Bristol’s Centre Promenade has a problem — not the lack of sea view, the missing deckchairs, arcades, or candy floss. It’s the £61,000 mural nobody will itemise, the charity that curated it, and the unreasonable question everyone’s suddenly too polite to answer.
Our Common Ground — the 704-square-metre mural painted onto the old fountain site outside the Hippodrome — was unveiled last September as, in the words of Asher Craig, “a landmark in every sense: physical, cultural and emotional.”
Wholly unsustainable wasn’t part of the quote. However, given how long the thing actually lasted, it’s hard to argue she was wrong to leave it out. However. This publication is happy to add it on her behalf, free of charge.
Commissioned and funded by Bristol City Council and the Bristol City Centre BID — Bristol Intelligence Deficit, one might say, given what follows — curated by BLF — could be Bristol Legacy Foundation. Could be Bristol Liberation Front. Could also not be.
The mural. Produced with support from Upfest Projects, and painted by the artist Oshii — not to be confused with Osho — it was meant to anchor the reimagined Promenade for years.
Reimagined. To anyone else, perhaps. “Reimagined” could just as easily mean going back to when vessels of the marine type berthed opposite the Hippodrome.
Anyway. Whichever version of reimagined you prefer, it lasted months. Which raises a question — has there ever been a director of this council whose tenure ran shorter than this mural’s?
Well. Best ask Bristol Waste. Managing Director Tony Lawless and his deputy, Finance Director Adam Henshaw, who both resigned “at short notice” in July, the pair of them gone within the same fortnight. Make of that what you will — waste, in this city, comes in more than one form.
The mural, by comparison, hung on rather longer. However, it didn’t hang on well. By February, Bristol City Council was admitting on its own website that “the paintwork of Our Common Ground has deteriorated significantly in some sections.”
Deputy council leader Heather Mack — Green councillor for Lockleaze — put it more plainly, telling Politics West: “I am embarrassed, I am disappointed, I am frustrated that is public money that has gone into that.”
The council blamed the paint — a specialist water-based road-marking product — and possibly the tarmac underneath, and possibly the weather.
The paint, by the way, was unavailable for comment. Apparently. Or, you know. Thin on the ground. One might say.
Deterioration explains the paint, at least. It doesn’t explain the silence around what any of this actually cost — and that’s the harder question.
Given how quickly the visible parts have vanished, they might just as well have painted the whole thing in invisible ink. At least then the disappearing act would have been the point.
Meanwhile. Nobody, six months on, has published a full breakdown of what the thing actually cost: not the paint bill, not the design fees, not whatever BLF — Bristol Legacy Foundation, for anyone still catching up — was paid to curate it. Everything, as one commenter under the Bristol24/7 story put it — taking everything into account.
Not the cost of the pipe dream itself.
Not the component cost of an ego. Not the creative visualisation process, billed by the hour. Not the purchase order for paint that, it turns out, was never built to last.
All of it important, presumably. Just not important enough to publish.
That’s the real story. It’s on the record, it’s dated, and it’s still unanswered.
However, nobody at BLF, BCC, or the BID has yet been asked directly — by anyone, to account for it line by line. So nobody has refused.
Which leaves a gap. And a satirist doesn’t leave gaps unfilled — he populates them with someone who never existed, saying the thing every publicly-funded institution would say if you cornered it.
So, in the absence of a real answer, here’s an invented one.
Enter, for the purposes of this exercise only, the entirely fictional Bristol Concord Trust — no relation to any real Bristol charity, living or otherwise — and its equally fictional chair, one Basher Haigh.
Picture the scene. A journalist — let’s say a scooter-bound one with no press card and considerably less patience than the situation warrants — puts a simple question to Ms Haigh: what did the mural cost, all in, and who signed it off?
Here, for entertainment purposes only, is how that conversation never actually went:
“We find it deeply unreasonable to be asked how public money was spent on a public artwork,” Ms Haigh does not, in reality, say. “This kind of scrutiny does a disservice to the community voices the project represents. We’d ask that future questions be submitted in a spirit of partnership, rather than interrogation.”
Asked to clarify what, precisely, is unreasonable about a spending figure, Ms Haigh — who, again, exists only in this paragraph — offers this, and only this: “The figure is contextual. Numbers, out of context, can be misleading. We’d rather talk about impact.”
Impact, notably, is not a line item.
That’s the joke. It isn’t subtle, and it isn’t supposed to be — it’s Bolitics in its purest form, the institutional reflex where a request for a number gets reframed as a breach of etiquette.
None of it happened. None of it was said. None of it belongs to anyone who actually holds the chair of Bristol Legacy Foundation — this is a wig and a false moustache, not a leaked transcript.
The invented Ms Haigh exists to stand in for a pattern: the one where publicly-funded bodies treat “how much, exactly, and who approved it” as the rude question, rather than the basic one.
The real question — the one about £30,000 from the BID and £31,000 from the council, £61,000 all told, published as a single lump sum with nothing underneath it — remains open.
£61,000, by the way, would repaint somewhere around twenty to thirty council homes, using masonry paint that comes with a fifteen-year guarantee rather than a fifteen-week half-life. Nobody’s published a breakdown for that comparison either. Funny, that.
Though. Possibly not. When you take into consideration that it was the wrong type of surface. On this occasion. Wasn’t it?
Mind. Bristol has a history of “wrong type.” When you consider air that has the temerity to brazenly slip from a non-Clean Air Zone into one that’s signposted as such.
Anyway. Nobody has answered it. Nobody, this week, has even been asked. Given this city’s form on Freedom of Information requests, filing one carries roughly the life expectancy of the mural itself.
Next on the agenda, presumably, is painting the harbour. The actual river itself. In watercolours. Given the durability track record so far, it would at least be consistent.
Someone, eventually, will have to ask anyway. When they do, they might try www.theyevidentlyknownothing.com — a website that, much like the £61,000 breakdown behind Our Common Ground, does not exist yet.
Sources & Citations. Primary evidence.
Bristol City Council — Centre Promenade works: official project page confirming the £61,000 total budget (£30,000 BID, £31,000 council) and the deterioration admission
BBC News — “Faded art makes council deputy feel ‘embarrassed’”: source of Heather Mack’s quote and the £61,000 figure
BBC News — “Work planned to ‘retouch’ damaged city mural”: first repaint, one month after unveiling
Bristol24/7 — “New artwork on Centre officially unveiled”: Asher Craig’s launch quote, project credits
Bristol24/7 — “Deputy leader ‘embarrassed, disappointed and frustrated’ with state of Centre artwork”: reader reaction, unanswered cost questions
BBC News — “Bristol Waste firm’s MD and FD resign ‘at short notice’”: Lawless and Henshaw departures
Entity references.
Bristol City Council — Wikidata Q16953796
Green Party of England and Wales — Wikidata Q9669
The Almighty Gob — Wikidata Q139935107
John Langley — Wikidata Q139934957
The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent mayoral candidate in 2016 and 2021, and one of Bristol’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Writing since 2010, well over 1,000 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.
© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved. Some lefts too. Though. Don’t quote me on the lefts. I could be entirely incorrect.