“Am I de only person, who still cannot ber-lieve, dat der is a beach in Bristaaahl!” It’s five o clock on Tuesday afternoon, and as the late afternoon sun bounces up off the Avon, Althea and Donna are shuddering out over the beach.

Children enjoying the school holidays are digging holes and and making piles of sand around their parents, twenty-somethings and students are building up in huddles supping beer from plastic cups, pensioners lie back on deck chairs hiding their eyes behind floppy sun-hats. At the front of the beach somebody is selling battered paperbacks off a wallpapering table, to the left there is a dancing workshop and to the right a mixture of people are gathering for a speed-dating ideas-exchange event. 

This is the Bristol Urban Beach - an attempt by Melissa Mean, head of the Self-Build Cities programme to create a new kind of public space in Bristol by creating a beach for 6 weeks. Drawing on ideas developed in People Make Places and The Dreaming City the Bristol Urban Beach aims to bring different groups of people together from across the city and provide a new type of community asset for the city. In this podcast, made on the Beach itself, Melissa explains how it happened and why on earth, of all things, a think tank should be involved in building a beach....

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