Bristol, England - Do any ILXers reside in this fair city?

bristol is very bike friendly.

i work in the city, but live out in the sticks so have to commute in (there are a handful of very good park-n-ride schemes .. )C

a lot of the local living folks in the office bike in.

Clifton and Redlands are the two central desirable areas.

These look out of our price range tbh. What are other OK areas? Is Totterdown any good?

St Andrews, bits of Bishopston, bits of Montpelier, bits of St Werburghs. South of the river bits of Bedminster and bits of Southville are the routine choices. Hotwells has been 'about to happen' for over 10 years. We looked at Totterdown 15 years ago as an option but there is one main route through it and it's SLOW. I've seen it take 40 minutes to get from the shops at the top to Temple Meads in traffic.

What about Stokes Croft?

Brothels (sorry, massage parlours) and (daytime) trustafarian coffee shops run by people from other parts of Bristol. Used to be the most unpleasant part of walking home for me, highest chance of muggings. I know people who used to take a taxi just to get through it at night.

Kingsdown a better choice than Stokes Croft if you want to live in that area imo.

or Montpelier, it's just up the road from there and has Gloucester Rd in easy reach too.

Aye, I'd rather Montpelier too.

If anyone fancies going to a gig I'm unexpectedly playing Cellar Tapes on Friday with my new project. It will be odd.

got my second interview in a week... my first visit to Bristol, although it's strange to think it could possibly be my home soon.

so it's official - i should be moving here around late august. so much to think about - where to live and how to get costs down without living in squalor being a priority. i'll be working in central brizzle, between temple meads station and cabot circus. ilxor, kinder has kindly sent me a few notes to do with various areas, but if anyone hears of rental accommodations, pref 2-3 bedrooms with at least some sort of outdoor area, hit me up :-) looking forward to discovering a new place and hopefully meeting some brizzlxors in person

So, we've started looking at houses. It appears CJ Hole have a bit of a tight grip on the rental market and drive up prices. Lots of agency fees and deposits and things nowadays - way more than when I started renting ten years ago. I'm wondering if there's a good place to seek out private lets as I'd much prefer an independent landlord (so long as they're not a total asshat)... If anyone's got any tips or knows any honest letters, gimme a shout pls !

We saw a nice one in Totterdown. Is that an okay place? I have a mate in Easton who says it's not bad there either.

Because CJ Hole are also a large estate agent, they've probably done more to drive up the BTL market in Bristol than anybody else. I found our original flat in a small independent letting place on Gloucester Road, which I unhelpfully can't remember the name of but is still there (or was 2 years ago).

Totterdown was always fine as I remembered it but it lives and dies on how congested or otherwise the Wells Road is.

glad i left

congratulations on the job DL !
hope the home hunt goes ok.
shout if you ever fancy a lunch hour meet up.
unfortunately i rarely do the after work thing due to kid kaos, unless there is a gig i want to go to.

Nice one Mark. I didn't realise you lived in Bristol. Having a lovely time circumnavigating the pitfalls of rip off lettings agencies right now. I mean look at this http://thebristolcable.org/2015/07/taking-the-piss-agency-fees-2/

Anyone know of anywhere online I could look for private tenancies or a decent honest agency that doesn't try and charge dozens of hidden fees?

i don't live in bristol ..
i live in the near-by regions of the cotswolds and have to commute into bristol for the job (near st nicks market, so pretty central).
i will ask in the office next week to see if anyone knows of a cool local groove re landlords.

aw thanks! although my suspicion is that there is no such thing as..

Found a house! Signing for it today. Up in Montpelier nr Stokes Croft. Needless to say we're excited.

What part of Montpelier?

not far off gloucester road. bath buildings.

Lovely, we nearly moved into them at one point.

ah nice. it's a really great place. just what we were looking for. bit more expensive than we'd hoped for but having done my sums, not commuting into London each day means I save money anyway.

you're near all the nice cafes and stuff around Picton Street, not to mention Bell's Diner
Boston Tea Party is NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE and it makes me cross

Letting agents are shits round here. We let our flat with one a while ago and they cocked everything up. Just one example, it took about 5 requests to get them to spell my surname correctly.

