What’s going wrong in Bristol?

When a man is tired of London, he just needs to relocate to Bristol — or so the stream of westbound émigrés would suggest. Each year, hundreds up sticks and flee the capital in search of its laid-back lifestyle.

Bristol prides itself on being the chilled-out alternative to the big smoke — a bit like Brighton, but further west and therefore cooler. Here they swap the ruthless capitalism of their blowhard cousins in London for giant water slides, balloon festivals and radical street art. But the city is still chippy about London’s cultural dominance.

I grew up in south Bristol, and went to the same school as its most famous export, the graffiti artist Banksy. Banksy’s caustic barbs — against politicians, priests and bankers — are a miniature snow globe of Bristolian attitudes. Ours is a radical city, the narrative goes, a repudiation of the square bureaucrats and businessmen in London. You guys can slog away on the capitalist treadmill all you like: we’re too easy-going for that.

A lot of my parents’ generation were exiles from London — many had been priced out of the capital and subsequently convinced themselves they’d never liked it there anyway. London was, as one friend’s dad told me, just ‘seven million people screaming me, me, me’.

Yet Bristol’s determination to define itself in opposition to the capital smothers the city’s vast potential. It is, after all, a genuinely beautiful place, with stunning Georgian terraces and easy access to countryside. But the culture is stifling — success, drive and ambition are treated not as virtues but as cause for shame. The city has, for many years, been nicknamed ‘the graveyard of ambition’: a label adopted with woolly-headed pride by the locals.