LATEST: AT ONE POINT RIOTERS TRIED TO GET INTO CABOT CIRCUS SHOPPING CENTRE
Rioting still going on at 4am in Cheltenham Road/St.Pauls Bristol. Much more of a local youth uprising this time. More reports later. What a great start to wedding day. I love the fact that the Bristol Evening post is still running ‘Peaceful Protest called off’ this morning – look out the windows guys and smell the burning barricades. You’ll see in this clip why bottle banks are so useful!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDq26-OZYxs
Runing battles all the way up cheltenham road as far as the new sainsburys.. lots of horse charges met with street furniture…..
and back in st pauls Burning baricades on brigstoke road. Youth of all flavours turning out to give the filth a good belt. Police obviously a bit shy in our neighbourhoods.
None of us give a fuck about the cops, the royals or tesco. Cant realy beive that this week even though faced with our local Filth, unlike last weeks Welsh mob. The people of bristol, yet again managed to show them what we think of them.
That copper chopper is still out (hope your all safe out there)
Got to sleep now
C U Next Thursday
This one goes out to all those arrested in the london squats today. Solidarity is attack!
Brizzle Rising
Ian Bone 
Watching the twitter stream through the early hours I got more & more pissed off at the attitude of some of the peaceful protester types slagging off the youth who were kicking off. They clearly have no appreciation that the youth have a different agenda and they clearly have no understanding of why they are so angry. Probably not interested in fact, so long as they can maintain their cosy faux-bohemian little bubble.
Anyway, here’s a jolly little clip to start the day:
Hope everyone got home safe.
Telepathic Heights is being given the Plod treatment, as we speak, and a squat in Cheltenham Road has been raided too. Good old Plod bringing peace through war. Now the police have managed to wind up a significant section of Stokescroft/St Pauls, what chance of a repeat performance again today?
As Ian says, solidarity with Bristol, plus London, Brighton and Heathrow.
Walking to Temple Meads this morning there was a lot of broken glass across Portland Square on the path towards the pedestrian crossing, and on the footpaths outside Cabot Circus itself on Bond Street.
#stokescroft legal support: Bindmans solicitors 0207 833 4433. Best in the business. Don’t go local! Please RT.
“Chris Chalkley, of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft insisted that neither local campaigners against Tesco nor squatters were involved in the violence. “People were coming from afar for a ruckus. I didn’t recognise many of them. I can’t say more than that,” he said.”
What a prick.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/29/police-arrest-15-bristol-protests
Chris has always been noted locally for the naivety of his politics. Let’s just leave it at that shall we?
How about this from the Avon & Somerset:
http://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/LocalPages/NewsDetails.aspx?nsid=23252&t=4&lid=0#nsu2057&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Yes. Chief Constable Colin Port is now committed to arresting anybody who was in Stokes Croft in the last 12 hours. Should be interesting …
copper chopper = the sty in the sky.
The trouble with this ‘outsider’ vs ‘local’ thing is that Bristol’s inner city neighbourhoods are geographically very small, certainly compared with, say, London’s.
St. Paul’s to some people is analogous to Brixton; yet in comparison it is miniscule. And Stokes Croft, as some have pointed out, is by and large a recently invented neighbourhood, in the sense that the road Stokes Croft is maybe a couple of hundred metres long, bounded on one side by Kingsdown and Redland, and St. Paul’s (and Montpelier, if you were being generous) on the other.
Chris Chalkley and his ‘People’s Republic of Stokes Croft’ chose to define it as a discrete neighbourhood to emphasise its reputation as arty and bohemian and freewheeling – but historically it’s just a road dividing other, pre-existing neighbourhoods.
Which is fine, until you get to the whole issue of who gets to call themselves a ‘Stokes Croft local’ and who doesn’t. Normally it’s not an issue, of course – but now it apparently is. “OMG those nasty masked-up people throwing bottles at the police were SO NOT locals! They were OUTSIDERS!” Err, well, firstly who was taking down names and addresses to check, and secondly, are you seriously saying that those kids from St. Paul’s – as in , the very next streets! – somehow have less right to be on the streets and making themselves heard than you?
Talking of Brixton- RIP Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce, the Brixton mum who was shot and paralysed by the cops in 1985, sparking the the riots there. Condolences to her family too.
People seem to be confusing the Stokes Croft social scene and
‘Canteen Culture’ with local residency.
Working class residents seem to be being airbrushed out now as ‘outsiders’. Of course most of the people doing this airbrushing have brought themselves into the area. A two bed in Montpelier now costs around £250k plus.
Sorry to say this, but it has to be said, that in my experience, middle class squatters (and I was one once myself- although I consider myself ‘declasse’ now!) quite often seem to act unknowingly as a vanguard for the gentrification of working class areas- whether it is down to their ‘radical chic’, the growth of an alternative consumer culture (vegan cafes, wholefood shops etc.) or bars and pubs being considered to be ‘cool’ places to hang out… I’m thinking of Stoke Newington and Shoreditch in London….This usually happens during economic downturns…but don’t get me wrong, I’m not slating squatters in Bristol or anywhere else, it’s just an observation, though back in the Eighties I met a guy who squatted solely to save a deposit to buy a property…Old farts: Discuss?
There were definitely those types in the 80s. Stayed in a squat with 2 other punks/crustys in Hackney early 80s -they had fuck all apart from what I remember loads of killing Joke records and bog roll with a picture of Thatchers face on each sheet. They were in hindsight living the lifestyle, one is an executive in Japan now, and the other an executive of Toshiba witha £1m house in Weybridge. The squatted council flats have been sold off.
I need to go cabot circus
I really cannot comprehend why you’d think that by destroying shops, buildings, people’s lives and causing mass dammage will make your point? If this was ever about government, it certainly isn’t anymore which is proven by the lowest common denominator believing he/she to be deprived of some “middleclass luxury”. Guess what? Most of us have worked to get what we have, and DON’T appreciate having mindless yobs taking that away from us. Many on websites such as these refer to the police as “filth” and “pigs”. Fact is, you all think that you can do a better job, but you really can’t, because your answer is to “protest” and “riot” which clearly isn’t getting anyone anywhere. Grow up.