‘Are You Looking for a Body?’: Excavating Contemporary Homeless Places

Abstract

About halfway up Stokes Croft, Bristol, there is an area known locally as Turbo Island. It remains an unassuming triangle of land that, about five metres at its widest point, houses an advertising billboard and an electricity substation. Turbo Island was once the site of three buildings—71 to 73 Stokes Croft—that received a direct hit from a 400 lb bomb during a Second World War air raid. The foundations of the buildings remain and form a wall upon which homeless people have been known to sit, chat, and drink for several decades. The name ‘Turbo Island’ is said to derive from the amount of ‘turbo’—that is, super-strength—cider that homeless people consume at the site, cultural linguistic evidence perhaps of Turbo Island being a homeless place, a place that belongs to homeless people. Turbo Island also happens to be directly opposite the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC) headquarters (32 Jamaica Street). It was one of the first places that PRSC attempted to promote the idea that we—the wider local community—could collectively and collaboratively improve Stokes Croft for the enjoyment of everyone if we took responsibility for simple things. For example, if we collected litter, kept the streets clean and tidy, and cared for the few green spaces we had to make the area a more attractive, healthy place to spend time. It was in this vein that PRSC installed a picnic table painted with a chessboard,1 so that people who used Turbo Island had somewhere to sit and something to do. Turbo Island was (and remains to this day) a nexus point for homeless people. It was often where I first met homeless people with whom I went on to develop close working relationships. It was the place to which people most commonly returned. One afternoon, after a particularly long day of ethnographic mapping, I dived into Abdul’s convenience store to buy myself and Little Tom a drink before we crossed the street to sit on Turbo Island.