‘The Bearpit story is my story, it’s what I lived’

The Bearpit is a public space that inherited the infrastructure from the late 1960s. It is a location where you will find all walks of life, including the street and homeless community. It is a cultural display of art, from performance, live music and graffiti. It is used as a skate park.

The Bearpit is a place where community events occur. A commuter corridor. A place where food and beverage were a way to bring people together. But without a doubt a place that suffers from crime and antisocial behaviour.

The community of the St James Barton Roundabout is not easy to define. When we talk about community, we believe any person that interacts with the space should be allowed to be defined as a member of the community. This includes the population of the city and beyond.

The Bearpit is a place that is very close to my heart. I spent seven years of my life down there. I made my home in Bristol in it through building business and community there.

I am sure many of you have heard or read of many different tales when it comes to this iconic space. The challenge I will always have is that the Bearpit story is my story. It’s what I lived.

Miriam Delogu in the Bearpit

What I want to share with you is a recollection of experiences, aspirations, failures and learnings that lead to create the vision for The Circle – a new vision for the St James Barton Roundabout and Bristol.

In 2011, the Bearpit was voted the single worst area in all of Bristol. Years of fear, crime and neglect gave rise to this title and very few believed it could ever change. It was a site that was an eyesore. It felt unsafe with it’s dark and dirty tunnels, lack of light in the evening and sharp corners. It also felt forgotten and unkempt.

Being new to Bristol, when I first entered the Bearpit – being half-Italian – all I saw was a fantastic piazza. To me, it was a hidden oasis and all I ever saw was its potential. It felt like it should have been a space where people would come together and enjoy it.

In 2012, I accepted a job making coffee at the back of a van. Within four, months that business pulled out. It was a hostile place. Commuters rushed through, heads down, headphones in. Most people didn’t even notice us. But as I had been standing there 10 hours a day, having the occasional conversation it hit me how important our presence had become to many.

I knew the only way to make real change, was that I had to be there full time to meet the needs this neglected space was suffering from and to fundamentally understand what on earth was going on.

I joined the Bearpit Improvement Group, a community group made up of a diverse group of individuals who wanted to improve the space. Through Section 106 funding we purchased the shipping containers to give us a permanent base. We worked on five themes: trade, play, heritage, art and greening.

In 2013 I opened Bearpit Social, a cafe with one purpose. To bring people together using coffee and food. We would have CEOs, nurses, students, members of the street community, lawyers, couples, children; all on this platform at the same time.

We would play music, the likes of the Jackson 5, and people would do little shimmies and we’d laugh and build what I call two-minute relationships. People would talk to each other, exchange stories. It was magic. It was social integration at its best.

The containers meant permanence, a sign of new beginnings. That perception that this could be the oasis we hoped for could be possible.

When council regeneration works began, six weeks of no trading ended up being four months. But it was the fresh new beginning we had been waiting for since 2012.

Still, without a formal agreement from Bristol City Council to trade, we gambled on our hope that the space would improve and invested more money. We were finally connected to the water and waste mains.

The bus was craned in and we were desperate for some colour, some greening and some seating. With a grant from Kew Gardens through their Grow Wild initiative we built five Tetris-shaped planters that doubled up as seating and information panels.

For the first time, the Bearpit had children playing in it all afternoon. The oasis in the middle of the city we had been dreaming of began to take shape.

Some of the Grow Wild team and volunteers in the Bearpit – photo courtesy of Grow Wild

The Bearpit has this exceptional way of being a rollercoaster ride that never ends. When it’s good. It’s thrilling and exciting and when it was bad, it was really bad.

This is an excerpt from a blogpost I wrote in November 2015:

The everyday sexims, racism, homophobia, emotional abuse, physical abuse, men being followed into the toilets by several women to exchange drugs for sexual favours – the things we witness on a daily basis is baffling when we are in the city centre, when there is a police station five minutes from where we are situated. I am told conversations are happening, things are in progress but this is our reality every day. I fear its been left for so long the cult-like mentality is as strong as I remember it in 2012 when we first step foot in the space. The numbers are growing, the gravity of their actions are escalating.

