Features / Breakfast with Bristol24/7
Breakfast with Bristol24/7: Kerry McCarthy
“You can tell a lot about a cafe by the quality of its scrambled tofu,” says Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East.
The waiter at Garden of Easton looks daunted as he heads off with our order. When the food arrives, in healthy contrast to my mayo-smothered okonomiyaki hers is a crumbly golden mound surrounded by brown toast triangles.
But before she can pass judgement Kerry is already mid-flow, the gush of her conversation touching on everything from psycho-geography and nature to music, mushrooms and even squid.
We’re on Kerry’s patch, and she talks warmly about Sweetmart, the Indian supermarket opposite on St Mark’s Road, and the convenience of the nearby Stapleton Road station.
Having represented the constituency now covering neighbourhoods like Stockwood, Brislington, St Anne’s, Knowle and Easton for two decades, it’s unsurprising she is well-known locally.
“I do tend to get recognised quite a lot now, particularly round these parts,” she says. “Usually it’s nice but given the way politics has developed in recent years you’ve got to be a lot more vigilant, which is a real shame.”
Her long tenure shapes how she talks about change. While she is reluctant to call it gentrification, she’s noticed demographic changes in Bristol East: older residents born into the area being replaced by young couples in St George, while other places have welcomed refugees putting down roots.
With the Temple Quarter development incoming near Barton Hill, she is intent to avoid what she describes as “a Canary Wharf/ Tower Hamlets scenario”. Locals have told her they don’t want to be “the cleaners or the caterers”: “We’re asking businesses what are you doing in terms of internships and work experience.”
With the city’s landscape changing fast, how are residents expected to keep up?
“Resistance comes when people feel they’re being ‘done to’,” she explains, referencing both the success of the Lawrence Weston wind turbine and the backlash with the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme.
She supports the latter but is clear about its problems: “It was not managed well. People didn’t feel ownership”.
There’s also, she adds, a battle over perception. Misinformation and ignorance around climate change and ideas like 15-minute cities, for example, can fuel suspicion. Quoting Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel, she says: “There’s a line in it: ‘All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest’ – that comes into my mind almost every day!”
Kerry McCarthy has been MP for Bristol East for over 20 years
Kerry is equally protective of green spaces and our city’s music venues, noting the difference between “being in nature somewhere like Brislington Meadows and being in an overly managed park.
“You talk to developers and they’ll say, we’ve got planters here, maybe a green roof… That’s not an experience of nature. With the Meadows, if you were starting from scratch it sounds like a decent scheme. But it’s that question of what you’re losing.”
The former punk helped save the Fleece from nearby development in 2014 and, as well as its wild spaces, wants to hold on to Bristol’s creative character. “When you’ve got a development to scale how do you build the grungier elements into it?” she asks, sipping her oat flat white. “The worry is that you end up with something very bland.”
Kerry, a patron of the Music Venue Trust (MVT), is referencing Joy Division’s roots in industrially declining Manchester and the warehouse origins of the Wild Bunch: “You need a bit of grit for that music to develop.
“If you kicked them out of their warehouses or squats and bought them a shiny new rehearsal studio, they probably wouldn’t end up making the same music. Let them be and allow them to have some spaces.”
How does she feel about the arena being built in Filton? “I can’t think of any band I’d want to see that would play to 20,000 people!” she laughs, while suggesting it could benefit the grassroots by contributing a £1 per ticket levy to a pot that is then distributed to struggling smaller venues, a currently voluntary scheme that the MVT is campaigning to establish legislatively.
“I think we will be able to get them to agree to it,” she adds. “I feel like they will subscribe to the idea that they are part of the city’s infrastructure and will want to play their part. Even if they only held five gigs a year, an extra £100,000 going to Bristol’s grassroots venues would be amazing.”
Utensils set to one side now, the conversation takes a turn into unusual territory. Kerry reveals her “weird” passion for snooker, particularly Ronnie O’Sullivan “because he’s the maverick one” and her mission to bring a world snooker event to the arena.
Her political interests are just as eclectic. She recently hosted the first parliamentary reception on fungi and is excited about the discovery of a rare pink fungus just outside Bristol.
She’s even tabled some parliamentary questions about the risk to the jumbo flying squid from illegal fishing. “I imagine the clerk that gets them thinking ‘what the hell is she on about today?! Last week it was fungi, this week it’s squid…’ I love it when I end up doing these random, niche things!”
Kerry jokes it’s this that has motivated her plan to stand again when election time comes around: “I like doing it. I feel like there’s still so much to do. And I can’t leave until I’ve saved the flying squid!”
This article originally appeared in the Bristol24/7 May/June magazine
Illustration: Lucy J Turner
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