“Roll Up, Roll Up. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the unique and splendiferous; to the fantastic and extraordinary...the Cabot Circus Launch event! This will be a day of amazing performances, incredible music and a theatrical extravaganza” says the welcome message on the Cabot Circus home page. The Visit Bristol website reads “Having taken over three years to build and costing in excess of £500 million, Cabot Circus will provide city centre visitors with over 120 new shops, including 15 major flagship stores.”

What neither of these sites remember to mention is that around 40 of these so called “new” stores already exist in Bristol, many will simply be moving up the road leaving empty shells in Broadmead and yet more in the Galleries, as yet some of the spaces that will be created still have not been filled.

Another issue conveniently neglected is that on the day of the grand opening one third of the new units in Cabot Circus will stand empty as branches will not have moved in and contracts still have not been signed. The city is simply over saturated; we already have at least one of each high street chain.
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At the Bristol end of the Bristol and Bath cycle path is a banner encouraging people to come by bike to the Bristol Anarchist Bookfair, which took place last Saturday (September 13th) at St.Werburghs community centre. Somebody else has decided to scrawl over the banner with “Nothing says anarchy quite like a bookfair”. My sentiments exactly, what ever happened to rioting in the streets and smashing the state? Are today’s crop of so-called anarchists so apathetic and self absorbed that they think organising themselves a bookfair will bring about the downfall of the government? Since when did the words “organise” and “anarchist” appear in the same sentence anyway?

I spent the day with Bristols [alleged] fly-posting, banner-dropping, lentil-munching, pseudonym-ing, anarchist bookfair collective.
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