Stokes Croft for visitors

A Visitors Book briefly appeared at the bottom of Ninetree Hill last month, dangling from a tree

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Some people think it's cute, but we know different. It's a new way to catch rioters.

If every hour the police come up and put their name in along with the time, then if there's a riot all they need to do is go to the book, look at who signed it during the riot, and put them away for five year. It's the physical version of facebook. Indeed, it even has the work "book" in there, which is one of those concepts the Daily Mail want to ban, or at least burn.

Fortunately YA55VDY is wise to these police tactics, and doesn't sign the book.

For those readers who don't live in our fair city, it's about time we gave them a view of Stokes Croft, one that shows how it is the areas leading artistic and cultural quarter. Which it is.

At least, provided giant grinning skulls painted by 3dom and Rowdy are things you can cope with. We feel for the people on Dove Street, who have that staring at them out their bedroom windows. How long do you have to live there before it starts talking to you?

Anarchists. Maybe

The elusive "Bristol Citizen" asked us why we forgot to mention anarchists as the cause behind the riots. Good question.

It's hard to see theft of LCD televisions as somehow aligned with the Anarchist cause. Indeed, it's hard to see a complicate blackberry-and-facebook based Command-Control-and Communication Infrastructure being operated to co-ordinate such thefts. Sitting in a pub like The Hare on the Hill cheering on rioters out on ninetree hill -that we can accept.

Planning a mass rising of the population in Croydon. Unlikely. Croydon? It's not exactly the Bastille or the Battleship Potemkin, is it. If you are going to plan a revolution, pick somewhere dramatic to be celebrated in cinema and art for centuries. Not Croydon.

Who then? Well, we also forgot to mention Rave Music. - music described in the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act as "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". A music so dangerous that they had to ban rave gatherings, out of fear of groups of people wearing lime green t-shirts dancing to A Guy Called Gerald threatened society -or at least the alcohol revenue of clubs, pubs and national supermarket chains.

There's another issue: where did all the balaclavas come from? There's only one group of people who go round the city with Balaclavas and facemasks, geared up for a mass uprising and already showing an affectation for consumer toys. Yes, the cyclists.

With the face gear, the fingerprint-protecting gloves and the riot-ready helmets, along with the nimble wheeled subversion-mobiles, these are the real criminals in our society.

What to do? The obvious answer is to show that we aren't intimidated, to place our range rovers firmly in the cycle paths and say "we will not be intimidated!"

Praise L008YXR for being the first of the true citizens of our streets to drive over to the bike paths of Montpelier and show they are not afraid. Already you can see how the passing cyclists look threatened and unhappy!

Tesco would like to us to remind you that they are still open.

Riots, Root Causes and Random Opinions

It became clear during the week that even Boris Johnson was out of his depth. After some final words of advice from Sarkozy -whose strategy of containment doesn't actually work when we have to drive through the areas of unrest, we finally jetted home. And then drove down to Stokes Croft

Tesco is boarded up. It's not clear whether this was due to attacks on it, or the supermarket chain accepting the inevitable and adopting this as their decor. It is still open, providing a reason to park in the bike lane, as KT04TWZ has done.

In the distance there's a woman pushing a fixie along the pavement. Given the abuse of bicycles in the English Riots (to separate them from the Ulster Riots and the regular Scottish "fixtures"), she and the cyclist heading into the city on the road should be pre-emptively arrested.



Further down, the windows of the Croft and Rodak Polish Food at the bottom of ninetree are broken -you can see them behind the bike lane/paveparking van Properbread HK07UKR. If one were to view the riots as either a popular uprising against The Man or a mass looting by consumer-hungry troublemakers, it's hard to say why either establishment was targeted. These establishments are not The Establishment. 

There are other places boarded up, but the presence of quality art by Petro, Epok, Sepr and others shows that this is not recent. Overall then, for the area that is now associated in Bristol and the country's mind as "the first 2011 riot" is quiet and back its normal life. 

On that topic, can we point out that the graffiti covering Annabel's at No 9 actually predates the sex-shop art we covered previously. We apologise to the Annabel staff for this accidental neglect.

