The global magazine Time Out revealed Stokes Croft and St Paul’s as one of the “coolest neighbourhoods” in the world.
The ever-changing and vibrant area has a long history as the centre of African-Caribbean culture in Bristol and as a cradle of social resistance.
It’s also home to the bi-annual St Paul’s carnival, a day filled with dancing, good food, and a celebration of the city’s Caribbean heritage.
Stokes Croft is considered Bristol’s epicentre of counterculture and alternative nightlife and is jampacked with independent bars, clubs, shops and restaurants.
We visited the vibrant cultural quarter to see if locals agreed.
The ever-changing and vibrant area has a long history as the centre of African-Caribbean culture in Bristol and as a cradle of social resistance.
It’s also home to the bi-annual St Paul’s carnival, a day filled with dancing, good food, and a celebration of the city’s Caribbean heritage.
Stokes Croft is considered Bristol’s epicentre of counterculture and alternative nightlife and is jampacked with independent bars, clubs, shops and restaurants.
We visited the vibrant cultural quarter to see if locals agreed.
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TravelTranscript
00:00Stokes Craft and St Paul's have been voted as one of the coolest neighbourhoods in the world by Time Out magazine.
00:06Let's ask locals if they agree with the veredict.
00:09Stokes Craft is a bit of a funny area, as you know it's got gentrified a lot in recent years.
00:14So it's a bit of a mix, so you've got the students here, you've got the hipsters, it's all quite trying to get funky and trendy
00:22but you still want that sort of grimy underbelly, yeah?
00:24You walk through half past six in the morning and all you see is random crackheads.
00:28I love this area, I've been here for ten years, it's interesting seeing how it's kind of changed or there's attempts to make it change.
00:36It's definitely got more expensive since I first moved here.
00:41But yeah, it's cool, I live two minutes walk away from Gloucester Road, at the Zetland Road Junction, and it's amazing.
00:47I've just got restaurants, bars, everything I want on my doorstep, which makes me lazy in terms of why would I ever leave this area?
00:55I've got everything I need here.
00:56I love it, it's like a really welcoming place. I've lived in Bristol my whole life and I always really liked it down here.
01:03It does kind of make me quite sad though, because I feel like a lot of people look down on St Paul's and Stoke's Cross because of the homelessness
01:10but that doesn't make it any worse, it's just a welcoming place for them to go.
01:14What are your favourite things about the area?
01:17The street art, definitely. The graffiti and the... I don't know, it's quite a unique atmosphere, it's very wild, expressive, creative.
01:31I feel like it kind of brings high street shopping back, because a lot of that has died out with the internet and that,
01:36but there's so many cool shops up here and you've got a grocer's just down there, it's really nice to have real shops and not the internet.
01:44What issues are there with the area?
01:47It's overpriced, crime, rubbish, noise pollution.
01:57The moment I work in the old Sparks building in town and I probably walk through about three or four areas that have a lot of homelessness and drug addiction,
02:07you can regularly walk down the street and there's just someone passed out on the floor.