Bristol named UK's coolest city

Bristol named UK's coolest city

Posted on: 18 Jul 2017

Rough Guides have picked ours as the country’s coolest city, with this accolade coming as another nod from the publication which has already this year found Bristol to be the top UK city.

Bristol

As if it was ever going to be anywhere else…

 

An article penned by Rough Guides’ Greg Dickinson entitled ‘Why Bristol is the coolest city in Britain’ has unfurled a five-fold justification for the city’s latest accolade, which, when combined, place it at the pinnacle of the country’s cool list.

 

Though the notion of ‘cool’ has long been a notoriously slippery one to grapple with (and has therefore become the crumpled vestige of outlets like Top Gear and the NME), but here Rough Guides appear to have cracked it, citing a quintet of quotas fulfilled by the city.

 

 

These are the following:

 

  • There are some weird and wonderful places to sleep
  • You can lose your tandem bike virginity
  • There’s a new foodie quarter: Wapping Wharf
  • You can float above the city in a hot air balloon
  • Bristol is the home of British graffiti

 

And though anyone who has spent as little as an afternoon in Bristol could easily extend this list, these criteria do go a distance to succinctly capturing the cultural appeal, the whimsical fun and downright tastiness of the city. The report also makes very discerning picks of some of Bristol’s best new businesses, which have occasionally gone unnoticed in others of its type.

 

“The city’s first-rate nightlife, thriving creative and tech industries and proximity to the great outdoors made it an obvious choice,” writes Greg Dickinson.

 

“Think London, but smaller and (dare we say it) cooler – or at least more committed to its offbeat counterculture, and with an enormous gorge cutting an improbable chunk through part of the city.”

 

To read the full report, click here. Or for other examples of Bristol’s recent accolades, click here and here.


Article by:

Sam Mason-Jones

An ardent Geordie minus the accent, Sam seemingly strove to get as far away from the Toon as possible, as soon as university beckoned. Three undergraduate years at UoB were more than ample time for Bristol (as it inevitably does) to get under his skin, and so here he remains: reporting, as Assistant Editor, on the cultural happenings which so infatuated him with the city. Catch him at sam@365bristol.com.