A skid row, also called skid road, is an impoverished area, typically urban, in English-speaking North America whose inhabitants are mostly poor people "on the skids". This specifically refers to people who are poor or homeless, considered disreputable, downtrodden or forgotten by society. A skid row may be anything from an impoverished urban district to a red-light district to a gathering area for people experiencing homelessness or drug addiction. In general, skid row areas are inhabited or frequented by impoverished individuals and also people who are addicted to drugs. Urban areas considered skid rows are marked by high vagrancy, dilapidated buildings, and drug dens, as well as other features of urban blight. Used figuratively, the phrase may indicate the state of a poor person's life.
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist, and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls, and bridges throughout the world. His work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist and founding member of the musical group Massive Attack.
St Pauls is an inner suburb of Bristol, England, situated just northeast of the city centre and west of the M32. It is bounded by the A38, the B4051, the A4032 and the A4044, although the River Frome was traditionally the eastern boundary before A4032 was constructed. St Pauls was laid out in the early 18th century as one of Bristol's first suburbs.
Easton is an inner city area of the city of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Informally the area is considered to stretch east of Bristol city centre and the M32 motorway, centred on Lawrence Hill. Its southern and eastern borders are less defined, merging into St Philip's Marsh and Eastville. The area includes the Lawrence Hill and Barton Hill estates.
Thekla is a former cargo ship moored in the Mud Dock area of Bristol's Floating Harbour, England. The ship was built in Germany in 1958 and worked in the coastal trades.
Barton Hill is an area of Bristol, just to the east of the city centre and Bristol Temple Meads railway station.
Stokes Croft is a road in Bristol, England. It is part of the A38, a main road north of the city centre. Locals refer to the area around the road by the same name.
The Carriage Works are in Stokes Croft, Bristol, England.
Gloucester Road is a road in Bristol, England. It runs through the suburbs of St. Andrew's, Bishopston and Horfield and is a part of the A38, a former coaching route north of Bristol to Filton and the M5 Motorway.
Taking the Flak is a comedy drama which aired on BBC Two in summer 2009. It is set in a fictional Central African country that is the middle of a civil war. A team of BBC journalists arrive from London, to the annoyance of the local BBC stringer Harry Chambers, and send reports back to BBC News in London. The series has been described as "a bit like Drop the Dead Donkey meets The Constant Gardener".
The Bristol underground scene is a cultural movement in Bristol beginning in the early 1980s. The scene was born out of a lack of mainstream clubs catering for the emergence of hip hop music, with street and underground parties a mainstay. Crews formed playing hip hop in disused venues with sound systems borrowed from the reggae scene: City Rockers, 2 Bad, 2 Tuff, KC Rock, UD4, FBI, Dirty Den, Juice Crew, Rene & Bacus, Soul Twins, KC Rock, Fresh 4, and the Wild Bunch were among them. These names were the precursors to the more well known names that came from this scene. It is characterized by musicians and graffiti artists. The scene was influenced by the city's multiculturalism, political activism, and the arts movements of punk, reggae, hip hop, hippies and new age.
See No Evil is a collection of works of public art by multiple graffiti artists, located around Nelson Street in Bristol, UK. The artwork was first created in an event in August 2011 that was Europe's largest street art festival at the time. It culminated with a block party. The street was mostly repainted in a repeat event in 2012. The artworks comprise murals of various sizes, in different styles, some painted on tower blocks, including a 10-storey office block. The works were created under a road closure, using scaffolding and aerial work platforms.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
The Mild Mild West is a 1999 mural by graffiti artist Banksy, sited on No. 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol. It depicts a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at three riot police.
Dominique Provost-Chalkley is a British-Canadian actor, best known for their role as Waverly Earp on the television series Wynonna Earp.
Well Hung Lover, also called Naked Man Hanging From Window and simply Naked Man, is a mural by the anonymous street artist Banksy, on a wall in Frogmore Street, Bristol, England.
Westmoreland House was a building at Nos. 104–106 Stokes Croft, Bristol, next door to the Carriage Works.
Elena Whitham is a Scottish National Party (SNP) Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP). She was elected in 2021 to represent Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley. Since March 2023 she has held the junior post of Minister for Drugs and Alcohol Policy. Previously, she was Minister for Community Safety in November 2022 under First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, following the resignation of Ash Regan.
The Outlaws is a crime thriller comedy television series created by Elgin James and Stephen Merchant, and directed by Merchant and John Butler. It is shown on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK and Amazon Prime Video in some international territories. Filming of series 1 was halted in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2021 it was confirmed that a second series had been ordered, with series 1 production resuming in February 2021. It was later confirmed that both series had been filmed back to back. A third series began airing on BBC One in May 2024.
