You’ll Never Leave

Portishead is like nowhere I’ve ever lived before. A place in which having no identity has become its identity. If you’re visiting for the day it comes across as a quaint, pleasant seaside town. But once the sun goes down and you’re forced to stay here for any length of time, you see a very different face. The roads where there are no pavements for pedestrians, the creepy nuclear family-esque houses that watch you as you walk past them, the absolute lack of anyone under the age of 40 and the buses that seem to take decades to arrive.

I was born and grew up in Bedminster in Bristol. It is a complete contrast to Portishead. There was almost too much going on outside your front door. It was classically a heavily working-class area but over the time I lived there, it also became a place where Middle-Class artists would choose to settle down. These two distinct types of people living next door to each other almost created a game of Russian roulette. Who will you meet on the way to Asda?...

When walking down to the shopping area, East Street,  you would typically bump into the regular wack pack of people that the locals named 20p Tony, Cowboy Ken, the Chicken Man and Army Ozzy Osborne to name a few. I have always been particularly observant of the scenes you see in the street and this skill was forged in Bedminster. It was a gift to any photographer.

In 2017 the rent prices eventually became too expensive for my family to live there. A landlord from a previous house, who had a particular fondness towards our dog, offered us a place in Portishead. I was living in London at the time completing my second year of university. When I came back to live at home for the summer I found myself in a new house. In a new town. I was instantly perturbed by the fact of having to pay £5 to get a one-way bus ticket to Portishead from Bristol. Perhaps I got used to living in the hustle and bustle of London. But when I eventually moved to Portishead permanently after graduating, living here felt almost like a death sentence. The area just isn’t designed for young people and/or anyone that doesn’t have access to a car. Your options for what to do with your free time are limited to the bus timetable. Furthermore, as Bristolians say ‘there is only one road in and one road out!’

The coronavirus lockdown in March 2020 showed me how quiet a place can be. Traffic dropping down to the levels of the 1950s and everyone being forced to stay inside made me feel like I was in my own version of the Truman Show. I discovered whole areas of Portishead that didn’t look real. Maybe there was some invisible force keeping me here? Maybe the houses that felt like they were watching me actually were? Maybe there was no one under the age of 40 because they had been taken by this invisible force?

If you find this message please tell them the following… 

No one chooses to live in Portishead, they just find themselves here. They wake up one morning, open their curtains to be greeted with a view of a field and then they know. They will never leave.

Photo-book available to purchase here: https://bit.ly/3pzu59t