I've worked just around the corner from Portland Square for a few years now. And the studio where I recorded this track and the album it comes from is on the Square itself. I walk through it pretty much every day.

When I first moved to Bristol, maybe fifteen years ago, Portland Square was home to the homeless, to dealers and sex workers and to their customers. The Square and the streets surrounding it were a little edgy to say the least. But it was also a place where young, artistically minded folk could live cheaply. Today it is both the beneficiary and the victim of the gentrification of inner city Bristol. Where years ago squatters turned their noses up at derelict spaces on and around Portland Square, as I write this, there is a basement apartment for sale at an asking price of �665,000.

Another area rich in creativity, populated by musicians, artists, writers, DIY promoters of events is being slowly but surely eroded by market forces. The people that make an area desirable so often end up unable to continue living in it.

I wrote the song a couple of years ago and is loosely about how easy it can be to sleepwalk into prisons of our own design.