Introduction

Kate Pahl

At the heart of this chapter is a recorded conversation between four people working at the interface between art and research. This Introduction, along with the Conclusion, is designed to situate the conversation within the wider context of arts practice and co-produced research.

Contemporary art practice has experienced a paradigm shift from the idea of art as sitting within the gallery to a more diffuse concept of art as collaborative and participatory (Bishop, 2012). These approaches involve people building knowledge together, and rely on a de-centring or de-materialising of the art object to suggest something new. This chapter sits within a tradition of dialogical approaches to knowledge production and draws on the tradition within contemporary art practice of the conversation as a form of engagement (Kester, 2004, 2011). Kester (2011, p 67) writes about such art projects:

The conversation that follows is between an artist (Steve Pool), a chief executive of a museum service (Kim Streets), an arts educator (Natalie Walton) and a researcher (David Bell). All worked on the ‘cultural’ part of the Imagine project. This dialogue reflects their concerns about how they respond as individuals to a co-produced project, Imagine, with its focus on imagining better futures.

As a conversation, it explores the dialogic form (Banks and Armstrong et al, 2014). This enables the authorship to sit with more than one person, and be composed of multiple viewpoints. This situates a community development approach to the co-production of research within a conversation that lets in multiple viewpoints and points of difference (Mouffe, 2007). The discussion is personal but also political. Reading it provides a different kind of lens. The conversation reflects the lived reality of the project, the aspirations and pragmatic decisions, and it makes visible the problems and opportunities of bringing people together from different backgrounds, histories and expectations to try and build something together.

This chapter draws on a conversation held in Rotherham central library café between Kate Pahl, Zahir Rafiq and Steve Pool. All of the quotations from Zahir in this chapter come from the transcript of this conversation. We explore with artist Zahir Rafiq his lived experience of Rotherham, and how he has used art to create a space for conversations and for the articulation of experience. In doing so, we ask the question, ‘What can art do?’ and in this process, we argue for the arts as a mode of enquiry as well as an articulation of experience:

Zahir Rafiq is an artist whose work has tried to probe and interrogate contemporary images and perceptions of British Muslims. At the same time, Zahir has worked primarily as an artist, someone who goes beyond the stereotypes assigned to him by the media or community descriptions. He has used his art to create positive images of British Muslims and to work closely with the police, faith organisations, schools and universities to develop contemporary images of the people and experiences he sees around him. Zahir's realisation in his work was that in order to convey everyday experience, art provides a way to sidestep many difficulties. Working as an artist provides an opportunity to be a different kind of social commentator. Zahir's story illustrates how art can become a way of articulating community experiences in a different way.

Zahir grew up in Rotherham, and his work draws on the twin traditions of Islamic art and Western artistic practice. Both Zahir's great-grandfather and grandfather were mosque builders. This involved both designing, building and decorating mosques, and was a skilled activity. Being a mosque builder involved designing and making the mosque and decorating the mosque with Islamic calligraphy. While this was not seen as ‘artistic’, it was part of a tradition where people decorated and inscribed images as part of everyday practice. When a mosque was completed, the community had a party to celebrate. When Zahir's grandfather came to England, he then got a job in a cutlery factory – making spoons. Zahir's mother was a skilled needlewoman and for thirty years was a dressmaker.

Art includes a huge diversity of practice and a commitment to knowing together and making together. In this book, we profile the work of individual poets and we showcase work by young people in poetry and visual images. We also articulate an approach to knowing through art, in that we recognise the need for artists as individuals to intervene and change the world. The process of making involves a process of change.

In our previous research on artists and what they did, we called this aspect of making art the artist's ‘ego’ (Pahl et al, 2017). Cassie Limb (see Chapter Twenty) can call up her experiential knowledge of form and shape to explore a sensory vision of the world with the girls she worked with. Zahir Rafiq's vision of the portraits (see Chapter Eighteen) comes partly from his own skill and experience, but is also visionary.

Making art can be a wrought process, a skill that is honed over time, such as the poems, but it is also fresh, anew. The poetry and the images in this book call up experience that is complex, entwined with place, but also wrought through complex experience that maybe does not reach mainstream media. Experience is also captured through art. In Shahin Shah's chapter (see Chapter Seven) it is possible to visualise some of the oral stories told by older South Asian community members – the vivid colours; the artistic lens enhances what has been told. Artists refresh and bring to life stories through images, often ‘saying what has been unsaid’ by the oral storyteller.

