Psychadelic

If Salvador Dali and Dr.Seuss had decided to drop some acid together and design a new residential community, what they created would look like St Werburghs.

Let me set the stage: go for a long walk, from Bristol’s  downtown shopping district northwards along streets that carry a hodge podge (or as they spell it here, “hotch potch”) of light industrial buildings and residential rowhouaing. You’ll pass a cabinet maker’s shop, a small construction company,  a block of houses,  some stores and a pub, a small machine shop and a car repair garage, more houses and so on.

After about a mile, you come to a fork in the road: take the north fork, walk past the former St. Werburghs Church that has now been turned into a rock climbing club (where better to put 13m high climbing walls than in an old church building?) and you enter a tunnel whose walls have been completely covered with psychedelic murals and graffiti.

Emerge from the tunnel and, like Alice going through the rabbit hole, presto!, you are in St. Werburghs.

St. Werburghs, where the only way in and out is through the rainbow-drenched kaleidoscope tunnel.

St. Werburghs, where all the planning rules that govern the other side of the tunnel appear to have been suspended.

St. Werburghs where an 18 acre City Farm/organic garden/growing allotments/social benefit project occupies the centre of the community. http://www.swcityfarm.co.uk/

The farm runs to the top of a hill and is home to chickens, ducks, lambs, pigs, goats and rabbits and provides city children with a refreshingly casual environment to experience in real life animals they have probably only seen in storybooks. And the farm is also a social project, as quite a few of the people working here are developmentally disabled and, under supervision, can do useful work.

Next door you’ll discover the hilltop Farm Café, (pictured in the photo at the top), built of poured concrete in a freeform shape with ovoid shaped wooden windows set into the concrete walls, and a big outdoor hillside deck overlooking the rest of the community.

I order a coffee and carrot cake and join a few mostly young couples with small children out on the deck at picnic tables, even though it’s winter: here, it’s sheltered and calm and not very cold by Toronto standards, maybe 10 degrees, and sitting outside in a sweater and jacket with a scarf wrapped round your neck seems the most natural thing in the world. . Little children wander among the picnic tables. Somebody’s dog goes into the cafe, then comes out and lies down next to my table, waiting for its master. A gaggle of young moms with smaller children are gathered at the picnic tables inside, where it’s warm enough to sit in shirtsleeves.

As I look around I keep waiting for Papa Smurf to walk out.

St Werburghs is an urban experiment: it’s as if somebody decided to let a gang of hippies build their own homes to their own quirky tastes and mellow “everytin’ irie” standards.

Which is more or less exactly what happened. People were permitted to self-build their own eco friendly homes to their own tastes in amongst the existing Victorian townhouses, and the result is an array of designs, some austere and Scandanavian, some with green roofs covered in native grasses, some with swoopy Dali-esque woodwork and exteriors that look like sets from The Lord of the Rings.

“Eclectic” doesn’t even begin to describe the architectural mishmash and you can see some samples of it on the community website http://www.stwerburghs.org/

The sense of freedom is St. Werburghs is palpable and it’s infectious. It’s a “hippie holiday” destination just a mile from Bristol’s city centre and stands as a demonstration of what happens when the English eccentricity is allowed to express itself in the design of an entire community.

Once unfashionable, property values in St. Werburghs have increased substantially in the last few years: it’s easy to see why. The quirky little place on the other side of the psychedelic tunnel is one of the friendliest places I’ve ever visited.