the home of a regional morning newspaper, the Western Daily Press, a local evening paper, the Evening Post and a weekly free newspaper, the Bristol Observer. A Bristol edition of Metro is distributed for free on buses in the area. The local listings magazine, Venue, is now published weekly after many years as a fortnightly publication and comprehensively covers the city's music, theatre and arts scenes.

Bristol has a flourishing independent media scene, including The Bristolian, Bristle magazine and a local Indymedia website. The Spark Magazine (est 1993) covers the surging interest in all things green, ethical and New Age.

The Bristolian news sheet achieved a regular distribution of several thousand, pulling no punches with its satirical exposés of council and corporate corruption. The Bristolian, 'Smiter of the High and Mighty', even spawned a radical independent political party that polled an impressive 15% in Easton ward in 2003. In October 2005 it came runner up for the national Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism http://www.bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=24307

The anarchist-oriented Bristle, ‘fighting talk for Bristol and the South-West’, was started in 1997 and celebrated its twentieth issue in 2005. Its pages especially feature subvertising and other urban street art to complement news, views and comments on the local activist scene as well as tackling issues such as drugs, mental health and housing.http://www.bristle.org.uk Bristle Website

1970s women’s liberation paper Enough, was succeeded in the 1990s by the environmental and pagan Greenleaf (edited by the late George Firsoff), West Country Activist, Kebelian Voice, Planet Easton, the anarcho-feminist Bellow and present-day punk fanzine Everlong, all of which have been published in Bristol.

Urban radio projects such as the 1980s pirate, Savage Yet Tender and Dialect Radio (ceased October 2004)http://anarchist606.blogspot.com/2004/10/dialect-no-more-sad-news-that-dialect.html have proved to be more short-lived.

The Bristol Indymedia website ^*, like the wider Indymedia network, provides a mix of news and articles that often tend towards a left-wing, progressive or anarchistic perspective. Bristol Indymedia volunteers have also produced filmsExample BIMC Video: DSEi solidarity demo in Bristol and run community media daysCube_Microplex).

Dialect

Older Bristolians and those that live in outlying housing estates such as Southmead and Hartcliffe speak a distinctive dialect of English (known colloquially as Brizzle or Bristle). Uniquely for an urban area of England, this is a rhotic dialect, in which the r in words like car is pronounced. It is perhaps this element of the dialect which has led outsiders to dub it "farmer speech".

The most unusual feature of this dialect, unique to Bristol, is the Bristol L (or Terminal L), in which an L sound is appended to words that end in a letter a. Thus "area" becomes "areal", etc. This may lead to confusions between expressions like area engineer and aerial engineer which in "Bristle" sound identical. Other examples include 'Americal' and 'Canadal', and, when unsure, the answer 'I have no ideal'. In the same way, the Swedish Ikea is known by some as 'Ikeal'. This is how the city's name evolved from Brycgstow to have a final 'L' sound: Bristol.

Bristolians often add a redundant "mind" to the end of sentences " i want to do that mind" "i'm not doing that mind".

Another Bristolian linguistic feature is the addition of a superfluous "to" in questions relating to direction or orientation. For example, "Where’s that?" would be phrased as "Where’s that to?" and "Where’s the park?" would become "Where’s the park to?". Interestingly, this speech feature is very predominate in Newfoundland English, where many of that island's early European inhabitants originated from Bristol and other West Country ports. They lived on the island in relative isolation in the centuries to follow, maintaining this feature.

Graffiti

There are several graffiti artists active in Bristol, probably the most known is Banksy, who has produced an albumn cover for the britpop band Blur. There is controversy around many graffiti artists, this is mainly due to a persons interpretation of graffiti. Some consider it to be a form of art, while others consider it to be pointless vandalism. In general, local authorities do their best to remove graffiti in an effort to keep the urban landscape clean, and it is a common task for those doing community service punishments to have to clean graffiti off walls. Another problem caused by more successful graffiti artists are copycats, who instead of attempting to create graffiti art instead spray obscenties and tags on walls.

Other Bristol graffiti artists include gHOSTbOYand Sick Boy.[http://www.sickboy.uk.com/

External links

References

Bristol

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