Walk up Stokes Croft on any given morning and you’ll pass a dancing teddy bear mid-throw, a Molotov cocktail frozen in his paw, painted above what used to be a bank. That’s Banksy’s “Mild Mild West,” and it’s been there since 1997. People photograph it, sure. But locals mostly just walk past it the way you’d walk past a neighbor’s front door. It’s not a landmark to them. It’s just part of the street.
What makes Bristol’s art scene different is that you don’t have to walk into a gallery to see it. It lives on shop shutters, skip bins, lamp posts, and the sides of buses. Half of it will be painted over within the month. Some of it disappears almost as quickly as it appears. That’s part of the fun of walking around Bristol.
Stokes Croft: where it all started
If you’re exploring Bristol’s street art, Stokes Croft is a good place to start. It’s scruffy in places, no question, with peeling paint and boarded-up windows sitting next to bright new murals. The area isn’t polished, but that’s also what gives it its character. The neighborhood has spent years trying to protect its independent character. You can see that history in the artwork covering the walls. There’s a mural protesting the local Tesco. There are hand-painted signs, wheat pastes, and stencils layered over older stencils.
The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, or PRSC, runs a small gallery on the main street that’s worth ducking into. The team there can tell you which pieces went up last week and which ones are already gone. They sell prints and postcards too, a lot of them sourced from the artists working out of the Jamaica Street Studios next door. If you’d like to take something home, the gallery is a good place to look.
Bedminster and the Upfest effect
Head across the river to Bedminster and you’ll notice a different feel. This is where Upfest happens, Europe’s largest free street art festival, and the murals here tend to be bigger, bolder, and more technically ambitious. North Street has become one of the best places in the area to see large-scale murals. Six female Bristol-based artists painted consecutive shop fronts along one stretch, a project now known locally as the Six Sisters, and it’s become one of those spots people plan a whole afternoon around.
The Upfest Gallery sits right on North Street too, and it’s been supplying spray paint to Bristol’s street art scene longer than almost anywhere else in the city. Walk in and you’ll find over 500 colors of spray paint, plus framed original work if you’re after something to actually hang on a wall at home.
Nelson Street and the See No Evil legacy
Back in 2011, an event called See No Evil brought international artists in to repaint the whole of Nelson Street in the city center over the course of a week. Cherry pickers, scaffolding, and entire building facades transformed. Some of those original murals have since faded or disappeared, but the project had a lasting impact on the area. The relationship between the council and local street artists has also helped shape the area. Bristol hasn’t always taken the same approach to street art as other cities. That relationship between the council and the local street-art community has helped shape the city’s approach to public art.
Where the past and the present meet
For a longer view, M Shed on the harbor side is worth an hour of your time. It’s housed in a 1950s transit shed and does a good job of linking Bristol’s industrial history, shipbuilding, tobacco, and the slave trade it’s still reckoning with to the creative energy that followed. Seeing that history puts some of the city’s street art into a different context. For many people, the artwork is more than decoration. It reflects the way people in Bristol have used public spaces to express their views.
Why this matters if you’re buying art
Bristol’s street art culture doesn’t stay on the street. A lot of the artists who cut their teeth on a Stokes Croft wall now sell canvases, prints, and commissioned pieces through galleries across the city and beyond. Buying from a Bristol-based artist also gives you a connection to the local art scene. Many of these artists have strong links to the local community, and the scene continues to change as new artists and new work appear.
It’s also worth saying that not all Bristol art lives on a wall in Stokes Croft. Down in Totterdown, painter Peter Lyons works in a completely different register, autobiographical pieces built out of ten years in a therapeutic community and his own recovery from alcoholism. His work is also a good example of how varied Bristol’s art scene really is. The murals may get most of the attention from visitors, but there are plenty of artists working in quieter and more personal styles too, and it comes out of the same city that raised Banksy: one where people make art because they need to say something, not because someone asked them to.
That’s perhaps what makes Bristol’s art scene so interesting. That’s perhaps what makes Bristol’s art scene so interesting. You’ll find work on walls, in galleries, and in studios, often reflecting very different sides of the city.