Working with artists sometimes means changing gear, and recognising different perceptions of the world. It might mean seeing things through the lens of the material, the situated, or the embodied, surfacing ‘material knowledge’ in Paul Carter's words (2004). Art as knowing can be developed through conversations, walks, in moments of interaction that create spaces for more things to happen. Art is a process, and here we think about how things emerge – stuff comes from stuff: trying, helping, working, making, talking – new ideas come from doing. By this, we mean that as we created this book, and the artworks were developed, we learned from each other, and listened to each other's stories.

This vignette typifies the meetings that took place between us, a group of researchers and parents, during collaborative research over a number of years near Clifton Park in Rotherham. As part of our collaborative ethnography, we organised a series of family den-building events, with community partners, in order to think through how children learn and have experiences in places. We aimed explicitly to draw across and value different kinds of knowledge about young children – professional practitioner knowledge, academic knowledge, and particularly the knowledges gained from everyday lived experiences of being parents and children.

These kinds of everyday knowledges about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of parenting young children are rarely represented or valued in policy discourses, and therefore risk being overlooked in practical initiatives designed to help or support families with young children in communities. By foregrounding and valuing these everyday lived experiences of families and children, we hope to offer more realistic accounts of what it means to parent young children, which we think should inform policy and practice regarding how young children should be cared for and should participate in communities.

When the politics of opposition reappeared openly in Bristol in the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was driven once again by local issues, but also by the fortuitous arrival of Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt on the eve of the general election in 1807, who took a house in fashionable Bellevue, Clifton, while settling his business interests in the Jacobs Wells brewery. Hunt had developed an appetite for arguments about electoral independence through a series of noisy interventions in the contest for Wiltshire the previous year, and now saw Bristol as an ideal place in which to further develop his ambitions. Partly through Hunt's influence then, conflicts over local corruption and the right of franchise came to dominate the language of opposition in the city in this period, once more making the corporation and the local party system the principal focus of discontent.

The Bristol newspapers had loudly congratulated the Whig and Tory clubs for getting their candidates elected without the trouble of a poll after the general election of November 1806, but the collapse of the resulting ministry after just six months raised the issue again in the late spring of 1807. Soon after the new election was called, it was announced in Bristol that an independent candidate, Sir John Jarvis, had unexpectedly come forward to oppose the customary coalition. Jarvis was the commander of the city's Volunteer rifle corps, an unlikely candidate, and Hunt was highly suspicious of him. In the first place Hunt believed Jarvis to be a Tory and in the second Jarvis appeared to have nobody in place to nominate him. Suspecting that Jarvis was actually a paper candidate, produced by the coalition to dissuade the freemen from putting forward a genuine independent candidate of their own, Hunt accompanied Jarvis to the Guildhall. There he tried to nominate Jarvis himself, but was debarred since he was neither a freeman nor a freeholder in the city and since nobody else stepped forward to do it, the Whig Evan Baillie and the Tory, Charles Bragge-Bathurst were elected without a contest. Jarvis's farcical non-candidature raised tempers that had already been sorely tested in 1806, and public animosity towards Bathurst in particular led to serious disturbances, the immediate causes of which remain unclear.

The rise of Bristol to a position of commercial prominence was very much bound up with the transatlantic economy, so that any long-term transformations to that economy inevitably affected its status. The war with America and the eventual declaration of independence wrought significant changes in Bristol's relationship with the North American colonies; by extension it also altered the dynamic of its trade with the West Indies. In the decade after the Seven Years’ War Bristol's American trade grew spectacularly. From September 1763 until September 1764, eighty-one ships entered Bristol from British North America, carrying 6798 tons of merchandise; the corresponding figures for 1774–75 were 175 ships and 20,561 tons, a three-fold increase in tonnage and two-fold in ships. In 1775, the first year of the war, the number of ships entering Bristol from America fell to 125; in 1780 it was just 1. The corresponding figures for ships clearing Bristol for North America were 57 and 9. Vessels entering Bristol from the West Indies also showed a decline, from 85 to 66 over the same period, so that the overall volume of incoming transatlantic trade was seriously affected by war. According to Ken Morgan's figures, it fell from an average of 21,202 tons in 1772–73 to 12,326 tons in 1778–80, the lowest level of trade since the War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s.

