Features / Breakfast with Bristol24/7
Breakfast With Bristol24/7: Helen Godwin
Helen Godwin was still only a couple of weeks into her new job as metro mayor when we met for breakfast in Bedminster. The day before, she had held her first all-staff meeting with the team at the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority and she admitted it was still “definitely surreal” to see her name and job on her official lanyard.
We chatted over eggs Florentine for her and eggs Benedict for me at the Hippie Flower Cafe on East Street, just a short walk from WECA HQ in Redcliffe.
The choice of breakfast venue for these features is often meaningful. So is our new mayor a hippie? “I’m a bit of hippie but not particularly,” Godwin laughed. The real reason why she has chosen this cafe is that during the election campaign, a women’s canvassing group had met here “and I just really liked it”.
Godwin’s grandmother came to do her shopping on East Street and her own Bristol roots were something she made a big play of during her successful election campaign. Her first home was in Armada House on Dove Street in Kingsdown. Leaving Bristol after university to work in recruitment in London, she lived in Tooting where she got to know her local MP, the future mayor Sadiq Khan. But she later returned to Bristol with her young family and now lives in the north of the city, making regular trips to watch Bristol Rovers at the Memorial Stadium.
Godwin now has the top elected job in the region that covers not just Bristol but also Bath and South Glos, with North Somerset making overtures to join; not least to get their hands on some central government cash, the latest of which was £752m to improve transport in the region.
Outside the Hippie Flower Cafe on this Thursday morning, the bifold windows had been opened onto the pavement, beyond which the occasional bus trundled by. A few weeks after we met, Godwin posed for photographs at First Bus’ new electrified bus depot in Hengrove, with these green-coloured buses now all carrying the WECA logo.
“We’re now moving things forward in a way that hasn’t been moved forward before,” Godwin said, sipping her decaf latte. “The people there are smart and good and they’ve had a really tough time for obvious reasons. Why WECA has not achieved so far I think is a lack of political leadership.”
Godwin compared the West of England to Manchester, which received £2.5bn from chancellor Rachel Reeves for their own transport improvements. “I think our officers are just as smart as the officers in GM (Greater Manchester) or anywhere else. I think our geography goes against us in the sense that there’s a natural affiliation between some of the northern mayors that enables them to come together more easily. They’ve got a very similar script… We’ve got a different story and I think the lack of political leadership and the lack of drive to tell that story has just meant that no one’s needed to pay us any attention.”
Before Godwin arrived at the cafe, I was perusing the WECA website and it was like the past had never happened. There were no news articles about former mayors Tim Bowles or Dan Norris. Nothing to do with her, Godwin told me, saying once again that the combined authority needs strong leadership. Unlike the new pope who had been internally promoted the week before we met, Godwin was a WECA outsider.
She said speaking to around 130 staff was nerve-wracking: “I’m asking those people to to deliver for me based on nothing, based on no pre-existing relationships or no track record. So that’s a massive ask of them but I think what they appreciate most so far is just the fact I’m there because they’re not used to that… It’s not difficult to go to work every day so I don’t for one minute think that I deserve any plaudits for turning up every day but it’s just an indication of how low the baseline was.”
It might all have been so different. Godwin left her cabinet role and then resigned as councillor for Southmead in 2021 to join PricewaterhouseCoopers. Her return to frontline politics was triggered at Marvin Rees’ valedictory speech as Bristol mayor at the Beacon in March 2024 where she said she felt among “my people” and decided to throw her hat into the ring to become Labour’s mayoral candidate for a second time, this time successfully.
As our breakfast came to an end, Godwin headed to find a post office on her way into work at WECA, ready to put her lanyard back on.
The Hippie Flower Cafe, 128 East Street, Bedminster, Bristol, BS3 4ET
Eggs Benedict £8.45
Eggs Florentine £8.45
Flat white £3.40
Latte £3.50
Total £23.80
Illustration by Lucy J Turner
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 edition of Bristol24/7 magazine
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