"s u r p r i s e" right?

we're going with 0cean. they don't seem so bad, but i trust lettings agents about as far as i can throw'em. can't believe how many fees and upfront costs there are in renting these days. shame we even have to use an agency - i found out about the house through a friend whose mum owns the house, but hey ho.

xp very good.

oh hello. I live here now! :-) :-) :-)

what ?!? I thought you had Hitchin written through you like a stick of rock...

a lot of people were surprised.

good luck dog latin!

This may be of interest.

http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-releases/the-8-best-record-shops-in-bristol/3/

Anyone up for coming to see either Jlin or Colin Stetson in Bristol in the next couple of weeks?

I have never heard of those people and am largely tied down by abject poverty and frogbox crazy separation-anxious dog, but /wave and a belated welcome to brizzle dl

hi Zora!

Massive Attack due to play a big homecoming show in September. Anyone interested?

10 months in, how is the Bristol adventure going?

Yes I would be interested in Massive Attack, but I doubt it's realistic (for me).

I'm loving it mate, gurt lush etc etc... Already made a lot of friends, doing DJ slots and generally getting involved in a lot of stuff. Met up with kinder from ILX once or twice. Still need to meet with MarkE at some point (not forgotten this). Job's a lot better than the one I left in London. Overall it's one of the most positive changes I've made in my life. Frustratingly we have to move house again cos our landlady's selling-up, but that's not til September so hopefully we'll find somewhere just as good. Need to buy soon, but that feels a bit of a way off.

Oh, I'm seeing Kamasi Washington at the Anson Rooms soon too if any Ilxors are about for that.

Last weekend I went to Bristol for the first time since I was kid - me and my partner enjoyed it so much that we've already discussed potetially moving there! We ended up raving to old skool hardcore and jungle in Stokes Croft a crowd approx 15 years younger than us till 5 AM.

Haha, that was the 'Rave On Avon'. We tried checking it out but by 5pm there were amyl-ed up students spilling in and out of every venue so we hung around a bit and then went for a pint. Stokes Croft is anarchic at the best of times, but it was just a little bit too much for me on that occasion. chap, if you revisit let me know.

Will do! Think it would've been a bit much for my old bones too, but we were sort of in holiday mode.

Stokes Croft is just a stone's throw from nice leafy cobbled areas, don't worry :)

I'm looking for beer/brewery/pub recommendations if you have any...?

Follow @marktaylorfood on Twitter - food critic for Bristol's paper who has loads of recommendations on his timeline.

Cheers suzy!

I haven't been paying close attention to craft beer recently because (a) I'm drinking less beer and (b) I get a bit bored by the aggressive happiness of too much of the stuff (I have half a feeling this is becoming an out-of-date view but hey, I'm drinking less beer just now. Also I used to go to Bristol a lot but now I go only very rarely, sadly, os my view's not worth so much.

ANYWAY I really like beer by Moor (who've recently moved to Bristol), I like their Raw in particular; Bristol Beer Factory are VG, I think of them as being particularly strong on stouts; Arbor Ales also always worth at least a taste. People seem to like Wiper and True but I don't recall ever drinking their beer. The Wild Beer Company's from not too far away (somewhere in North Somerset I think) and it's worth looking out for their stuff if you like your combinations experimental.

I don't know about whether there are good craft beer bars in Bristol - I'm sure there are but I think Bristol's blessed with a very high number of surviving nice old-fashioned pubs; this looks pretty useful to me: http://www.camrabristol.org.uk/Files/TavernTrail.pdf though I don't know lots of them so I can't vouch for its quality. If you're interested in old-fashioned boozers then you should definitely have a look in the Kings Head between town and Temple Meads, it's an amazing survival and their "tramcar" snug is (as far as I'm aware) unique.

(The craft beer angle of that post is because I saw you'd posted a similar question on the beer thread fwiw)

the Bag of Nails is a v good old skool Bristol pub imo. if you google it you'll find a bunch of stories from eg Buzzfeed about its USP, which is the several cats who are also there at any one time, but it has a lot to recommend it outside of that

Best craft beer place is Small Bar on King Street, at the Queen Square end. I also used to like Beerd on Cotham Brow.