Stokes Croft and Montpelier

The Haunted Bookshop

A witchy bookshop in one narrow front room, at the foot of the street

You're at number 43, outside a witchy bookshop tucked into one narrow front room. It shuts on Tuesdays, so plan this walk for a Wednesday to Saturday afternoon. Stokes Croft China, up the road, takes Tuesdays off as well. Before you set off, look along the shopfronts.

No two of them match, and hardly any belong to a chain, which is not the usual way a British high street works. That's the thread for the next hour. Stokes Croft climbs from the city centre up to Montpelier, and for decades the people who live and trade here have argued about who owns the place. The answers are all around you.

They are painted on the walls, and they run behind the counters. Paint is cheap and hard to remove. A worker-run café, a china workshop, a room full of artists: those need almost nothing but a lease and stubbornness. The street keeps its character because of what happens in front rooms like this one.

Start walking north.

Turbo Island

A bombed-out triangle the street treats as its living room

That triangle of tarmac and flyposting at the fork in the road is Turbo Island, and its emptiness is the story. In 1940 a German bomb destroyed the buildings that stood here, numbers 71 to 75 Stokes Croft, one of them a shoe shop, killing a resident called Mrs Parsons. What was left was not cleared properly until a road-widening scheme in 1961, and nobody rebuilt on the gap. In 1985, five years after Stokes Croft was declared a conservation area, the council sold the plot to an advertising company for 32,500 pounds.

The hoarding went up and the ground beneath it was left alone, which is how private land turned into the street's living room: bonfires, drum and bass, and the drinkers who gave it a name from a cheap, strong cider. In 2009 archaeologists dug here as a homeless heritage site, lifting more than a thousand objects out of the ground, mostly bottles. In 2024 it was put up for auction, a community land trust's offer was turned down, and the plot was sold privately before the sale day. Somebody owns this triangle.

Nobody owns what happens on it.