STOP the South Bristol 'Liveable Neighbourhood'
- keepbristolmoving
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Authoritarian Council Overreach and Living Nightmares Coming To A Street Near You
Jun 12, 2025
This is a post addressed especially to all those living in or needing to travel through the area depicted below, i.e. Bedminster, Southville, Windmill Hill, Ashton Vale, Malago Vale and part of Totterdown. If you have friends or relatives living or working there, please share this with them.
You will most likely already be aware of the debacle that is the East Bristol ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’1, but maybe you are not yet aware of the details - details which will very soon be coming your way if you do nothing to say No Thank You Very Much to the City Council and Ed Plowden (Windmill Hill councillor as well as the chair of the transport committee).
In the name of making
the council is forcing through change that is causing much longer driving routes and journey times, leading to traffic chaos, more pollution, noise and risk of accident, and a whole lotta stress for all those who don’t or can’t - for whatever reason (which is quite frankly none of the council’s business) - ride a bike or walk to get to where they need to each day. If you don’t believe me, check out the evidence being collected on the East Bristol Open Roads Facebook group, or, even better, go and check the area out yourselves, and have face-to-face conversations with the people actually living there and hear their experiences.
This is happening in an area already including or adjoining on several large green spaces - Netham Park, Troopers Hill Park, Avonvale Cemetary and St George’s Park.
Why would you teach children that it’s safe to play on city streets when there are already plenty of parks and safe spaces to play? How can a few ugly planters and ‘pocket parks’ create a real ‘green space’? These are genuine questions.
As for helping people ‘feel part of a community’, it is actually splitting any pre-existing community down the binary of on the one side those who either naively believe the council’s hype or are Machiavellian adherents to the Net Zero agenda, and on the other those who are sensible persons who want the council to stick to their day job so they can get on with their lives.
As Alex Klaushofer writes in this article:
It’s time to take a step back and look at the role and powers of councils. Once . . . they behaved as local service providers whose purpose was to collect the rubbish and administer social care. If they had time and money available, councils might engage in “community initiatives”. But they were never there to impose way-of-life changing policies, arrogating the right to decide who goes where and at what price.
Here is what one member of the Redfield community, Katie Sullivan, eloquently has to say in a comment on this Bristol Post article, in which some were extolling what they see as the virtues of the scheme:
All these cyclists ‘terrified’ by our ‘dangerous roads’.I’ve lived, walked, cycled and scooted throughout Barton Hill for the last 18 years, and at no point was the traffic so dangerous that I would avoid it or stop my children using the streets to cycle or scoot or generally move around to play.We live in a city. Deliveries, taxis, service vehicles, builders, emergency and healthcare workers, commuters, parents. We all live and work in these streets and it has been fine.There are parts where issues existed, and these were ignored by BCC for years. Beaufort Road a prime example. But the simple traffic calming management systems in place all over the UK were not used. Instead we’ve been dropped into some kind of futuristic Orwellian control mad dystopia. Nothing about any of our existing traffic complaints needed this drastic redesign and restrictions to our streets.We also have two very distinct areas of change. The individual burden placed on the residents of the Beaufort Rd area of the scheme by the EBLN is, whilst irritating if you’re not in favour, not that onerous on any one person.In Barton Hill, some residents are so fenced in by bus gates and multiple mile workarounds to access their homes that life has become completely unbearable.A typical scenario. You live in St Anne’s. Your dad lives in Barton Hill and is of very limited mobility. You’ve been in the habit of dropping in on the way to work to check on them, and of driving them to and from appointments at the Wellspring, a couple of streets from their house. Easily done, fits in well with your own commute, and is a lifeline to your dad.This simple, everyday caring arrangement is now utterly impossible to achieve. 1-2 mile routes in heavy traffic lie between you and your dad.
Regarding South Bristol, the first phase of ‘engagement’ took place last summer in August and September. You may, but are more likely not, to have received the information that you could ‘have your say’ about your area on an interactive map, the results of which can be found here. You did not need to prove you live or work in the area to take part, so the responses could be from anyone, anywhere.
This is from the council website:
As already mentioned, please talk to East Bristolians regarding what ‘liveable neighbourhoods’ ‘make places’. Ask them how they are currently feeling about that making ‘life better overall’ factor, as well as the reduction in loneliness, by making it way more difficult to visit friends and relatives you cannot walk or cycle to. Katie is right: Orwellian is a most apt description for the gaping cavern between what BCC says these schemes do and what they actually achieve.
So last summer the council wanted to know if you had any ideas, and then gave you a list of their own ‘possible improvements’ that they had, in true Blue Peter style, prepared earlier for you, and wrapped up nicely in a ‘toolkit’:
From the experience of East Bristolians, I would pay particular attention to that mention of ‘modal filters, diagonal filters, bus gates, one ways and no entries’. These are fancy names for road closures, including the kind that can suddenly cost you a lot of money if you fail to obey the no entry sign and drive down a road that you have used freely all your life till now. They are also what lead to the above-mentioned worsening of all the issues the council are claiming they want to mitigate, even though, as Katie says, there is often nothing to mitigate in the first place.
And watch out for that ‘street art’. It may sound nice in theory, but in reality it is a lot of large and brightly-coloured blobs on tarmac for no discernible reason other than the council apparently trying to stamp its authoritarian mark all over the streets where you live.
Here’s a summary of what will happen, from Keep Bristol Moving’s flyer:
The latest scheme to be abandoned is in West Dulwich in South London, where a group of committed local people took Lambeth Council to court and won, on the grounds that the consultation was not fit for purpose. Lambeth have been denied an appeal and will have to pay £35K in legal costs, plus very possibly all the money back they took in fines. The consultation held in East Bristol was no different in form to that of West Dulwich, and it remains to be seen how the South Bristol ‘engagement’ will proceed in the light of this court case and the mess BCC have made in their ‘pilot project’. For more on the sorry state of BCC’s ‘consultations’ see Chris McEvoy’s piece here.
If you are concerned about all this you will need to start taking action now, so that you don’t find yourself in your own Living Nightmare. In East Bristol it was only once the council started to implement the measures that it hit people what was actually happening, and by then it was too late to prevent what has been introduced as a ‘trial’ but is of course a massive foot in the door strategy.
For connection and any support we can offer, do get in touch with us at Keep Bristol Moving via our website, Twitter/X and Facebook.
We also have a flyer you can print out and distribute.
For the SBLN see this Microsite.
This piece will also be published on the new Stop the SBLN Substack page. If you would like to write for us, let us know!
