Why Bristol needs a local guide
Bristol does things differently and gets defensive if you compare it to London. The street art in Stokes Croft is world-class and not curated — it just happens. Clifton is Georgian townhouses and the suspension bridge. Bedminster is where the younger crowd moved when Stokes Croft got too expensive. The cider is flat, dry, and not what Americans think cider is.
Bristol attracts around 3 million visitors a year, and a lot of them come for the street art and leave without scratching the surface. They photograph the Banksy pieces on Park Street and never walk further into Stokes Croft where the murals change every few weeks and nobody asks permission. They stand on the Clifton Suspension Bridge and miss Bedminster entirely, which is where the artists moved when the rents pushed them south. To become a tour guide in Bristol means understanding a city that has always done things its own way. The trip-hop scene came from here — Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky — and that independent spirit runs through everything from the St Nicholas Market stalls to the cider farms in the Somerset hills just outside the city. To become a tour guide in Bristol is to know which pub in Stokes Croft still pours scrumpy from a barrel, where the best Caribbean food in St Pauls is, and why Bristolians will argue for hours about whether the Harbourside is better now than it was ten years ago. Become a tour guide in Bristol and you represent a city that would rather invent something new than copy what London did last year.