To be fair, odds are I would have gone to any counter-demo in any city I happened to be in, even if it had been in front of a hotel I didn’t know, had never been to, and was unlikely to. This is just what I do. In fact, I initially thought this was a different Mercure in Bristol – one farther from the centre – which seemed more in line with the government policy towards asylum seekers, which is to get them out of sight and out of mind, so they can be usefully demonised. It was not until the day before the demo that I realised which Mercure it was, and that I had been there before.
Bristol held me. The first time I came to Bristol (save for a stopover in 2007, when I took a walk on the Quayside, saw a film at the Watershed, and was instantly hooked) was in 2014, for – initially – a seminar that was part of a job I hated and regretted taking. What sounded like a dream – tenure-track postdoc, secure, well-paid in a notoriously precarious academic environment, etc., with the possibility of staying on in what was billed as one of the bastions of social democracy – wasn’t; I was bullied and felt lonely and isolated in the sterile, conformist Danish social environment, ripped out from the precarious but dynamic, ever-changing, international, circle of friends and acquaintances at CEU. My primary relationship buckled under the pressure of another international move, combined with my disappointment in the job, and life, that everyone felt I should be settling down in. I felt very much the opposite, but struggled to see anything in the future that did not involve some version of the same. The only bright spots involved the possibility of extended research stays in Bristol and in Auckland, two of our project partners, so when a work event got scheduled in Bristol for February, I decided to bring a larger suitcase and not return until spring.
I still remember that first night. I don’t know why we were staying at the Mercury – I think the organisers at Bristol decided it was convenient for downtown and probably fitted the budget. I remember it being one of the nicer hotels I had stayed in – years of precarity combined with the desire to travel meant that I stayed in very cheap hostel and hotel accommodation well into my 30s; while Denmark was the first time my disposable income meant I did not have to worry about money, the country itself was prohibitively expensive, meaning that I was still having the more-or-less same lifestyle, just paying much more for it. It was not the hotel itself, however, but sitting outside it, on the Welsh back itself – I had snuck out for a cigarette (sorry!); the night was surprisingly mild, or at least that is how it appeared to me, my blood frozen by the unforgiving Danish northern winds – watching the glistening lights over the canal, that I felt happy for the first time in months.
Bristol melted me. It was not only my blood that had turned to ice over that first winter in Denmark; being in the southwest made me feel human again. It wasn’t only the casual smiles of staff in coffee shops*, or friends I (quickly, and thank you, you know who you are) made; it was also the fact that it was the only place (and to this day, even after more than ten years in the UK, even with the small exception of London) where I felt truly welcome. It was – still is – the only place where people would (occasionally, and casually) ask if I was from Bristol, rather than where I was from. In honour of that, one of my social media profiles still says I am from Bristol.
This, in sense, is true – I was born in Belgrade, but Bristol made me. The next time I came in autumn, I saw Nick Cave’s ’20,000 days on Earth’ – at the Watershed, where else** – went back to my room, and made a decision on how to live the next ten years. The rest, as they say, is history. While most of that history involved living elsewhere (Cambridge, London, and, for the past five years, the north-east), Bristol always felt like coming home.
It is not only that I came at the right time, at the cusp of the upswing of gentrification, but before the major part of the London fallout began. I lived everywhere – from a shared flat above a shop (yep) in Gloucester rd. (a lease I had taken over from a friend who has split up with her boyfriend) to a shared house in Horfield where I rarely saw anyone else to a horrible HMO in Clifton where they insisted the boiler room was an acceptable place to sleep; I stayed in friends’ flats, houses, gardens (usually lovelier than the boiler room). I went everywhere, walking, cycling, on the bus, and the railway. In between, I bid ny days in Copenhagen and elsewhere, waiting to return to Bristol.
It is also true that I was well-positioned as an outsider-in – I was doing research on how universities were engaging with local communities, so this gave me good access to both, at the time when impact had not yet begun to strangle the milder, less instrumentalised public engagement. This does not mean I did not witness, and was explicitly told about conflicts emanating from this; as elsewhere, universities (and particularly elite universities) are almost by definition conduits of gentrification. Even from this perspective, I (almost) always felt welcome; Bristol has no suspicion of ‘outsiders’ the way many other places in England do.
It is also not the proverbial ‘mildness’ of the southwest, memorialised in Banksy’s grafitti over Hamilton House. Yesterday, I watched that mildness scale up very quickly when crowds of angry, shouting men decked out in St. George’s flags showed up on either side of our lines, in front of the Mercure Brigstow. No pasaran.
As I said, I would’ve gone to any anti-fascist demo, anywhere. But the fact that someone is trying to prevent people who are, in a very different but very real way, seeking refuge at exactly the same spot where I found it*** – the Mercure Brigstow – meant there was no place I would have rather been yesterday.
*I write this with very much of an awareness of cultural expectations of emotional labour, especially in the so-called ‘hospitality industries’. While Denmark has a bit of a reputation for staff explicitly not performing it, which we can also attribute to decent labour conditions and thus absence of need to work for a tip, tipping (especially over-the-counter) was not a thing when I first got to Bristol either. People still chatted away in ways that, at least to my human-contact-starved Scandinavian eyes, seemed genuine.
** Of course, I also saw quite a few films at The Cube, including If a Tree Falls, another film that has been very influential on my orientation.
*** I’ve picked up on social media that one of Britain’s racism-loving publications has apparently used a similar angle to justify the far-right racist attacks on hotels hosting asylum seekers – apparently it’s “understandable” that people who have had their weddings there feel aggrieved to see the same places used to host migrants (as you can imagine, with the requisite set of adjectives/qualifiers added, incl. “off public purse” – despite the fact that it is explicitly the policy of the British government to ban asylum seekers from working – and “lounging”, despite extensive reports on how horrific conditions for asylum seekers in hotels actually are). I don’t think the kind of dour-faced conservatism that sees your ‘joyful’ occasion (= wedding) and someone else’s different kind of ‘joy’ (= being able to escape explicit oppression, persecution, starvation and likely death wherever it is you are escaping from) as mutually exclusive or even hierarchical (and if the latter, then in my view it certainly wouldn’t be the posh weddings that should be prioritised) is worth commenting on, but I do think there is another kind of resentment fuelling the far-right that does merit more attention. Given some things we know about the social composition of the British far-right (leaving aside for the time being the social composition of those who fund and direct it), I think it is more likely that their resentment stems from their own (perceived) inability to afford the exact posh weddings in the exact same hotels that the said article (which I won’t link to) is nostalgically referring to. Which only confirms what we already know, which is that one of the aims of far-right mobilisation in the UK is to divert attention of the working/exploited precarious class away from the (very needed) economic redistribution and onto attacking migrants and minorities.
Jana Bacevic 