YOU ARE ARRIVING ...IN BRISTOLBATH

JOHN Savage CBE is a man with a vision. But he admits, you might not like it.

Let’s step forward into the future imagined by John, the 66-year-old executive president of GWE Business West – the mighty “chamber of commerce” organisation for the region.

John wants to wind the clock forward to present his ideal vision of how Bristol should be in 2050. The city, he assures me, will have changed beyond all recognition.

For a start, and rather fundamentally, John thinks it will no longer be called Bristol.

“The city needs to keep expanding, and I think by 2050, Bristol and Bath will have met in the middle to form one greater conurbation, which will probably be called BristolBath,” he says, as he leads the way across his office.

“Or maybe it will just be called Greater Bristol – people in Oldham or Bolton are happy enough to be a part of Greater Manchester because they understand the difference it makes to the economy of their region. So it’s not as strange as it might at first sound,” he adds.

We are in the organisation’s grand headquarters amid the Georgian splendour of Leigh Court – a converted country pile on the outskirts of Abbots Leigh.

John stands beside a conference table, upon which a large map of the region has bold marker-pen lines scribbled across it to denote the shape the new super-city might take.

“You really think people in Bath, or for that matter, Keynsham, would let this happen?” I ask.

John slaps the map theatrically, and bellows: “It will happen. We must make it happen!” As a grin breaks open across his face halfway through the second sentence, it becomes clear that there is more than a hint of irony in his tone.

In fact, John is taking his vision of Bristol in 2050 very seriously – the organisation has spent around £250,000 employing a team of town planning experts to come up with a “blueprint” for the city 40 years hence.

The vision will be published in an all-encompassing hard-backed coffee table book next May – a book that John hopes will be used as a guide to the direction the city should take over the next couple of generations.

The project is inspired by a similar city-plan created in Chicago in 1909.

“The Chicago plan was created by an incredible town planner called Daniel Burnham,” John explains, lifting a copy of the 1909 tome from his desk.

“He envisioned growth in the city that ordinary Chicago folk couldn’t have imaged in 1909, and the remarkable thing was the authorities in Chicago stuck to the plan – and the economic rewards were pretty much as Burnham had predicted.

“He made a few major errors – for a start, he didn’t foresee the rise of the motor car – which was quite a significant mistake – but generally his plan helped shape one of America’s most prosperous cities.”

John is ambitious enough to believe the same can be done in this century for Bristol.

But lack of ambition seems never to have been a problem for John. For a time, as a young man, he felt he would become a priest, but it was a career in business – with a high-flying executive post with Associated Newspapers – that took him away from the high-rise council flat poverty of his childhood.

But at the height of his career, 20 years ago, he had another calling – he took on the top job at Business West with the dream of making Bristol a major economic powerhouse.

“The city was in a bad way after the St Paul’s Riots in the 1980s,” he recalls. “To say it was a calling may be going a bit far, but I am a religious man, and I certainly felt the Big Man upstairs had some sort of plan for me to make a significant difference somewhere.

“When I saw the poverty that existed in parts of South Bristol, I was transported straight back to the poverty of my own childhood, and I felt I wanted to work to make a difference to the lives of these people.

“The cycle of multi-generational poverty that I could see happening to people here was unbelievable – not the sort of thing you would expect to see in modern-day Britain.

“I suppose that’s why 20 years on, I’m still doing this job – despite the fact I’d only intended to stay here for three years.”

John believes passionately that the way to get communities out of poverty is by well-managed expansion of the city to create a greater economic powerhouse for the West Country.

“You’ve got to sell the city to businesses to encourage inward investment,” he says. “But there is an imbalance of jobs between the north and the south of the city – we need to encourage more industry into south Bristol if we’re going to lift people out of poverty.”

That’s why, as well as scrapping the green belt between Bristol and Bath, John would like to see a “dog-leg” of green-field expansion of the city out towards, and encompassing, Bristol Airport over the next four decades.

The blueprint contains plenty of other scenarios that will raise an eyebrow or two from environmentalists.

“One of the things I would like to see is a lock gate at the end of the River Avon,” John says. “That way we could stop the river being tidal, which would open it up for all kinds of water sports.

“Big scale leisure projects like a water park through the city stretch of the Avon can bring in a lot of investment into the city.

“I know there’s probably some rare worm that only lives in the mud flats of the Avon at low tide – the green brigade is bound to come up with something along those lines,” John chortles. “But you have to balance the benefits for the city.

“As we’ve seen with the football stadium, the dissenting voices are often the minority, but they really can stop progress for a city like Bristol.”

But it is transport that will be the big focus of the Bristol 2050 plan.

“At the moment we don’t have a public transport in this country – not a proper public transport,” he says. “The whole thing is a mess, and it needs to be sorted out, because I believe by 2050, very few people will be able to afford to run their own private cars.

“The idea that we all tootle around the city in our own bubbles is going to go out of the window,” he says. “At least, that’s what I believe.

“Imagine if we had a proper tram system connecting all the outlaying suburbs, so people really could get to their place of work quickly and cheaply,” he says, with real passion.

“Bristol ranks about 35th in the list of European cities’ GDP, second only to London in the UK, but we’re working at 40 per cent of the capacity of Frankfurt – Europe’s most prosperous powerhouse. I believe we can do better than that.

“The