The strange hidden lives of Bridewell

 Hello. Ive set up this blog for Bridewell stories the Islands contribution to the Bristol Biannual. http://bristolbiennial.com/events.html

This is a brief story of how my views on the building that is the Old Bridewell Police Station have changed form indifference to curiosity, surprise and finally affection.

The strange hidden lives of Bridewell

It was a few months after moving to Bristol before I moved into the Island, with my studio in the Old police station. I had often walked past the building; the stern authoritarian exterior compelling me to keep my head down and move on. It seemed there was “nothing to see here”, and so I assumed it was still a police station and paid little heed to what went on inside. Little did I know, it was to play a big part in my life and shape my actions for the next 3 years and counting...

After a few years of  traveling an the like I alighted in lovely Bristol with the intention of settling for a while and finally doing something constructive with my passion: art/painting/ and such things. So with this in mind I set about looking for a studio and visited the Island home of the invisible circus and a bewildering array of colorful residents spread out over an improbable jumble of buildings made up of the Old police Station, the old fire station and an even older court house.

There were studios in the police station side an the rent was cheap so I jumped at the chance and found myself being a "real artist" with a studio! Don't you know.

How could I have guessed that this solid stone symbol of law and order would be a place to meet fellow creative people, to be inspired and create? How could I have guessed that there would be burlesque dancers on stilts stalking the corridors, or that I would be spending several manic weeks constructing a landscape out of books? Or even painting glow in the dark aliens deep beneath the fire station?

How can you know how many stories are hiding out there as you walk past busy with your own? Or what part a hither to nondescript building will play in your life?

Well I used to care not one jot about the gruff looking building on Nelson street, at most I was mildly scared by it. Then the most unexpected things stated happening in my life in and around the building. And now its a well loved home from home to me. Its a place where I work and where I have made friends. Its for me no longer a symbol of law and order but a symbol of all the wonderful people I have met and ironically a symbol of the freedom to create and express myself.

Hope that's wetted your appetite for all things bridewellian.

Over the next few weeks I hope that we will discover some of the unexpected, happy, sad and down right strange stories that have attached themselves to this odd little corner of town and maybe learn a little about the people who made them.

Dan Le mesurier

For more on Le mesurier visit: arrrtmybrainhurts.blogspot.com

A landscape made from books.