Totterdown Rising Commissions
In 2023 Lyra Festival commissioned four poets, in collaboration with Word of Mouth, to respond to the theme ‘Totterdown Rising’.
Poets Beccy Golding, Anita Karla Kelly, Agata Palmer and Angie Belcher each wrote a piece inspired by the destruction of Totterdown in the 1960’s.
Rainbow Teeth of Totterdown
by Agata Palmer
A tall Doric column of cast-iron, Three Lamps,
stands solid, like a Cerberus at the entrance to the area:
one lamp, in memory of the close-knit community
one for independent shops and pubs
and one for the planning committee that erased the above.
Streets: rows of rainbow teeth, chimneys,
sharp enough to maul, but you wouldn’t bite the hand
that keeps you fed, would you?
Cold calculated coordinated compulsory purchases
faced by incredulous residents. Disbelief didn’t help.
Meetings, letters, protests mushroomed too late.
Five hundred and fifty households extinct like red squirrels.
Bristol blunder was no accident, the bold brutal design
cared for no one but the cars of the future.
No more usual days with family round the corner,
chats at the butcher’s buying pigs trotters or Bath chops,
no more bowling alley or Poodle Parlour gossip.
Totterdown turned into a prairie, with ‘’Tinkers’’* setting up.
These steep pavements hold memories,
my sweat pushing a double buggy down
Frederick Street and up Vale Street –
a regular challenge. Sons left. I stayed. Only thirty years.
Those bulldozers chewed up five generations
of shared history, houses ripped down to rubble and dust.
Demolition desert for decades.
I want these bricks and slabs to remember us all
in their steady silence, remember my mother with me,
our tottering up & down to local open spaces and shops,
her few thousand sunset photos from Perrett Park,
my sons’ first steps, school runs, Easter egg-rolling.
New Walls, the replacement housing on the slope,
lumps of burnt toast,
was behind the lilac bush in our back garden.
The postage-stamp-sized Zone A: the compensation land,
on our walk to the greengrocers and Victoria Park.
Ciao Polacca! The Banana Boat heaven of fruit & veg.
Emigrants and pregnant women notice each other –
we chat about the sons we bore the same year that saw
the Hale–Bopp’s comet lounge across our skies for days.
Demolishing homes, pulling healthy teeth
from the jaw of human history. Dentists from hell!
The best revenge is the thriving life
with cafes, workshops and art trails.
Life knitted back together and re-invented
by native and newly-arrived ‘’loony lefties’’
creative ‘’stirrers’’ and ‘’woolly-hatted idealists’’*.
Copyright © Agata Palmer 2023
*K.Pollard Totterdown Rising (Naked Guides Ltd, 2006, pp 68, 45 & 46)
Totterdown is a great place
by Anita Karla Kelly
Totterdown is a great community
Totterdown is a vibrant community
The community is a rainbow
Totterdown is a rainbow
A concrete grey rainbow that cars can drive over and no-one gives a fuck Totterdown is a community that sticks together
A community that sticks together is Totterdown
Except when the sticking becomes unstuck and no-one gives a fuck
I
h r a i t a e t it when there’s a poem about Bristol o and the first things you hear are
h
l
o l y s
balloons and coloured houses and everyone r s their e e like – ‘oh my god
can’t you think of
something original’
but no-one says
anything because
that would be rude
Totterdown is a great place
Totterdown is a volatile place
Totterdown is a volatile person
Totterdown is a friendly person
Totterdown is a friendly pub
Totterdown is two pubs fighting
Totterdown is two people fighting
Some people are proud about the fact
that there’s a h
i
l
l
that’s the steepest in Europe
and possibly the world.
They love that people gather
to roll eggs down it.
Some people don’t like it. It’s annoying.
Who wouldn’t want to knock down
houses in totterdown and build a road?
