Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Bristol is now a hotbed of ‘ventrification’

Seeing my hometown, Bristol, in flames this week following the violent ‘Kill the Bill’ riots, it was unrecognisable as the safe south-west city which I had dreamed of leaving since the age of 12 (when I started sleeping beneath a poster of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground map). I finally escaped to the capital in search of fame, fortune, sex and drugs at 17.

When some people say ‘I don’t recognise the place’, they’re usually talking about the effects of immigration, but that’s not my experience. Bristol always had a large black population, though thankfully not as a result of the city’s shameful history of slave trading, which at its height saw more than 2,000 ships take around half a million Africans to slavery in the Americas.

My black schoolmates were not simply accepted; they were inevitably at the centre of every year’s in crowd. Sadly, the same was not true of the quiet and studious Ugandan Asians who arrived in the 1970s, and who the black and white cool kids delighted in teaching rude words to. I learned young that black and white is never just a case of black and white, but of cultures. It was a lesson that would stand me in good stead when arguing against the inane insistence that the history of the human race consists solely of white villains and non-white victims.

Peevish posh kids are using working-class neighbourhoods as a stage for their temper tantrums

No, when I say I didn’t recognise the place where I was born — far from saying it’s been taken over by ‘foreigners’ — I mean that I didn’t realise exactly how it had fallen to a certain sort of detestable white person: the Trustafarians, rich kids slumming it, as rich kids always have, but this time in the name of virtue-signalling and violence rather than good honest vice.

How did I miss it? Though I left in 1976, I went back regularly to visit my parents until their deaths at the turn of the century.

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