Which UK city is the most creative? Bristol?

“Carlsberg don’t do cities, but if they did…”

Walking to work, you notice graffiti on your neighbour's garage door, bloody hell; Banksy’s left a calling card. A 6ft mural of a policeman pissing all over it. Jammy git, her house just went up £35k.

On and over the Clifton Suspension bridge, sauntering through the trees of the Clifton Downs, the mellifluent sounds of Bristol trip hop and an Unfinished Sympathy accompany you…Okay, we’ll stop there, but hopefully you get the picture.

A shameless advocate for living in Bristol, it’s a struggle to encapsulate in just 500 words this enthusiasm. Adjectives like friendly, exciting, diverse…blah, blah, all spring to mind. Let’s be honest though, you’d probably use the same words to describe your own hometown. So what makes Bristol different or unique?

Let’s apply some agency thinking and try to distill it down to a core thought. The brief (if it ever existed), to brand Bristol would almost certainly contain the words ‘creative and unorthodox’.

Take a look at Isambard Kingdom Brunel. His designs revolutionised public transport and modern day engineering with the Clifton suspension bridge and the railway line that brings you from London to the southwest. If you’re left in any doubt about his creative credentials, check out that crazy hat– hilarious!

These days you’re more likely to associate Bristol with the creative brilliance of Nick Park whose Aardman Studios are famous for the claymation ‘Wallace and Gromit’. Although Angry Kid (angrykid.co.uk) still makes us laugh, how did the Academy overlook that one?

Aside from these two luminaries, the list of individuals and companies in Bristol Media’s South West Top 100 Creative Companies (swtop100.co.uk), in which 3Sixty was third most respected, (behind Aardman), demonstrates something about the character of Bristolians I’m terrifically proud of. After all, this was an award voted for by our peers and makes us deeply humbled considering the creative riches of the region, both in terms of pure talent and a staggering £425m of annual fees from the creative sectors. So how do we measure a city’s creativity?

Let us know if you have the definitive answer to that one. According to Wikipedia; ‘creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas’. Blimey, that’s high brow. We just think Bristol is a really social city that enjoys collaboration, qualities that inevitably lead to inspiration and change.

(Photography courtesy of eddiedangerous, Flickr)

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