It’s an annoying place
where there’s too many steep roads
too many
people
who know each other
too many
people
who talk to each other
lots of gangs of people
Totterdown is a gang
Totterdown is a gay gang
Totterdown is gay but not in a derogatory way in a way that people like
n
i b
a o
Because there’s a r w of houses on a hill
I can understand why the council
would want to knock that down
because it’s really annoying to
hear about the rainbow of houses
in poems all the time.
Totterdown people do what they are told
People do what they are told
People don’t do what they are told
Would you do as you’re told?
Can you please stand up
and move to a place that’s
not blocking my view.
That’s like when the council
asked loads of people in Totterdown
to relocate so they could knock down
their houses and not build a motorway.
There was a play about it
with Pete Postlethwaite in it
where they made people move seats
to illustrate the point
he’s my favourite actor
he’s dead now.
People walk around in Totterdown
People walk around
People love walking
People hate walking
People love driving
People love driving and cars
People love driving and bars
People love drinking and bars
People love drinking
Cheers to totter-downers
You drinky-doers Hill - dwellers
You shouty uppers You stand – againsters Hand-holders Concrete-resisters Car-drivers
Campaign – risers Flat-road-survivors Grass-walkers Rule – breakers Egg-rollers
Do-as-your-tolders Banana- boaters Swim- savers Mosque – meeters
Tipple-topplers Pizza- eaters Resistance – fighters Gert-lushers
Rainbow- lovers
And the Man at the Back
by Angie Belcher
(A tribute to Henry Bradbeer who wouldn’t let the bulldozers take his house when totters was being demolished.
Written using stolen 1970’s song lyrics.)
A long, long time ago, I remember how the music use to make me smile
I was there, and I saw what you did, saw it with my own 2 eyes
Well I started off with nothing and I promise I’m a self-made man
I’ve washed my socks in the sink, And I’ve not much to show for my life
But there’s my blood in that brick, There’s spit in that milk
Somewhere a queen is weeping, somewhere a king has no wife
He was a hard-headed man in a cold cold city
Take me home because our house is a very very very fine house.
He wondered if I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me?
It’s such a lovely place, he had such a lovely face
They want me to give up my life, my heart, my home.
And I‘ve nothing to lose in this fight
The man at the back said everyone attack
Just because no-one wants to take the long way home
Take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy
It’s a god awful sad affair
Siblings were separated, politicians exonerated
They say a place is just bricks and a road is just tarmac
Then a heart is just pipes and a family is just bodies
But there were plants and birds and rocks and things
There were sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground
They said you better shape up
And we said, well lets stay together but now Its only a teenage wasteland
And we said do you feel like we do?
Some body took the “Pulse” out of “Compulsory Purchase Order”
Then we whisper words of wisdom, let it be
And we got our motor running cos we they said I’m in love with my car
Do you want to ride, see yourself going by the other side of the sky
The motorway sun coming up with the morning light
No matter what we get out of this, I know we’ll never forget
Because It’s all right now, baby. It’s all right now
Your metal stairway lies on the whispering wind
Only if you care for each other as you care for yourself would this world be a peaceful place
And we’ll keep on fighting until the end
Home is not a place, it’s a person. Wherever we’re together, that’s my home.
Totterdown saga
by Beccy Golding
Faraway and in the uplands -
you reach it from the river or
a steaming locomotive,
take a tumble from a basket
of a Gromit-shaped balloon
down south of the city
on the seventh of it’s hills
below the ragged rugged reservoir
is a staggery pile of mountains
where live my lovers and my handsomes
the tenacious back-boned peoples
of the clamber ups and Totterdowns.
Sturdy, strong, vociferous
clamorous, obstreperous
working class uproarious
artists and bohemians
are the tenacious back-boned people
of the clamber ups and Totterdowns.
Faraway and in the long times
abiding in a golden treasure nest
of curios, necessities, deliveries and purchases
are the traders, neighbours, pupils
who barter, birth and breathe the air
of the clamber ups and Totterdowns.
And then. one. day.
