2025 in the rear view mirror

A SLIGHTLY belated happy new year to all!

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Here's hoping that you're looking to 2026 with optimism and that it brings you all you want. Or at least peace and quiet and a few unexpected joys.As the old year diminishes in the rear view mirror, we might try to make some sort of semi-informed sense of what happened locally. Like many other hacks, I can sit in lordly state in the back bar of any of our diminishing number of public houses, grandly proclaiming that journalism is the first draft of history.

It's not that Bristol, with its famous sense of exceptionalism, was detached from the rest of the world in 2025 - see for instance demonstrations over the conflict in Palestine - it's just that if the local print, broadcast and online media were anything to go by, we had more parochial preoccupations.

The three biggest - in no particular order - were van-dwellers, the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood, and whether or not biological men may enter all-female spaces.

The Council's plans to create "Liveable Neighbourhoods" as "... safe, healthy, inclusive, and attractive places where everyone can breathe clean air, have access to better quality green spaces and safe spaces to play, and feel a part of a community" sounded good in theory.