There is a short scene in the short film Hartcliffe Aspirations where a group of young lads are asked what they want to do for a living. One replies he wants to be a scaffolder. Nothing wrong with that; it’s a decent and honourable occupation. I liked the very fact that, despite the odds, they actually want to work at all.
The writer and director Paul Holbrook, along with local journalist and broadcaster Neil Maggs, shot their movie in Hartcliffe, a sprawling working class area in south Bristol, in the shadow of the Dundry hills which separate it from the affluent rural communities on the other side. The area has, in the eyes of some, a bad name. It has been associated with a variety of social issues from unemployment, drugs, alcohol abuse, poverty, crime; essentially nothing positive. And because of these long held associations with the dark side, the assumption is that everyone in Hartcliffe suffers from one or all of these conditions.
I know Hartcliffe and (some of) its people well and the widely held perceptions do not resonate with me. I spend some years working in and around the area back in the late 1990s and whilst there were issues, I saw the side that rarely if ever gets reported. An honest, hardworking, caring, loyal and tough community, which in the main worked hard and played to the rules. If there were people who could not be bothered to get up to look for work, there were many more, the overwhelming majority, who did.
I certainly came across the type of young lads who featured in Hartcliffe Aspirations. Yes, there was occasional hostility, quite possibly because they felt, with some justification it must be said, that I represented part of the establishment that kept them in their place, so to speak.
The expression ‘the university of life’ has been commandeered by the chattering middle classes these days, but the people I knew had graduated with honours from that particular university, a university in which they were largely self-educated, as well as through the actions of their elders.
Back in the day, I played for a football team which included a good few Hartcliffe lads. I don’t recall their being any different from the rest of us. In fact, I don’t remember even thinking they somehow might be different. There were a few ‘wrong ‘uns’ in BS13, but then there were ‘wrong uns’ everywhere else, too. Even if leafy Clifton, there was a rapist no one could find and in Brislington (Briz) where I lived, there was an IRA supporter who toured the pubs collecting from the Provos. Whilst it is true that some problems have worsened over the years, particularly with reference to drugs, Hartcliffe is still the same in all the ways that matter.
Hartcliffe Aspirations does not hide from the real problems of the area. In fact, in a few short minutes, it confronts them head on. The title of the film could be the title of a film about any one of hundreds of working class estates around the UK.
I don’t know the statistics, but I suspect that not that many people from the area make it to Oxbridge or any university at all. As Bristol’s demographic shifts dramatically in favour of the imported affluent hipster generation, all fancy Dan lattes, vagen cafes and ‘craft’ beers, parts of the city have changed, moved up in the world. Others have stood still. Places like Hartcliffe look worse because they have nothing like the money spent on them than the more up-and-coming desirable areas. But Hartcliffe is still standing.
No one is born to be a bad boy and no one chooses to be born on the wrong side of the tracks. If by the accident of your birth you arrive in affluent Chew Magna, across the Dundry hills, your life chances are likely to be very different. None of the lads who hang around street corners were born in order to live a life involving little more than living of the scraps by the better off. They were not born to smoke fags, drink cheap cider, smoke spliffs or chase the dragon. It’s the world you come into that matters. And where you were born is often the place you stay forever.
Society, through its allegedly democratic choices, determines that a pernicious form of class war should continue to foment, that in order for some people to enjoy wealth, others must have nothing. The story we are told means that opportunity can only follow money, that a meritocracy can only take place among the better off. The only ones who should be helped to stand on their own two feet are those who can already stand. You see, we choose, subconsciously or not, to maintain an apartheid system of wealth and poverty. The deserving rich and the deserving poor. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The system, such as it is, has been designed with only one group of people in mind: the haves. Government policy is never about rebuilding the country in the areas it most needs rebuilding. Why should the boys (and girls) of Hartcliffe not aspire to be top surgeons, lawyers, scientists, sports stars, teachers, actors and the entrepreneurs of tomorrow? It is not because none of them want to; it’s because nobody asked.
Hartcliffe Aspirations is, in my view, one of the most important films to come out of Bristol in a very long time. Messrs Holbrook and Maggs have told a story that needs telling and has needed telling for decades.
Bristol has much to proud of in terms its past and present. But the oppression of aspiration is something we should all be ashamed of, just as our forefathers should be ashamed of the slavery upon which the wealth of Bristol was largely founded.
Paul Holbrook and Neil Maggs let the people speak and set out the tone of the film. That’s a major reason why it works. Another is that the portrayal of Hartcliffe is brutally real. And I hope they have opened a debate on the future of places like Hartcliffe which must not be allowed to fizzle out and die. People’s lives, certainly the quality thereof, are at stake.
Everyone should be allowed to become the best version of themselves they can be. That’s not happening in Hartcliffe but once the voices of the people start being heard, everything changes. Hartcliffe Aspirations won’t change the world, nor was it meant to. But maybe, just maybe, it will signal a brighter day for the people of BS13, a chance to dream, to shoot for the stars.