At the start of November 2015 I was assaulted for the first time in the Bearpit. And it was the the start of the hardest months we had to endure. We could feel the escalation in the air building every day. That stillness I mentioned earlier began to feel more and more eery.

The Bearpit Improvement Group wanted to give empathy but continued to sit in the comfort of a monthly meeting, making decisions on a place they did not understand.

But we did get an incredible step forward from it. The beginning of the Bearpit Stakeholder Group. We were finally being heard. The group was made up of representatives from Bristol City Council, the police, local businesses and local services.

For the first in the Bearpit’s history, everyone involved with this roundabout sat around a table to discuss the problems it faced and worked together to find solutions.

Truth be told, we have always been scared. Anti-social behaviour and crime has always been present. The difference last year was that the attacks on us were personal and almost felt orchestrated. But we kept going because we knew what we were fighting for: for a better Bearpit, a place where grassroots community action could make the difference by using food to bring people together.

In July 2016, the three businesses, Bearritos, Bear Fruit and Bearpit Social had a difficult choice to make. Was it time to go? Or were we going to stay? How would we continue to survive? At the end of the summer we decided to merge our businesses to create Bearpit Bristol.

We went to the council and with our business plan they granted us a seven-year licence to make our vision of transforming the Bearpit into a safe and welcoming destination become reality.

We began to thrive despite all the hardship. We held the first ever Bearpit Banquet in September and fed more than 300 people. We worked with the skaters to get a skate block in. This meant a permanent feature for a new user group to enjoy the space. We built a garden with Sara Venn and Incredible Edible Bristol.

We knew the toilet closure was coming. Was it a chance to expand? Could we convert one of the old blocks into a bar or restaurant and have its profit support a newly converted modern and functional public toilet in the other block?

Towards the end of 2016, with the support of the Bearpit Stakeholder Group things began to turn around. The space began to have new lease of life.

In January 2017, for the first time in decades, the Bearpit was no longer a hotspot for crime. It didn’t even make the top-20 list. This was a huge success and the work of the Bearpit Stakeholder Group paid off.

And what we have tested and proved over and over again, is that this space thrives when we are able to create a platform for people from all walks of life to come together. That with critical mass, we have never had any problems.

When there is a balance of all the user groups of the space, when there is opportunity for cohesion and bringing people together through food, trade, culture – the Bearpit is the best place in the whole city. Through collaboration and partnerships we can make a difference.

The banquets, the market days, the celebration of spring after the long winters, the garden work parties and the community action clean-up days were all temporary snippets of time where we could see change was possible. And they helped us get through the worst of times.

Little did we know were about to go through the worst six months of our lives.

The Bearpit at its best

Spice started being distributed in Bristol and in the Bearpit we felt it hard. We spent our days running our businesses to calling ambulances and putting people in recovery positions, stopping them from being mugged while we would wait for assistance.

The relationship with the other organisations who had their own agenda broke down. Council mediation brought to light the stark difference in our vision.

We were about collaborating, creating long-lasting change and making Bristol fall in love with the Bearpit. Unused structures began being erected, tagging began to over take every single wall. Drug dealing and violence soon followed. A death even happened in the space.

This wasn’t the Bearpit we knew. This Bearpit began to be really scary. A mentally unstable man began obsessed with us. He would cycle through the space at the end of day and pretend to shoot us and remind us we will soon no longer be here. On a cold November morning as I was setting up, he threw his bike towards me and told me he was going to kill me.

Three things began to be evident on this roller coaster ride. If we were to ever create real change, the physical design was dysfunctional, the environment needed to change and so did the political apathy towards the space.

With our licence only allowing us to work and develop 25 per cent of the site, we would never be able to truly change the space. We knew we had to think big. We had done the incremental change. It was time for radical change.

By this third attack on me physically at work, as managing director of Bearpit Bristol CIC, I knew I would never be able to forgive myself if any of my staff were ever harmed. The death and violent threats to me and the other directors were becoming too frequent, too personal.

