Civic History?!
March 2 2008 (Slight update on previous)

One day, I shall get into the Guinness Book of Records for boring the largest number of people to death with my only-slightly-pompous theory of Civic History.

If you live in Bristol or thereabouts you'll probably have had problems avoiding The Bristol Story, an almost 200-page ‘graphic history’ of Bristol, written by me and beautifully illustrated by Simon Gurr. It is this year’s Bristol Great Reading Adventure, which is to say the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership (BCDP) wants everyone, especially younger folks, to read it.

It’s been a really weird experience, this. From germ of idea to completion it’s been about three years in the making, and it’s not like many books you’ve seen before. Si and I knew pretty much all along how we were going to do it; try and engage a notional intelligent/curious 12-year-old reader with some silly bits and make it fairly graphic heavy early on so’s we could sandbag them with more words and education later on.

It’s not really a comic, but there’s loads more pictures in it than, say, Terry Deary’s excellent ‘Horrible Histories’.

It’s also different in that there are – I think – 85,000 copies out there, all free. It’s been organised by BCDP and paid for by the Heritage Lottery Fund, plus business sponsors, the two universities and the South West Regional Development Agency (about whom I take back everything I ever said. Ahem.) Copies have gone out to libraries, schools, been given to the staff of several companies and public sector organisations and there are (or were) piles of them in other places all over town to help yourself from.

This has created all sorts of pressures of its own in that you’re trying to create something that will be appreciated by the widest possible range of readers. It’s not like you write/draw it, then a publisher puts it in bookshops for people to buy, or not, as they please.

We’ve tried to entertain and inform in sort of equal measure. We ventured into Bristol’s mythology as well as the history, because it’s fun and because if you want to get all intellectual about it, then sometimes the myths are as important and instructive as facts.

For your actual history, well you can get quite a lot into 196pp, even of A5 with a lot of pictures. So we run through from prehistory to the present day, sketching in what seemed to us the most and significant bits.

Of course it’s warts ‘n’ all. It has to be. Fifty years ago there was a sort of official "top-down" narrative that peddled intrepid merchant adventurers and “colourful maritime heritage” while glossing over the many failings of the commercial oligarchy that ruled the place for most of his history. Failings like complacency, incompetence and the most staggering, egregious moral corruption. Nobody believes the picture postcard view anymore, and there's no evidence that that many people ever did. Though if you want to be historiographical about it, the publication of 'A Shocking History of Bristol' by Derek Robinson in 1973 (now available as 'A Darker History of Bristol') was probably the moment that the official version was fatally holed under the waterline.

In Bristol's case, the sanitised version of the history was not so much the product of any tourism industry, but rather the work of a local establishment that desperately wanted to sweep some things, slavery in particular, under the carpet, especially once large numbers of people from the Caribbean started moving here in the 1950s and 60s.

But there is greatness in Bristol's history, too. In many individuals, in invention and innovation in both technology and in ideas. For instance, the links between radical new religious movements and radical politics are too obvious and interesting to ignore.

The other striking thing is that Bristol has always had to replenish and grow its population and workforce through immigration. From earliest times to the present day its economy has depended on people moving in from the surrounding countryside, or from other countries altogether.

Folks like that don’t always know a lot about the history of the old place. Arguably, the biggest single immigrant group since the 1970s is white, educated and British. People coming here to work or study. These middle-class incomers dominate the public life of the city to an extraordinary degree, running the public sector, all levels of education and the upper reaches of such knowledge businesses as medicine, aerospace, technology and finance.

The only things most of them “know” about Bristol’s history are Cabot, Brunel and the slave trade (if that). But there’s loads more to the Bristol story, and if you’re going to have citizens participating in local administration, politics and community and neighbourhood activism, it’s no bad thing for them to know a wee bit about the history of their chosen home. Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

So then … Civic History; tell the whole story (to the best of your knowledge and ability), and you tell it warts and all. And to hell with that moral relativism crap; of course we’re biased, everyone is. But that’s no reason why you can’t aspire to intellectual honesty.

And in between all the good stuff and the bad stuff, there are lots of weird and quirky stories too, and a lot of myths and legends. There’s stuff to be proud of, stuff to be ashamed of, but what it all amounts to is that you live in a place that’s interesting. This applies to any town. In Bristol we’re especially lucky because it’s been around for over 1,000 years, making it way more interesting than most other places. Bristol is so interesting it has its own fairy tales.

The bad stuff is not your fault, and you can claim no credit for the good stuff. But as a citizen you can take pride in living in a city that is so rich in back-story and whose streets and buildings are infused with so many ghosts and resonances. And take responsibility for leaving it in a better state than when you found it. Civic History.

# For more on the Great Reading Adventure, plus info on availability of the books, see here. If you're desperate for a copy and can't get hold of one through the usual channels, mail me and I'll try and sort you.