The result was lay-offs and higher poor rates. Without reciprocal trading, local businesses came under attack. Some serge and stuff-manufacturing firms collapsed; tobacco-pipe making for the American market disappeared. With a credit crisis in America and the reneging of many debts by American merchants and planters, bankruptcies also took their toll. There were over five hundred during the course of the war, at a rate three times as high as Liverpool. These included a number of leading Bristolians: Sir James Laroche, the master of the Merchant Venturers in 1782 and MP for Bodmin in Cornwall, 1768–80; the Farr brothers, prominent Presbyterian merchants from the Lewin's Mead chapel, one of whom (Thomas) was the mayor in 1775 while his brother (Paul) was the master of the Merchant Venturers.

It is possible to exaggerate the depth of the economic crisis, at least at the top of the merchant hierarchy.

The relatively low visibility of popular radical organisations at Bristol in the decade following the French Revolution has led historians of the city to conclude there was little support for them. Mark Harrison, for example, notes that although the ‘public expression of loyalism was abundant’ in a welter of anti-Jacobin addresses forwarded by the corporation to the throne, the radicalism to which it was opposed remained ‘spectacularly absent’. It is not easy to disagree. Compared to well-known radical centres in smaller towns, like Norwich, Sheffield and Manchester, Bristol appears disproportionately quiet. For an explanation we may look partly towards the familiar arguments about the city's introspective concern with its own civic affairs, where issues over corruption and accountability in a relatively open electoral franchise centred more readily on the exclusive activities of the corporation. In these years, the corporation, its merchant allies and the political elite attracted more hostile public attention than ever before through their energetic attempts to further increase their own executive and judicial powers and to control the election of the city's representatives, nullifying the impact of the city's generous freeman franchise.

It is certainly no coincidence that in 1790, at the first English general election after the fall of the Bastille, a challenge was launched at Bristol against the by now customary pact agreed by the Tory candidate, the Marquis of Worcester, and the Whig candidate, Lord Sheffield. The Reverend Edward Barry revived the city's Independent Society of Freemen, claimed he had attracted 1500 men to join him, and called for a third independent candidate to step forward to uphold the right of election. ‘It was neither men nor party they assembled for’, declared Barry, ‘but the CAUSE; to protect their common rights’. A candidate was duly found in the merchant David Lewis, but the opening days of the poll were not encouraging and Lewis withdrew with just twelve votes to his name. With the remaining two candidates elected and chaired, Lewis, who according to the local press could have ‘nothing to complain of but the perfidy of his promising friends’, made his way to the Bush and consoled himself over dinner with Sheffield and the Whigs. Barry blamed Lewis for not trying hard enough, and Lewis blamed Barry for falsely claiming he had 1500 freemen ready to cast an independent vote.

The Bristol riots hit the news. Detailed reports of the riots were blazoned in the press, in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, and in many provincial towns in England. As part of the reform crisis a lot was at stake in how the riots were interpreted. They became something of a litmus test of reform. For Blackwood's Magazine, an ultra-Tory monthly, the Bristol riots gave the public a ‘foretaste of democracy’. Extending the franchise would only result in more scenes of appalling degeneracy, scenes of deluded mobs and manipulative demagogues, whose real intent was revolution. For reformist newspapers, the lesson learned from the riots was the decadent state of local government in Bristol, emblematic of Old Corruption, a portrait of self-selected politicians irresponsibly clinging onto power and privilege in the face of public mistrust and resentment, allowing a turbulent but manageable crisis to spiral out of control. As we have seen, this opinion gathered force after the trial of Mayor Charles Pinney in November 1832, leading the Examiner to declare ‘let us set about municipal improvement with all the speed we may’. As the Reading Mercury opined a year earlier: ‘The great bulk of the inhabitants, including sensible persons of all parties, are sick of the self-elected system and anxious it should be abolished.’