People have asked us who, given all the people like Max Hastings are writing bollocks, and David Starkey saying "it is because they is all black", why aren't we being paid to appear on television and spout some random bullshit about the causes of the riots and the measures that need to be taken?

Most of the shallow bollocks has already been written. You can blame thirty years of liberal thought, two years of government cuts, and then make up some opinions on what needs to be done next. When the Evening Post did ask for some opinions we provided some defensible data showing how civil unrest is strongly correlated with economic downturns -at which point they hung up the phone.

It seems that to get the TV and press coverage we deserve, and the appearance money- we need to have an agenda more outrageous, which blames the recent events to some downfall in society. The obvious events are, in no particular order

• Legalising same sex marriages.
• Banning slavery.
• The creation of the NHS.
• Making it legal for two men to hold hands in public.
• Allowing people of different racial groups to settle in the country (ignoring Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Romans, and all other pre-20th migrations except those from Ireland)
• Banning schools from being able to beat children.
• The end of capital punishment.
• The end of internment in Northern Ireland, rather than its rollout across the rest of the country.
• The end of National Service. 
• Rap Music.
• Jazz Music.
• Rock and Roll Music.
• Punk Rock.
• The rollout of 3G networks and the addition of TCP/IP protocol stacks to mobile telephones.
• The World Wide Web.
• Twitter and Facebook. 
• Television.
• The publishing press.
• Widespread literacy.
• The Human Rights Act
• The ending of the death penalty.
• The ending of deportation.

Many of these have been covered by other commentators. Even so, these are mostly symptoms. The root cause hasn't been addressed, namely that we aren't able to execute people based on verbal evidence from a single witness. If we had that, all the criminals would have been dealt with a long time ago.

That's right: since we stopped executing people for alleged witchcraft, Britain hasn't been the same.

Bring back Burning Witches based on hearsay! It's the only way to save the country!

En Vacance

People are asking "when will Bristol Traffic update us with what's going on in the Bristol City Centre?"

A big chunk of the B.T. team are actually on our summer vacation abroad, in France, Germany and the Yachts of important media types and ogliarchs of former Soviet Countries and Arabic-speaking dictatorships

We are doing this for your own good. Without us arranging the important deals with the owners of the press, the Evening Post's coverage would change; without us securing modest kickbacks from the supplying of russian gas to the UK, we wouldn't be able to pay our gas bills.

The situation is not so desperate that we need to return. We are beginning level-2 escalation, with both Boris Johnson and David Cameron returned. Frankly we were getting bored with them anyway. Cameron keeps wittering on about how never knew that Rebekah Brooks, which is why the Murdochs asked him to leave the yacht. As for Boris, there's only so much of his smugness anyone can take. Even Cameron's wife kept "accidentally" spilling red wine on him, just to keep sending him back to his room.

If things do get more out of hand, and trouble escalates to the urban ghettoes of the city: Henleaze, Westbury on Trym and Stoke Bishop, we will come back and declare a state of emergency.

As a precaution, FirstBus have pre-emptively withdrawn all service from the city. Forever.

Technically, Stokes Croft is not Bohemian

As we get lots of new visitors asking about Stokes Croft, we have to provide some more details about Stokes Croft than locals need.

Stokes Croft is not Bohemian. Bohemia is a part of the Czech Republic. While there may be Czech speakers in the area -and there is a Polish supplies shop, it still isn't part of the Czech Republic. Bristol doesn't have a Welsh quarter either.

London, interestingly, does. It has a Welsh Language school, in "Brenddu", to give Brent its welsh name. Perhaps they too have police vans with "Heddlu" on the front too, as we have been seeing quite a lot of those recently.

What Stokes Croft does have is excellent artwork, and some good beverages at the cafes and pubs.

It also has that famous take-away, Slix, seen here from across the road. Behind it: ninetree hill, Thomas Street, Dove Street and the Kingsdown escarpment.

Speaking of Slix, last month we linked to a review of it, which, in the filtered reviews, included this portion of a one-star review:

Just after I had ordered a guy came in and ordered the same as me.  Quickly after ordering he shouting at the man behind the counter "yo! Make it a fresh one this time!"

