Features / Marvin Rees
‘I didn’t cease being a Black man when I became mayor’
The former mayor of Bristol is a yapper.
Or, put another way, he “enjoys conversation”.
When I travelled to see Marvin Rees at Empire Fighting Chance to interview him about his newly released memoir, Let’s See What Happens, I was expecting to chat with him for 30 minutes at most.
is needed now More than ever
We ended up speaking for over three hours.
Let’s See What Happens: The Last Mayor of Bristol, published two weeks ago by Pan Macmillan, details Marvin’s life as a young mixed-race boy who went from growing up in Lawrence Weston and Easton to becoming the first directly elected Black mayor of a European City.
The book had been in development for two years and while its working title was My City, Rees ultimately decided to name his memoir after a phrase he has used throughout his life.
“I know at critical points in my journey when I’ve faced adversity or people have just told me you can’t do it… I just say, well, I’m going to give it a go and let’s see what happens,” he told me.
This unshakeable optimism has been hard won.
His childhood
1n 1976, Marvin and his family moved into the Long Cross estate in Lawrence Weston – photo: The Mayor’s Race
As Marvin explains in his memoir, life was tough growing up as a mixed-race child in 1970s Bristol.
His mum, Janet, born in Bristol to Welsh parents, had met his Jamaican dad at a club night in St Paul’s and quickly became pregnant with him and soon after his sister Dionne.
His mum was regularly harassed for having Black children and Marvin credits her strength for being the reason why he is so mentally strong today.
When she got pregnant at 22 with Marvin – who she named after popular 50s and 60s actor Lee Marvin – a health worker told her: “If you were a good woman, you’d have an abortion.”
After Marvin was born, she was repeatedly encouraged to give him up. In Let’s See What Happens, Marvin describes this as a “real-life Cathy Come Home culture”. Cathy Come Home was a 60s television drama in which the eponymous Cathy is homeless and has her children taken away by social services.
Although his mother’s family were progressive – in the 1960s, Marvin’s grandmother fostered the son of a Nigerian doctor – many who lived around them were not.
Marvin was the only Black child in his class at primary school. Some of the older kids called him “Blackie Sambo”.
Police racially profiled him.
When he went to watch a Bristol Rovers match at the football club’s former Eastville Stadium at the age of ten, he was verbally abused by older men and threatened with violence.
As he tells me: “I’ve been chased down the streets by people calling me n*gger. That was normal… It wasn’t unusual.
“Grown men driving past us in their cars calling out to 12/13-year-old boys, ‘Oi ya co*ns , w*gs, go back to where you come from’… That was the way it was.”
Finding confidence
Discovering boxing as a teenager did wonders for the self-confidence of Marvin – photo: Empire Fighting Chance
In his late teens, when he found boxing at Broad Plain Boys Club run by Jimmy Hill and Jimmy Robottom, Marvin’s confidence soared.
He explains: “I was terrified of failing as a kid… it paralysed me… But boxing made the space for me to learn how to come second, and it gave me confidence in something.”
As he added in his memoir, boxing taught him “nothing was set in stone: I could swap defeat and victory at any point.”
Marvin is now a proud ambassador of the Easton-based “Bristol institution” Empire Fighting Chance.
When I arrived to meet him for our interview, he was giving a pep talk to two young Black children at the charity boxing club, inspiring them with the story of African American abolitionist Frederick Douglas.
A rare eye condition called keratoconus put an end to his boxing ambitions but his drive remained. He tried to join the Marines and later the Army but, despite passing every other test, he failed the medical due to keratoconus.
So, he pivoted and studied economic history and politics at Swansea – becoming the first in his family to go to university.
He then did a master’s in political theory before doing another in global economic development at the private Christian Eastern University in Pennsylvania.
His first job after university was at Christian charity Tearfund, after which he worked as an intern for the Sojourners, a faith-based social justice organisation based in Washington DC. It was while living in the US that he met his wife Kirsten, who now works as a nutritional therapist.
After America, he worked at the BBC (“that was… a really unenjoyable period of my life”) before working in Bristol’s race equality sector.
