Gloucester Road
Paddy Uglow
This film was a bit of an experiment. We wanted to be able to run BristolStories courses using Windows software as well as on Apple Macs, so the best approach seemed to be to make a proper story and see how it turned out.
The obvious thing that sprung to mind was to make a story about my favourite part of Bristol, which is currently being threatened by supermarket chains.
Transcript
Gloucester road is my favourite part of Bristol. It is part of the A38 road which runs from Bodmin in Cornwall, past my home town of Launceston on the Cornish border and on to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire - 292 miles!
It is important to me because it’s the best place for shopping in Bristol, probably the best in the whole world!
Bristol has Cribbs Causeway and Broadmead, but Gloucester Road is different. Unlike those sterile coroporate malls of giant chain stores, Gloucester Road is a real street with real shops, most of them independently owned.
You can get everything here; food, hardware, clothes, medicine... Alfie the cat lives in this shop, and if you look carefully, you might see Winston here.
The cushion people live opposite our flat.
The bakery’s dough football team, celebrating the 2006 world cup, is just one of their many quirky creations.
Every day is busy, especially Saturdays, where favourite shops have long queues outside.
But, circling above this happy place like hungry vultures, are supermarket developers. They want these queues in air-conditioned supermarket aisles with the clash of wire baskets and the bleeps of credit card readers instead of the street sounds of people, buses and bicycles. They want identical sizes, cling film, ID badges and corporate rules.
They’d like to see these wonderful small shops close and the people trudge, zombie-like into their identikit superstores while large trucks choke the streets and computers determine stock levels on a national scale.
The quality of our shops says a lot about who we are. If you believe you’re an individual, then start shopping like one.
Start fighting.
