Bristol is now a hotbed of ‘ventrification’

Seeing my hometown, Bristol, in flames this week following the violent ‘Kill the Bill’ riots, it was unrecognisable as the safe south-west city which I had dreamed of leaving since the age of 12 (when I started sleeping beneath a poster of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground map). I finally escaped to the capital in search of fame, fortune, sex and drugs at 17.

When some people say ‘I don’t recognise the place’, they’re usually talking about the effects of immigration, but that’s not my experience. Bristol always had a large black population, though thankfully not as a result of the city’s shameful history of slave trading, which at its height saw more than 2,000 ships take around half a million Africans to slavery in the Americas.

My black schoolmates were not simply accepted; they were inevitably at the centre of every year’s in crowd. Sadly, the same was not true of the quiet and studious Ugandan Asians who arrived in the 1970s, and who the black and white cool kids delighted in teaching rude words to.