Around 30% of Bristol’s population are private renters (134,000). In the last ten years, rents in Bristol have risen by over 50%, and are still rising steadily – faster than anywhere else in the country. Wages have risen by only 24%. The standard length of tenancy in the UK is just6 months, shorter than almost anywhere in the world.

Alongside this stark picture which is pushing low-earners across many industries out of the city, there is a narrative playing out in the press, and in house prices. A 2019 Premier Innsurvey found Bristol to be the ‘most artistic place in the UK’. In 2017 the Sunday Times named it the best place to live in the UK. In 2019 Time Out declared Easton the 35th best place to live in the whole world. The average house price in Bristol is now over £370k.

How long can Bristol continue to benefit from being a cultural hub, alongside the stream of cultural workers who are now being priced out of the city? Is it a problem, and if so, whose responsibility is it to do something about it?

Over the past 18 months I’ve been working on a proposal for a large scale housing cooperative or housing association, designed to offer affordable housing on 5 to 10 year secure tenancies, for around 100 low income artists and cultural workers in Bristol.

Whilst the lifelong employers who built housing for their workers in the Victorian period are generally a thing of the past, many people work for a large proportion of their life in a particular industry, in a particular place. (for example, I could say confidently that

I work for the cultural sector, in Bristol). What would it look like to work in a connected, sector-wide way to create housing for workers who bring huge benefits to the city, but do not earn wages to support their lives in it? I would like to either present a paper or host a roundtable discussion (open to either)exploring what workers’ housing might look like in the 21st century, for individuals employed in the gig economy and freelancers in the arts.

Rachael Clerke is a Bristol-based artist working across many mediums. They make artworks that sit somewhere on the edge of live art and community infrastructure; playful experiments about what real life might look like if we were less concerned with what real life ‘should’ look like. Rachael is part of Interval, a collective of artists sharing space and resources above St Nicholas market in Bristol.