Culture of Bristol
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
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[edit] 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, as well as a number of non-League teams. See Football teams in Bristol for a full list. 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. There is an annual half marathon held around the city centre, and in 2001 the city hosted the 10th IAAF World Half Marathon Championships.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Music
The music scene is thriving and significant. From the late 1970s 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 Bronnt Industries Kapital 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.
Other forms of popular music also thrive on the city's underground scene. In the 1980s the city gave birth to thrash metal band Onslaught who became the first non-American thrash band to sign to a major label. Other notable rockers from Bristol include Stackridge, Vice Squad, The Claytown Troupe, Rita Lynch, Herb Garden, The Seers, Pigbag, and The Blue Aeroplanes. More recently a new wave of Bristol-based bands have been making names for themselves across the UK underground includng Two Day Rule, Alien Stash Tin, Osmium, Hacksaw, Bronze Age Fox and Legends De Early.
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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Fine Art
The first art gallery in Bristol was financed by a donation of £2000 in the 1849 will of Ellen Sharples.
The Royal West of England Academy, which has a variety of Fine Art exhibitions was established in the early nineteenth century by a group of artists in Bristol, known as the Bristol Society of Artists, these were mostly landscape painters and many were well known such as William James Müller, Francis Danby, J.B. Pyne and John Syer. In 1844, when the Bristol Academy for the Promotion of Fine Arts was founded, the Bristol Society of Artists was incorporated into it. At this time the President and committee was predominantly its patrons, rather than its artists. In 1914 a major extension to the front of the building, including the dome and Walter Crane lunettes, was completed and in 1915 King George V granted the Academy its Royal title, with the reigning monarch as its Patron. During World War II the Academy became the temporary home of various organisations including the Bristol Aeroplane Company and the U.S. Army. Immediately after the war ended the Council applied for the release of the galleries but was informed that they would be occupied by the Inland Revenue until further notice. It wasn't until 1950 that the building was returned to its original function after the intervention of the then Prime Minister, Clement Atlee.[1] The building is a grade II* listed Building.[2]
[edit] 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 [3]
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.[4]
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)[5] have proved to be more short-lived.
The Bristol Indymedia website [1], 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 films[6] and run community media days[7] (often at the Cube Microplex).
[edit] Dialect
Older Bristolians and those that live in areas which have had less influence from students and immigration, 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. Additionally, -al is drawn out as -awl, and an l may be added within a word with an aw. Thus "area" becomes "areawl", "cerial" becomes "ceriawl", "drawing" becomes "drawling" etc. This may lead to confusions between expressions like area engineer and aerial engineer which in "Bristle" sound identical. Other examples include 'Americawl' and 'Canadawl', and, when unsure, the answer 'I have no ideal'. In the same way, the Swedish Ikea is known by some as "Ikeawl", and ASDA supermarket as "Asdawl". This is how the city's name evolved from Brycgstow to have a final 'L' sound: Bristol.[8]
Another feature is the addition of S to verbs in the first and third person. Just as he goes, in Bristle I goes and they goes. As with other west country accents, H is often dropped from the start of words, th may become f, and -ing become -en.[8] Bristolians often add a redundant "mind", "look" or "see" to the end of sentences: "i'm not doing that mind". A redundant "like" may be placed in the middle of a sentence, a feature that has become more common throughout the country.[8] 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. These linguistic features can also be heard in Cardiff.
[edit] Graffiti
There are several graffiti artists active in Bristol, probably the most known is Banksy, who has produced an album 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 based graffiti artists include gHOSTbOY[2], Sickboy.[3], Feek, Yaka, Ponk, Xenz[4], cheba and richt.
Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja was also active as a graffiti artist with the nicknames of "3D" and "Delge" in the early 1980s. He appeared in the UK documentary called "Bombin’" alongside Wolverhampton artist and later DJ and producer Goldie.
[edit] External links
- Bristol City Council: Leisure & Culture
- Ashton Court Festival
- Bristol Balloon Fiesta
- Bristol Harbour Festival
- Bristol in effect...staticearth
[edit] References
- ^ History of the RWA. Royal West of England Academy. Retrieved on 2006-08-26.
- ^ Royal West of England Academy. Images of England. Retrieved on 2006-05-09.
- ^ http://www.bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=24307
- ^ http://www.bristle.org.uk Bristle Website
- ^ http://anarchist606.blogspot.com/2004/10/dialect-no-more-sad-news-that-dialect.html
- ^ Example BIMC Video: DSEi solidarity demo in Bristol
- ^ http://www.plugincinema.com/plugin/articles/article_indy2003.htm Mixed Media: A Report Back on the Community Media Day in Bristol (14th June 2003)
- ^ a b c Harry Stoke & Vinny Green, 2003. A Dictionary of Bristle. Bristol: Broadcast Books.
