A tender exploration of life on the margins of Bristol

On the after­noon of June 7, 2020, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Chris Hoare had just returned to his home in Bris­tol after tak­ing part in the city’s Black Lives Mat­ter protests, when his noti­fi­ca­tions start­ed blow­ing up. Ear­li­er, he had par­tic­i­pat­ed in a pow­er­ful, nine-minute-long kneel in sol­i­dar­i­ty with George Floyd – who had been killed days ear­li­er after a Min­neapo­lis police offi­cer knelt on his back for that dura­tion of time – but when he opened his phone, he saw that the action had escalated.

“[For­mer slave trad­er and Bris­tol MP] Edward Colston’s stat­ue had been torn down,” he recalls. ​“A lot of pho­tog­ra­phers do a great job of [doc­u­ment­ing] protests and I wasn’t real­ly inter­est­ed in that, so I went back the day after to see the after effects.”

At the time he was around a year into his project and new pho­to­book Sev­en Hills, but that moment – one of reck­on­ing with­in his home city, which was a key cen­tre in the transat­lantic slave trade – would help him focus his lens. A pic­ture he took that day of the statue’s plinth tipped on its side, is pub­lished as part of the series. ​“One theme was the his­to­ry with­in the city, and try­ing to cre­ate a dark, brood­ing feel­ing that hints at Bristol’s past,” he says. ​“The work isn’t about Col­ston, but it start­ed the feel­ing that I had to respond in some way, and as some­one from the city to make work about the city.” 

Yet it also formed a moment of fric­tion between its inhab­i­tants, which opened up deep­er fis­sures with­in its com­mu­ni­ties. ​“But when that hap­pened, you could see more divides in the city as well,” he con­tin­ues. ​“There’s a lot of divides in the city in terms of expe­ri­ence, wealth, class, opin­ion – when Col­ston was pulled down there were a lot of peo­ple say­ing that he shouldn’t have been pulled down and I don’t agree with that, but what I find inter­est­ing is that there are very mid­dle class peo­ple who come to Bris­tol, live this lifestyle and then they protest how their expe­ri­ences jars with some­one that’s work­ing class and from the fringes – so it’s very complicated.”

Hoare grew up near South­mead – an estate on the north­ern edge of the city’s sprawl­ing bound­aries. Almost exclu­sive­ly work­ing class, diverse, and phys­i­cal­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the rest of Bris­tol, his expe­ri­ence of his home city is very dif­fer­ent to, say, a uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent liv­ing in Stokes Croft, or a young pro­fes­sion­al from Lon­don mov­ing to the city in search of cheap­er rent. ​“Bris­tol is a small place, it’s noth­ing in com­par­i­son to Lon­don or even Birm­ing­ham real­ly, but the cen­tral area is real­ly tiny,” he explains. ​“The hills shape the city and the expe­ri­ence of the inhab­i­tants. The cen­tre itself is sur­round­ed most­ly by hills geo­graph­i­cal­ly and coun­cil estates – you can almost do a cir­cle of sorts of estates that sur­round the fringes of the city and then the hills that look into Bristol.”

Sev­en Hills focus­es the lens on these oft-over­looked extrem­i­ties. Using por­traits of the youth of the estates that Hoare grew up in as a mir­ror to his own expe­ri­ences, the book show­cas­es a dif­fer­ent side to the city to what is usu­al­ly cap­tured in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. The city’s peo­ple, off-beat land­marks, and spots of green­ery make appear­ances across the book’s pages, pre­sent­ed with a nos­tal­gic warmth and an air of magic.

Yet a ten­sion lies in the back­grounds – and often fore­grounds – of the pic­tures. With notice­able pock­ets of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion and ris­ing prices in the city, sub­di­vi­sions are part of the fab­ric of the city. Hoare points to the city often find­ing its way into ​“best cities to live in the UK” arti­cles, to its often warped real­i­ty. ​“But for who is it the best place?” he asks. ​“There’s two worlds that are hap­pen­ing, and that’s some­thing I’m very inter­est­ed in because I grew up see­ing a lot of things that were very dif­fer­ent to people’s pre­con­cep­tions of Bristol.”

Sev­en Hills by Chris Hoare is pub­lished by RRB Pho­to­books.

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