That led to another stint in the USA when he was 38 (“life starts at any time”) on the Yale World Fellows programme where he studied alongside Putin critic Alexei Navalny, who died in February while in a Russian penal colony.
First bid to become mayor
In 2010, Marvin Rees joined the prestigious Yale World Fellows Program – photo: Yale World Fellows
After Yale, Marvin returned to Bristol and ran for mayor for the first time in 2012. He had previously tried to get on the Labour shortlist for the Bristol West parliamentary seat in 2005.
Marvin, an alumnus of the Operation Black Vote, has always been interested in politics. Throughout his life, he says that the central question he has had in mind has been: “How do we change the world?”
George Ferguson won the 2012 mayoral race. Marvin came second.
At its core, Let’s See What Happens, is about how Marvin has dealt with failure or what he describes in the prologue as the “long line of challenges” he has experienced in life.
His Christian faith has helped him deal with setbacks: “There’s a biblical proverb that has always meant a lot to me. Increasingly so over the last 12 years. It talks about our sufferings: ‘We don’t despise our sufferings because suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, character, hope’.”
Marvin ultimately became mayor in 2016 but, after a citywide referendum, the position was abolished and Bristol opted to move to a committee system of governance going forward. Marvin’s tenure ended in May.
In 2023, he lost his bid to become the Labour candidate for Bristol North East in the 2024 general election. Damien Egan, the former mayor of Lewisham, won the bid and has since been elected as an MP.
Although Marvin’s political career is now on pause, he has continued to organise and advocate on issues of migration, social justice, climate change and housing.
Life as mayor
Bristol mayor Marvin Rees with City Academy students – photo: Bristol City Council
Throughout our chat, Marvin mentions many of the high points of his mayoralty.
- More than 12,000 new homes built.
- “Warm banks” set up to help people stuck in freezing winter conditions.
- “Pre-empting the government food supply” and ensuring there was enough emergency food to hand out during Covid.
- The creation of welcome hubs for asylum seekers and refugees.
- His founding of the International Mayors Migration Council.
- Winning the bid to host Channel 4’s creative hub at Finzels Reach.
I ask him about the disconnect between what he’s describing and how the local press and some vocal social media accounts, appear to perceive him.
Members of the local press, for example, got very upset with him when he stopped inviting local democracy reporters to his weekly press briefings.
On X, formerly Twitter, some describe him as a career politician or self-promoter.
I also ask him about the apparent disconnect between how he is perceived nationally and internationally vs how he is perceived locally. One national paper, for example, has described him as “Bristol’s Obama.” Meanwhile, here in Bristol, one paper derisively calls him the “Reverend Rees”.
This is what we end up going back-and-forth about for the majority of our chat.
On keyboard warriors, he says: “I think there’s a whole paper to be done on Bristol’s trolling culture. It’s not many of them, and they generally talk to each other.
“When I look at my children… I talk to them about having three assets when they grow up: intellectual strength, physical fitness and good character.
“If I thought that my child was going to be 40-something years old, writing mean things to people from semi-anonymity online – and that’s what they spent a lot of their time doing – I’d be embarrassed.”
Relationship with the press
Marvin Rees is not afraid of asking journalists questions – photo: Martin Booth
On his perceived negative reputation among the local press, he said: “I didn’t cease being a Black man when I became mayor. And there’s frameworks put around that from what people see and experience.
“Am I uppity? Is that what it is? And then, if people think I’m uppity without saying that word, what are the descriptions they put around uppity? Aggressive. Bullying. Arrogant.”
As a Black woman, the racist connotations around these words are not lost on me.
I winced when, upon returning to the Bristol24/7 office and recounting parts of my conversation with Rees, a colleague did indeed describe Rees as “aggressive”.
I am the only Black member of staff at Bristol24/7 and appear to be the only Black editorial team member at any of Bristol’s major print publications. I’m not even from Bristol.
To me, some of the local reporting on Marvin’s tenure could very much be described as racist.
But is it right to say a Black person can never be “aggressive”?
During Marvin’s two terms as mayor, he was repeatedly accused of bullying – once by a former Labour councillor and several times by members of the local press.
Can there be smoke without fire?