I knew then that this wasn't the best choice of take away.  I was then handed a stale bun in a napkin.  The burger was dry and a bit crispy, closer to a biscuit than a burger.  The lettuce was off and the relish tasted like it had fermented.

Slix's lawyers have been in touch to make it clear that this review gives the misleading impression that it is possible to get meals cooked fresh if specifically requested. Such an accusation is without proof, and therefore must not be repeated. 

The stokes croft bike lane: a new record!

You won't be seeing our white van today, as the team is all at home watching TV. Well, watching adult videos while drinking red bull and vodka, but it fits in with the day. However we do welcome contributions, as usual to bristol.traffic at gmail dot com.

Today we have received some lovely photos of what's happening down in Stokes Croft, showing that the police have finally stepped in and set a record for the number of vehicles that can park in a bike lane! We see you, Aberdeen Cars,


and raise you eight police vans!


We also have proof that Welsh vehicles are exempt from one way signs.



There, how you deal with that, friends of the north?

update: Gamu asked why we hadn't included the registration numbers. An error of omission, due to the rush to get this out. Here are the two from the photos: CN59DVO WX08DHE. As they say, Whose police state? Our police state!

Stokes Croft: Picton Street is normal

There's some paint on the road at the Stokes Croft/Ashley Road junction

The Bristolian Cafe is offering special "Riot Fry-Ups"

Claims were made in the press that people had been digging up cobbles and throwing them, but the only cobbled street we know of nearby -Picton Lane (good secret parking, BTW), is unchanged, except there is now a security person sitting in the sun at the back of the mini-Tescos (not photographed).

The local stores have a police car blocking the usual staff range-rover parking

but as there is still some spare yellow line space, this is not an issue.

Again: normality.

Stokes Croft Riot: Cheltenham Road is back to normal

We got a blip in web traffic last week with people searching online for "Stokes Croft" and "Stokes Croft Tesco".

We are Bristol's premier road-related news outlet --and given this road's role in both transportation and fast food, this extra traffic was not surprising.

To keep our out-of-town visitors informed, we drove the official Bristol Traffic White Van down to Cheltenham Road and 'the Croft to see what was happening.

The Tescos is boarded up, Fred Baker Cycles has a few hundred pounds worth of damage. All eight cyclists who read this site might want to consider visiting the shop and buying something there, to show your support for a local shop in the area that never chose to be alongside a new supermarket.

The outbound bike lane has a car in it, this time a police car.

The inbound bike lane also has a car in it.

Up on the now infamous Telepathic Heights, someone sits on the roof shouting at passers by.

All is back to normal.

Stokes Croft Riots

Given the news about riots in Cheltenham Road, we are pleased to inform all all readers that despite what happens over the weekend Ritas and Slix will both continue serving Bristol's best takeaway chips to passing motorists, be they minicab drivers or police riot vehicles. The latter will qualify for bulk discount. We also welcome rioters, as the two establishments do consider themselves part of the Stokes Croft community, and not some national invader that do not recognise that garlic mayonnaise is a key part of Bristol's cuisine.

However, the two establishments have requested that all police car customers park in the bike lanes slightly closer to Cheltenham Road, rather than the bike lanes directly in front of the shops, as bricks and the like being thrown at vans does tend to turn away traffic. They can assure the police that parking restrictions will not be enforced (based on historical data), and that anyone cycling up to the (closed) Cheltenham Road is a troublemaker who deserved to be arrested -although only after spending their free cash at Rita's and Slix.

Slix's lawyers will also be in touch with everyone who reviewed their cafe, as they are all libellous apart from the one that praises it so much it is clearly fake.

The Hare on the Hill pub in Kingsdown would also like to point out that you can get a good view from there, along with a wide selection of Bath Ales beers, and as it is out of the "no drinking" exclusion zone, customers are welcome to sit outside and enjoy the "sporting fixtures" of the Easter Weekend -one in which the Royal Wedding Festivities appear to have started a week early.

Trivia: next week will be the 48th anniversary of the Bristol Bus Strike. Since that date nobody except poor people without cars have taken the bus, and FirstBus have done their best to discourage even these people from using the bus, by overcharging for a mediocre service.