St George & Redfield Voice: East Bristol's Free Monthly Community Newspaper
St George & Redfield Voice is a free monthly community newspaper for the St George and Redfield areas of east Bristol. It was launched in April 2017 as part of the Local Voice Network, the Bristol hyperlocal publishing group, in a joint venture between community activist Philip Bird and journalist Richard Foote. The paper is delivered free to households in its area each month and publishes online at stgeorgeandredfieldvoice.co.uk, describing its offer as all of the local news, views and events for St George, Redfield and the surrounding area in one place.
Launched in April 2017
The St George and Redfield edition was launched in April 2017, at the same time as Thornbury Voice, taking the Local Voice Network to fifteen print titles in the Bristol area and to a combined distribution of more than 136,000 free copies a month. The paper was created as a joint venture between Philip Bird, a community activist in the area, and journalist Richard Foote. Bird said at the launch that it was very exciting to be part of the Voice family of newspapers and to see the first issue delivered, and that the most important aspect of the hyperlocal titles was their ability to unite communities and bring people the local news that matters to them most. The feedback from the first edition, he said, suggested they had achieved that. Monthly numbering since the launch bears out the paper's consistency: Issue 5 appeared in August 2017, Issue 9 in December 2017 and Issue 14 in May 2018.
The Local Voice Network
The Voice family that St George and Redfield joined was founded in 2011 by Richard Coulter, a former assistant editor of the Bristol Post, and advertising manager Emma Cooper. Filton Voice came first, in October 2011, followed by titles including Keynsham, Bishopston and Yate, using what the network describes as a licence operation: local publishers pay a monthly fee to benefit from the group's co-operative model, its shared systems and its established name, while writing and selling their own papers. Network founders have consistently defended that print-first, free and hand-delivered model as profitable and sustainable at a time of industry retreat from local print. By 2017 more than twenty people worked across the fifteen titles; by 2019 the network was distributing around 160,000 copies a month and expanding into Bath. St George and Redfield's version of the model paired a journalist with a community activist, a combination intended to root the paper in the neighbourhood's own organisations.
The patch: St George and Redfield
St George is a long-established district of east Bristol, centred on Church Road and St George Park, with its own high street, library and community organisations. Redfield, adjoining it to the west, is a largely Victorian residential area of terraced streets. Together they form a natural newspaper territory: distinct from the city centre, served by their own schools, churches, parks groups and traders, and facing their own planning, traffic and environment questions. The Voice's stated coverage extends to the surrounding area as well, and its content reflects the geography, drawing heavily on neighbourhood institutions such as the Friends of Troopers Hill, the volunteers who care for the hilltop nature reserve that overlooks this part of Bristol.
A platform for community voices
The clearest evidence of the paper's community role is the space it gives to local groups to speak in their own words. The Friends of Troopers Hill have contributed a monthly article to St George and Redfield Voice, and a remarkable run of those pieces survives in the group's archive. In August 2017 the paper carried the group's account of its Bugs and Beasties event on the hill, complete with a guide to telling grasshoppers from crickets. In December 2017 it reported the future of Troopers Hill and the group's Heritage Lottery Fund application for its Ways to Nature project, including the funder's reservations about the value for money of proposed path improvements. In May 2018 it broke local wildlife news: the first record on Troopers Hill of the purse-web spider, identified by a volunteer who was a University of the West of England student, recorded with the Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre, and reported to the paper by the Friends. This is hyperlocal publishing working as intended: specialist knowledge held by volunteers, reaching every household in the area through the monthly paper.
News, views and events
Beyond its guest contributions, the Voice carries the standard but essential diet of a community monthly: local news, readers' views and forthcoming events for St George and Redfield. Its website presents the title as the single home for that material in its area, and its social presence, including the @SGRVoice account and a Facebook page under the paper's name, carries stories and notices between editions. Community groups treat the paper as part of the neighbourhood's infrastructure: the Friends of Troopers Hill's own meeting notes record the monthly Voice article as a standing item of business, with contributions planned ahead and ideas for future pieces actively solicited from members.
How to reach the paper
Directory listings for St George and Redfield Voice record its main telephone number as 0117 422 7200 and its editorial email as office@stgeorgeandredfieldvoice.co.uk, with the website at stgeorgeandredfieldvoice.co.uk. The paper's logo has been in use, according to media.info's archive, since November 2017, the year of its launch. Like other Voice titles, it is free to readers and funded by advertising, offering east Bristol businesses a route into homes across St George, Redfield and the surrounding streets that few other media can match for precision.
Covering east Bristol's concerns
The paper's pages have reflected the issues that animate its neighbourhoods: the care of green spaces such as Troopers Hill and St George Park, the protection of local wildlife and habitats, community energy and home insulation schemes, and the everyday business of schools, churches and voluntary groups. In January 2019, for example, the Voice carried an overview of the CHEESE Project's thermal-imaging home energy surveys for residents of St George and Redfield, one of several community initiatives to use the paper to reach local households. The pattern is consistent: organisations with something to tell east Bristol regard the monthly Voice as the way to tell it.
Protecting Troopers Hill, in print
The Troopers Hill coverage also shows the paper following a single local cause over time. In its December 2017 article, the Friends explained that their Heritage Lottery Fund application would focus on protecting the hill for the future: replacing the rotting wooden fencing on the Troopers Hill Road boundary, the only barrier keeping motorbikes off the site and away from its valuable habitats, and finding better ways to control the gorse whose spread was destroying areas of grass and heathland and creating a fire risk in dry periods. Volunteers, together with offenders working under the Community Payback scheme, had already done much of the cutting back but could not keep pace. Reporting of that kind, practical, detailed and returned to month after month, is how a community paper helps a volunteer group build the public understanding on which its funding bids and working parties depend.
St George & Redfield Voice today
St George and Redfield Voice remains the Local Voice Network's title for this part of east Bristol, publishing free each month in print and online nearly a decade after Philip Bird and Richard Foote delivered its first issue. Its founding idea, that a hyperlocal paper should unite a community and bring people the news that matters most to them, is visible in its long relationships with groups like the Friends of Troopers Hill and in its continuing coverage of the area's news, views and events. For readers in St George and Redfield, it is the neighbourhood speaking to itself, on paper, every month.