For radical commentators the riots were regrettable because they would be used as a pretext for denying the vote to the bulk of the male population, keeping ‘all their fellow labourers in their present tyrannical subjection’. The real culprit, said the Poor Man's Guardian, was the local oligarchy, which had reduced offenders ‘to such a state of mental ignorance and degradation’. Francis Place believed the Bristol riots underscored the benumbing influences of religious prejudice and class on political consciousness. Church-and-King bigotry and ‘the contempt of all who are able to live without working for all who do work’ had rendered life brutish and miserable for the majority. Until there was some relief from the daily struggle for survival, which cramped people materially and intellectually, the degradations of a Bristol riot would continue.

In the larger scheme of things, the Bristol riots do pose some interesting questions for historians from below, if only because of the range of action they generated, from demonstrations for reform to scenes of spectacular vandalism and drunkenness.

Bristol was a city of spires and masts. Alexander Pope was struck by the hundreds of ships at Broad Quay and the Backs, ‘their masts as thick as they stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable’. ‘The streets are as crowded as London’, he remarked, ‘but the best image I can give of it is, Tis as if Wapping and Southwark were ten-times as big, or all their people run into London.’

It was the ‘swarming vessels’, to echo Richard Savage, that particularly attracted the Admiralty. Swarming vessels meant seamen, and seamen, especially experienced topmen, were what the navy needed to man its ships in wartime. Between 1738 and 1815 Britain was at war roughly two in every three years, and as fleets grew in size, her demand for men was insatiable. At the beginning of the war of Jenkins’ Ear in 1738, 23,000 men were borne by the navy; that is, registered on the ships’ books. That number rose dramatically in subsequent wars peaking at 85,000 in the Seven Years’ War, over 100,000 in the American, and at an amazing 140,000 towards the end of the Napoleonic wars. This was a six-fold increase in the space of roughly seventyfive years, and it could only be sustained by appropriating seamen from the merchant marine, whose own numbers could only be sustained by relaxing the official requirements of the Navigation Acts, which insisted on British and colonial ships managed by a high proportion of home-grown mariners. Because wages in the merchant marine were always higher than those of the royal navy, and appreciably higher in wartime, men had to be coerced into joining His Majesty's fleets. Precisely how many men were pressed into service is impossible to say. The figures are fragmented and fraught with problems. The best we currently have, derived from the Shelburne papers for the American war, suggests that 37.5 per cent of all seamen enlisted on land were impressed, and probably 34 per cent of the 235,000 men recruited ashore and afloat. As the historian who compiled these figures admitted, some of those who technically ‘volunteered’ for the navy did so under duress. It was either a case of come quietly and accept the bounty for a volunteer; or be pressed and be damn'd.

At the end of September 1729, the corporation filed into the Mayor's Chapel on College Green to hear the customary sermon from the Bishop's chaplain, Carew Reynell, at the swearing in of the new mayor. Reynell's themes were equally customary. In January, he had reminded them that ‘little jealousies bred discontents, that discontents occasioned murmurings, and murmurings ripened into faction’, and in November he would remind them of ‘the just sense (they) must have, as a Rich and Trading City, of the Benefits of Government’. Yet as the corporation listened to Carew's sage advice that day, events were unfolding in another part of the city and in its hinterland to the east to ensure the poignancy of his message for several weeks to come. At seven o'clock that morning the weaving community beyond Lawford's Gate had mobilised en masse and set off in a crowd to the house of a Bristol drugget maker, Stephen Fechem in Castle Ditch. Within a day or two, eight would be dead and Fechem in hiding. This chapter considers the often complex relationship between corporate governance, economic hubris and a series of threats to Bristol's stability emanating, or so it was presumed, from ‘without the Gate’ – not only from marauding weavers and colliers but from criminal extortionists and ‘gangs’ of sodomites. The self-confident reputation of the merchant elite would be severely tested by challenges of this kind over the next five years, culminating in the unexpected defeat of one of the oligarchy's sitting MPs, the Walpolean minister and the city's Recorder, Sir John Scrope.

Bristol's continued pre-eminence as the nation's second city, it was frequently said, required constant vigilance against factional discord and weak local government. Nourished by two decades of peace, Bristol's economy thrived in the 1730s, as the city finally outgrew Norwich as Britain's second-largest urban centre, and came to dominate the tobacco, sugar and slaving trades.3 Suggestions from detractors that its culture was materialistic and unrefined were countered by a self-confident corporation, who fondly ordered the publication of sermons like Carew's that elevated merchants to the status of local and national heroes. By 1744, Bristol had become the modern Tyre, counselled A. S. Catcott, rector of St Stephens, ‘the crowning city whose merchants are princes and whose traffickers are the honourable of the Earth’.