We were scared. We were angry. We made the decision to stop trading by the end of February. Enough was enough.

On the last Saturday of the month, we held what was going to be our last community action day. We weren’t going to leave the site in the hostile environment we had been in. With more than 100 volunteers, we picked up every bit of litter, painted out every wall, fixed all the flower beds and celebrated the power of community. It wasn’t over, but we needed a rest.

We wanted to do what we do best, bring people together to share with us the love we have for this unique space. We recorded the day and made a four-minute video to remind us what it was we were working towards despite the uncertainty of the future.

We started talking to people and organisations across the city. We dissected the site to understand the problems we were facing with the physical design, and started to think how we could create change.

The Circle’s plans are to transform the Bearpit into a food innovation hub, showcasing solutions to growing sustainable produce and supporting community-led initiatives that will improve health and well being

The promise of a better Bearpit is so close, I can see it so clearly. The Circle is much more than just an idea. This vision is the culmination of working in that space for more than seven years. Learning, exploring, thinking, challenging what goes on.

The extraordinary work of APG Architecture and McGregor Coxall have brought this vision to life. They have been working with us for over a year. Their passion for the project and their belief in us and this vision has allowed to be able to tell this story. To tickle people’s imagination with a new way of looking at the space.

The Circle aims to be a destination that brings the city together. Through circular economy, we are creating a sustainable food hub showcasing urban farms that provide education and employment opportunities with retail and independent local food businesses, an incubation centre showcasing and developing technologies to improve efficiency and production of food and energy, a community hub and coworking space where like-minded people in Bristol and beyond work together, a wellbeing centre that is truly inclusive, a community garden like no other and bringing back public toilets.

By early 2018, 476 incidents had been reported. Despite the heartache and despair from the events at the start of the year. We knew there was only one place we could be to share our vision, to share our desire for a better Bearpit. And so despite best judgement, we knew we had to return to the Bearpit.

In June, we based our return on a 90-day plan to showcase some of the ideas and test some of our thinking. We developed a new more open approach. Working with Golden Key on the principles of Psychologically Informed Environments helped us to appreciate the importance of design and interactions in dealing with people with complex needs.

We asked the street community what changes they would like to see in the space. We updated the model to include a wellbeing centre and consulted with experts across the city to explore what this would look like.

We worked with UWE Bristol on a more detailed partnership agreement, considering how The Circle could support research and innovation in food and sustainability. We installed a hydroponics unit to start the conversation about urban growing.

We achieved some amazing results and through countless of face to face conversations and more than 300 online consultations we began to adapt and tweak our vision to suit what people wanted without compromising what the project stood for.

But by November, the harsher weather, the increase in crack use in the space, and a few not-so-subtle threats, we knew it was best to leave.

Miriam says that her vision for the future of the Bearpit is “about showcasing kindness and putting wellbeing at the heart of it”

And so we began to work behind the scenes. We began to teach. To give talks. To give presentations. To collaborate. To build partnerships. To trial ideas. To adapt ideas. Always curious, always questioning ourselves, always thinking are we the right people to do this?

This vision was no longer just our vision. And as this vision grows, so will the collaborations and partnerships.

We aren’t developers. Nor are we corporate monsters. This conversation in the media that is aimed at dividing people is unjust. This story isn’t about community vs corporate or council vs creative culture.

Fundamentally, our vision is about people. Finding ways to create a fairer society, one that is thriving not just getting by. It’s about showcasing kindness and putting wellbeing at the heart of it. And if we can achieve all of these things, plus have sustainability at the forefront, what else can this extraordinary city do?

We know one thing: when we collaborate and bring people together, the space thrives. With one common purpose, we know change is possible.

There have been numerous people and organisations that have been part of our journey that have helped us get to this point and have become part of The Circle. It’s their time and dedication over the years and present that remind us why we do what we do.

This is an edited version of a talk given by Miriam Delogu, project leader for The Circle, as part of an event organised by The Architecture Centre that took place at the Arnolfini on April 25, 2019.

Read more: An alternative view of the Bearpit