Bristol: The new Birmingham and Aberystwyth.

Unless you’ve read this blog avidly for years, it’s unlikely that title makes much sense. So, to recap. Once upon a time I spent a night out in Birmingham and fell in love with the city again after being jaded for quite some time. It was everything it has a reputation for not being. I wrote about it.

I also had occasion to revisit an old haunt of mine, Aberystwyth, and found it less than it was. Miserable, with hen parties in full flow. At lunch time. I wrote about that too.

Recently one of my best friends got married and I assisted in organising the stag do. We decided to spend two nights in Bristol because, well, none of us had ever gone to Bristol before and it was between where we live in Telford and he lives in Wales. Bristol, it turns out, is fabulous. Before this, Bristol to me was basically a huge car park that we would pass on the M5 on the way to the south coast, but it is vibrant, bustling and alive in that way the best cities are. We spent a lot of time on a stretch of bars and restaurants on a kind of artificially created harbour, where we frequented a cider bar on a boat, a pub full of retro arcade cabinets (unfortunately the quid a go they cost isn’t quite so retro), a jazz bar, a rock pub and several others.

Head to the middle of the city, however, and you enter the ‘old town’, where 700 year-old stone arches are surrounded by newer buildings and quiet bars with supposedly haunted toilets. There are many, many places to eat and drink, most of them fabulous. That overwhelmingly positive feeling I got on that night out in Birmingham suffused the whole experience.

I was, however, also put in mind of that time in Aberystwyth, and this is because there were loads of stag parties and hen dos. They were everywhere. But hey, we were one of them, so how hard can you judge them really? During the second night out this reminder of that disappointing visit to Aberystwyth turned hugely positive as well, as we managed to team up with a hen party and saw the night out until almost 4am drinking, talking, laughing, dancing and generally having the best damn time I’ve had in, frankly, years. I’ve written before about how much I love cities, and Bristol is now right up there with London and Birmingham. If money was no object (yeah right, keep dreaming) I would take some close friends and spend as many weekends in as many different cities all over the world as I possibly could.

Bristol: I would recommend it.

The city is alive.

I recently had the good fortune to spend a night in London. Living in the Midlands, London is distant enough to me to feel like it may as well be another country. I know it’s down there, and I know as far as most of the world is concerned, it’s the only part of this country that counts. Sometimes I feel like I’m the equivalent of an inbred farmer in the sticks, considering himself almost a different species to these fancy city folk. The sensible part of me knows that cities are full of people not that different to me; the difference being that there are more of them; something you’d think would put me off, but for some reason doesn’t.

We got there by train – first to London Euston, then Underground, then another short train journey into Croydon. The thing that strikes me about London, is the sheer numbers of people, all different and no doubt complex, yet all specks besides the city as a whole, like stars in a galaxy. We got to our platform in the Underground, only to find our train was jam-packed. As I was preparing to force myself into this mass of bodies, my travelling companion, with the benefit of more experience in this, placed a hand on my shoulder and motioned me to wait and let the train go. I then learned that there was another train coming along in a mere 90 seconds. And another 2 minutes after that. On and on, day and night. The number of people constantly moving in, out, through and under the city is mind boggling. The roads are almost never free of buses – usually there are 2 or 3. To use a car to get around London seems ludicrously inefficient.

Endless movement, endless offices, endless new buildings going up, endless restaurants, apartments, banks and hotels, endless people. It adds up to something that while made up of these separate parts, feels somehow beautifully alive in its own right, and I love that about it.

It makes me want to tour cities everywhere, to see how each melting pot of humanity feels, to see if they are different. It’s why I’m drawn to fiction where a city becomes a character in its own right, like Ankh-Morpork in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, or New Crobuzon in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.

Cities are alive, and, while certainly bad for the environment, the wealth of positive inspiration I get from them manages to quiet the concerned ecologist in me.