Chance meeting

I've been in Bristol for over twenty years now. One of the advantages of living in one place for so long is that I quite often bump into people I haven't seen for years.

Recently, quite by chance, I met up with someone I used to know when I first moved to Bristol. He's now the Deputy Lord-Lieutenant (cute title). Fifteen to twenty years ago, we were both active in promoting local regeneration initiatives in Bristol's inner city, particularly in the St Pauls neighborhood, home to many of the city's Afro-Caribbean population.

Since those days, things have changed a lot for both of us, but some of the problems in St Pauls have gotten worse, thanks largely to the influx of crack-cocaine.

Anyway, back in the eighties, both of us had read and admired "Endless Pressure", Ken Pryce's groundbreaking study of West Indian lifestyles in Bristol. It was essential reading for outsiders like me doing development work in the area, and it was widely appreciated locally for its accurate depiction of Afro-Caribbean life in the city.

I was dimly aware that Ken Pryce had done other studies, but I never thought much about it, except occasionally to wonder why I hadn’t come across more of his work. Yesterday, I found out why.

My former colleague told me that, some years ago, Pryce had been doing a study on drug dealing in Jamaica and had been found dead, face down in some ditch somewhere, a victim of the violent subculture he’d been studying.

Today, I’m left sadly reflecting that the advent of crack-cocaine, along with the gang violence that accompanied it, not only derailed many of the hopes we had for the inner city twenty years ago, it also took the life of a fine sociologist who, had he lived, might have done much to document and explain the culture that killed him.