The hairy baldy bureaucrats
bowler-hatted pompoons
from deep inside the city walls
and the big wigs from far off up
away in the big old smoky metrapole
want betterment and progress
they do not understand
the entwining symbiosis of
the clamber ups and Totterdowns
All they see is rats nests
seething pylles of people
lumpen gert Bristolians
so they make a shiny modern plan –
we’ll send in the writhing whiplash slither monster
to gobble up the oddbod populace,
it will leave behind it as it goes
a trail of hard as rock excreta
metal tarmac scat
that stinks of petrol guzzle highways
encircling the city with a four lane span.
But before. they. do
Let’s use our clever eyes
zoom in and dive inside
the tangle of streets and houses
where people are living, striving, thriving
can you hear them uttering
tales of Totterdown Rising?
What is it that they do not want to lose?
On shopping day Mum tells Elsie Lawrence
‘on with your coat, love, we’re going up top.’
Ascend Parliament, Hillside Street cadence
past Highgrove, come out by the big main shops.
Stock up on provisions in David Grieg’s,
at the corner of Angers by New Walls
look in the shop which is selling cat meat
and quite desirable celluloid dolls.
Seasons is on the corner of Cheapside
- the aristocrat of grocery shops -
find superior customers inside,
the selection on display is tiptop.
Home & Colonial for loose leaf tea,
Greenough’s the drapers for necessaries.
On the corner of Firfield and Wells is
Harris & Tozer haberdashery,
kids take home corsets to see if they fit
their grandmothers satisfactorily.
Displayed in the window of butchers Flooks -
roast pork, beef silverside on china stands,
black puddings, polonies hanging in loops,
dishes of pigs trotters, tongue and pressed ham.
Above New Walls we find Fanson’s Hardware
an Aladdin’s cave of an enterprise
with ranks of chamber pots made to care for
all ages and posterior sizes.
And from Knowle Picture House you will hear pass
clang and clamour of electric tram cars.
Bushy TV and McCloud’s newsagents
stand in old tall buildings down on Bath Road.
Vivien Pipping says she used to glimpse
barges pulled up the river by tug boats
for shipwrights repairs at Totterdown bridge.
Off licence and pubs are very widespread,
on every street corner what you’ll find is
good quality beer, cheese, onions and bread.
Green Street has legendary off licence Franks
and if too much tipple is your downfall
there’s an undertakers down by Three Lamps
(the iconic sign is twenty feet tall).
Glanfield motorcycles race up Park Street
kids cheer them up Vale Street ‘cos it’s so steep.
Brenda Spriggs loves the little corner shops
in amongst the densely terraced houses -
straight onto the pavement from your doorstop
sidle down side streets where space allows it.
They’re selling all manner of fancy goods,
traders and stalls all specialising in
newsagents, leather and healthy fresh food
DIY, baking and home furnishings.
Pop in and stop for news and a chatter,
browse sewing and mending kits on the shelves.
Mike Leigh’s dog went to the poodle parlour
‘but dad learnt quickly and cut her himself’.
Flocks of shoppers came up from miles around
to the dense-packed streets of Old Totterdown.
but it. all. matters not
the pompoons will not listen
they do not give a jot
they put their puffy fingers in their ears
send out meany-mouthed proclamations
to the tenacious back-boned people
of the clamber ups and tumble downs.
we will buy your homes and shops for pennies
not at all for what they’re worth
disregard your histories
blight your buildings
move you out
we know better what the city needs
a quarter of the neighbourhood
a dozen streets from at its core -
a place that people made a special day trip for -
became a dirty derelict rubbish dump
families uprooted, homes demolished
all the treasure swept away
and then. like. shifting clouds
bored with the magic highway interchange
the pompoons turned their hats upon their heads
found something new, more modern
some other shiny thing
without a chin nod over shoulder they
sauntered off and washed their hands
the tenacious back-boned peoples
of the clamber ups and Totterdowns
learn to walk upon the hills
they stand up and balance proud
they did not want to put themselves
in the way of progress
wanted good futures for their kids
new cities that were promised
but in the end a mother said
‘we shouldn’t mind so much
if they had made the road
but to leave us like this…’