Years ago, when I lived in the St Pauls area and worked in the city center, I’d walk home each evening along what used to be known locally as the Front Line. If I'd been working late, more often than not I'd drop into the local cafe on the way home. I knew the man who owned the place, so I was always assured of a friendly welcome and the food was good - despite how it looked from the outside.
The Guardian once said that no one ever went there for the food. But that was later.
By 2003, the cafe had become one of the hot spots in a battle between rival gangs for control of the city's drugs trade. For several weeks, in an attempt to head of further violence, high-profile armed patrols were used to police the area.
Three years ago, the local council ordered the owner to sell the property to a Housing Association, and it's since been demolished. A good thing too, probably. Not many were sorry to see it go - as the owner himself once observed (with characteristic understatement) few of his customers were the sort of people you'd want in your front room.
The police and the local authority hailed the cafe's closure as a local success in the "war on drugs". Ironic, really - it was the failure of local drug enforcement strategies in the 1980s that allowed the crack-cocaine trade to take root in the first place.
Still, I'll remember the cafe for the times I had there: in back, behind the counter, eating and talking with the owner and his family. Others will remember it as the place where the Bristol Riots started in 1980. For all of us, it should be a reminder of society's failure to deal with a social menace that continues to disfigure our inner cities.
