Welcome to the Carnyville

“If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” the Joker-esque host declares.



‘Here’ is the old fire station and police station, complete with use of old cellblocks, on Silver Street, Bristol.



‘It’ is the Invisible Circus, the Bristol-based arts-community collective of street performers and circus acts. They bring the cabaret and the carnival; they all share origins in Victoriana and Vaudeville, and they all offer up the neo-burlesque and the gothic. And it is this collective which most definitely ‘happens’ to the once formal, regimental space, in a frenzy and thunder of chaotic performance, choreographed fire, fiery dance and aerial antics on a series of nights never to be repeated.



The air, the atmosphere, the evocation, alters between rooms and between tracks. In the cavernous fire station, rope artists wind themselves around colour-striped blackness, suspended only arm’s length above their audience, and in its back rooms, a photographer stages mock-peep-show-esque portraits.



Within the ground floor cells and offices of the police station, fortunes are told, costumes designed and funeral arrangements made.





All the while, above them, on the cellblock balconies protruding overhead, prisoners are led between flame-wielding poi dancers, and welders shower the crowds below with sparks.



In the forecourt itself, the gothic is infused with the romantic as a light misty rain descends out from the skirts of two ghosts treading the walls of the police station at 90 degrees.





The mood returns to the anarchic when an insane trapeze artists throws herself into impossible knots heart-stoppingly far above the crowd.



But while everyone’s attention is on the activity happening in the night sky high above their heads, Pan’s creatures of the underworld are free to roam undetected, manhandling and molesting their unsuspecting victims and generally making nuisances of themselves.



Carnyville was meant to be a series of irreverent, re-appropriative, creatively explosive, audacious, romantic, and even dangerous nights.



But in the wet misty rain that filled the space and distorted the light collecting in the open spaces between the old cellblocks and the fire station, it’s the ethereal memory of the ghosts which still prevails, as if their descent down the building’s face towards us was a defiant, emotive escape from the building's past. It was this ‘haunting’ which lasted longest.



“If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” might be the opening declaration of the Carnyville, but for some reason this is a very ‘Bristol’ event, and I’ve never heard of the like happening anywhere else.



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Hanham Hall

hanham hall
Originally uploaded by slightly blurred

It might not look like it - since it clearly needs double glazing and thicker insulating walls (!) - but this is to be one of the first sites for the future of residential zero-carbon living! Can't you tell?? ...The signs are there, I'm sure - in the cracks and in the shadows...

Hanham's Hobbit Habitation

I knew it would happen! The minute we left Hanham - the not-especially-interesting, fairly innocuous, inoffensive little far-out suburb of Bristol where I lived throughout my childhood and my teens, and where my parents still lived up until 2 years - I knew as soon as I turned my back for a moment - something interesting would happen there!!! It turns out Hanham Hall - what used to be some sort of old people's home/mental hospital - where the residents of which used to trundle down to the not-especially-interesting or particularly attractive Anglican church my family and I frequented, until we saw the light and stopped - until the residents were dispersed, in whatever manner seen fit, and the hall closed down - has grand designs in mind. It's all boarded up and waiting for something to happen. And apparently that something is to be a test development for a township of eco-villages!!! Which, along with a similar project in Peterborough, will be the first in the UK!!! These homes will be entirely solar and wind powered. They will have zero-carbon emissions.





Suddenly the memories of the 45-minute chav-populated bus journey into school in town, the dull-as-dishwater 'High Street' with its transport cafes, travel agents, and the 60s inspired 'Folk Centre' plastered in garishly luminous posters advertising the next series of line-dancing classes and the local Christmas panto, have been replaced by the warmer recollections of dusky summers spent at the cricket ground where my dad and granddad played, while I built dens and fell in nettles, and winters spent tobogganing down Hanham Hills and smack into the dry-stone Hanham Walls... Suddenly Hanham conjures up, not the giant plastic fish outside the 'Hanham Friars' (pun intended - I hope - unless the owners had been to Hanham High School, in which case they most likely couldn't spell!!), but the gorgeous, poky little St George's chapel tucked out of sight down by the river, and just down from the spooky Sally-on-the-Barn farm estate, named after its supposedly resident ghost.





Aaah, those were the days, back in Hanham - Progressive Village of the Future - Ultra-Modern Community Forerunner - had I just been able to see it at the time...



I am reminded of the time of the local petition to get the Blue Bowl pub and its assigned bus-stop changed back when the new management at the pub tried to insist upon both the pub AND the bus stop being referred to as the Millhouse. But oh no, us Hanham residents weren't having any of it. We carried on calling it the Blue Bowl even when the bus drivers pretended not to know where we were talking about!! I should have known then to expect great, progressive, people-powered initiatives to be just around the corner!! Oh me of little faith...



Now I'm stuck in Leeds, where the recycling box is threatening to overwhelm us in our kitchen because they only collect the recycling twice a month! They could learn a thing or two from Hanham...!!

Some thoughts of designs for the eco-villages: Are they going to be gleaming, dynamic, Sci-Fi, Enterprises...



Or a bit of a throwback to 50s-style utopianism... like a provincial Barbican



Or something a bit more hobbitty...



Or something not so far from what we already have...



...which is the pretty dull, and probably most likely route... but, hey, I'm not going to underestimate Hanham's potential for pushing the boundaries and exploring architectural controversy!! I'm not going to make that mistake again!!

Oh, and how could I forget Hanham's tourist attraction?? The memorial for John Wesley that brings thousands... or hundreds... or tens... of Wesleyan fans to the replica pulpit said to be a point to which persecuted Baptists fled back in... whenever it was that Baptists were last persecuted...



It's a mystery indeed why such an attraction has not already placed Hanham more in the limelight...

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