The Food Riots of 1801

On 6 April 1801, in the midst of the most serious subsistence crisis of the Napoleonic war years, four or five hundred Kingswood colliers struck work in an attempt to persuade city magistrates to reduce the price of provisions in Bristol market. Two days earlier, disturbances had broken out in the streets of the city over the price of meat, butter and potatoes; indeed the whole south-west region had been gripped by marketplace rioting, chiefly over bread supplies, for a number of weeks, leaving civil and military authorities severely stretched. It was not the first time the colliers had taken collective action over the price of food. Similar tactics had been used in 1709, 1740, 1753 and, to a lesser extent, in 1795, but the 1801 dispute marked a watershed in relations between the Bristol crowd and the corporation over the principle of marketplace intervention. Quite simply, magistrates were no longer disposed to cooperate.

However, the colliers’ confidence was initially strengthened by knowledge that a customary mix of mobbing and formal parleying had earned crowds in Bridgwater, Taunton and several other regional centres, substantial market reductions. A list of these ‘agreed’ Somerset prices were accordingly drawn up by the colliers into a petition to the mayor of Bristol, and pressure put upon farmers in the region to add their signatures to it. ‘Our whole intention is peace’, insisted the colliers, but ‘through hard living, many of us are not able to perform the labour we wish to do’. But the mayor had no intention either of receiving the petition or adopting Somerset prices.

The so-called Bridgwater agreement had been brokered after crowds forced dealers to accept price reductions at Wellington and Taunton at the end of March, then walked from Stogursey to Nether Stowey, Goatchurch, North Petherton, Bridgwater and Otterhampton, in search of a magistrate to sign a petition of endorsement for lower prices. Although magistrates consistently refused to do so, they had been unable to disperse the crowd by persuasion or military force, without promising assistance. A day later they called together the farmers, gentlemen and principal inhabitants of the district and contrived a public agreement to relieve the markets with plentiful supplies of cheaper food the following week.

In March 1756 a by-election was held in Bristol to replace Richard Beckford, the West Indian planter and merchant, who had briefly represented the constituency. The previous election two years earlier had proved prohibitively expensive, especially for the Whigs, who spent over £30,000 getting Robert Nugent elected, and there was a disposition on both sides to come to some kind of compromise. A joint committee of the Steadfast and Union Clubs initially agreed that the Steadfast would choose a candidate to replace Beckford, technically a Tory, with the understanding that the Union should have the next vacancy. According to Josiah Tucker, the pamphleteer and rector of St Stephen's who was among those who tried to broker the deal, a ‘club of low tradesmen among ye Dissenters’ rejected it, believing it would be in their interest to have an MP of a Nonconformist denomination to represent the City. The Union Club was not happy with this intervention and informed the Tories that if the well-known Bristol attorney, Jarrit Smith, stood as their candidate, it would raise no objection.

As it was, a contest could not be avoided. Jarrit Smith, a well-connected local Tory, but a reluctant candidate at sixty-four years of age, found himself facing an aristocratic outsider. He was John Spenser, a 21-year-old pipsqueak, heir to the fortune of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and backed by the Sunderland family. In another electoral battle that emptied pockets, Smith edged out Spenser by fifty-two votes, a mere fraction of the 4765 cast; to date, the highest number that had ever polled in a Bristol contest and probably 90 per cent or more of the eligible electorate. Spencer's friends, piqued that they had been unable to mobilise a shifting population of soldiers and sailors to prevent defeat, demanded a scrutiny. The ‘Blue Mob’ protested, Josiah Tucker recalled, and threatened the sheriffs with their lives unless they made ‘a fair return, that is, returned Mr. Smith’. The sheriffs complied, much to the jubilation of Tory supporters in town and country, where sheep were roasted whole and local dignitaries chaired in imitation of the victory parade in Bristol. In reply, the Whigs complained to parliament of an unfair return, but failed to overturn the verdict.

In early April 1756, Jarrit Smith returned to Bristol to celebrate his victory.