Marvin tells me of many people in the city who would have positive things to say about him. Omari Cato, from Creative Power Town. Oona Goldsworthy, the chief executive of Brunelcare. Maria Kane, the joint chief executive of the North Bristol NHS Trust. Members of the business community. The chief constable of Avon & Somerset Police. The list goes on.
He encourages me to speak with them if I want to truly understand his character.
Part way through his list, Martin Bisp, the chief executive of Empire Fighting Chance, enters the room.
Marvin invites him into the conversation and Martin makes clear that the Marvin he sees “is a kind man who goes out of his way to help people… sometimes I see the public caricature of Marvin, partly based on race I think, and partly based on class, and it just doesn’t reconcile with the man I know at all.”
A “Bristol institution,” Empire Fighting Chance has been around since the 1970s – photo: Empire Fighting Chance
I press Rees on his strained relationship with the local press.
He makes an analogy to boxing: “If you’re gonna to ask me a question, it’s a contact sport, you’re stepping on the field of play. I’m gonna ask you a question too about your question sometimes, if it’s a silly question.”
I suggest the best politicians know how to manoeuvre around “silly questions” by answering them with clear agenda points. That way, the politician avoids their personality becoming the story.
He says that, for him, politics “isn’t a game” and that he wants “genuine political debate”.
“It’s so dry and lacking insight if you toss up the question and I’ll evade it. And that’s been one of the frustrations, the superficiality of debate and discussion within the city about quite complex issues.”
Just as his mum taught him to say, ‘I might be Black but my name’s not Sambo’, to childhood bullies, Marvin refuses to allow journalists to treat him like a “Sambo”.
He says: “If you come to me legitimately, I’ll be legitimate. That’s why young people talk to me and I can go around the city.
“But I’m not going to be a Sambo. I’ve come from my background. I’ve done what I’ve done. And I love the city and I want the best for people in the city. But I can’t indulge nonsense.”
He adds: “Black people have been on the wrong end of journalism in the city. I’m not just talking about a profession that has not employed Black people for 50/60 years, literally not giving us a voice… but the profession that writes the first draft of history, as they say.
“So, are we supposed to play as though there’s nothing to see there? Is that the game I’m supposed to play?”
He talks about the negative press he got when he flew to Canada to give a TED talk in 2022, about how mayors can tackle the climate crisis.
He says: “The Bristol City Council leader was asked to go and speak at TED. I spoke on the Wednesday morning. Bill Gates spoke on the Tuesday morning.
“Al Gore spoke the morning of my talk… So, the question is the negative press. What is the negative press actually about? What’s the substance of that negativity?”
He adds: “You as a professional journalist can choose to write within your emotions and say, you know what, I don’t care about the substance.
“I’m just going to say: this guy is arrogant and oppressive and all the rest of it, and bullying. Or you can say, actually, the substance of this story is about the number of homes being built.”
I try to bring the conversation back to his memoir but it’s clear the both of us are exhausted after our debate.
Rees described his memoir “a few stories put together in chronological order about my journey and my time as mayor” – photo: Martin Booth
I ask whether he’s trying to disrupt any narratives with this book.
He says: “I’m not trying to set a narrative. We told some stories. That’s all it is… it is a big thing, I don’t deny that, but, I mean… the world will keep spinning.”
As our interview comes to a close, and I walk out of Empire Fighting Chance, I look out across the city and am reminded of an anecdote Marvin shared with me when we first sat down.
Soon after he became mayor, he found himself in a taxi being driven by a former schoolmate.
During the summer holidays, they had often hung out in Easton and roller-skated in the area.
As a child, Marvin would look out over the hill and think: “I want to get over that hill. I want to get to the other side of it. Now, what’s on the other side of that? Bishopston. But that wasn’t it to me. To me, it was a horizon and I physically wanted to get over it.”
What’s on the other side of the hill now he’s the last mayor of Bristol? Let’s see what happens.
Main photo: Bristol City Council
Waterstones at The Galleries will host the book launch for Let’s See What Happens on Tuesday. For tickets and more information, visit www.waterstones.com/events/book-launch-with-marvin-rees-lets-see-what-happens/bristol-galleries
Read next:
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
