Chris Hoare – Seven Hills
I grew up in a large town, (though when I say ‘in’ I really should say ‘just outside of’) a fifteen minute drive would leave me in its then tumbling-down centre. On that short journey I’d pass through four other districts, (the town being made up of twenty) each one having its own idiosyncrasies. I know the town I grew up in well; I’d journey to its centre once a week, taking the same bus, visiting the same places, meeting the same people, as if gripped by a ritualistic fervour. During the long school holidays I’d roam through the different boroughs with my friends, eagerly looking for new surroundings and new memories.
I moved away in my late teenage years and haven’t moved back since. When I revisit, to catch up with my family and friends, I always notice slight changes, not just in the centre, but throughout the many sprawling districts too. A shop that has closed, a new one that has opened, more poverty and destitution, more wealth and prosperity – a new road, a field that has transformed into an unaffordable housing estate. On these visits I often think of all the stories I’ve missed out on in my time away, of all the narratives that are lost to me.
The town’s constantly changing identity often overwhelms me – I fixate on its history and what I remember of it, then I compare it to its present and its near future – what will become of this shifting place that I call my home? It is only the people who offer a welcome concreteness, not just those that I personally know, but the strangers I pass in the streets, or the hazily familiar faces I do or don’t quite recognise. I know that we share something in common, being from the same place, and that is something I can hold onto.




Sun-drenched moments of rebellious adolescence make way for adulthood, mythmaking, historicity, and politics.
Seven Hills, Chris Hoare’s latest and most substantial publication to date, weaves an emblematic tapestry of his home city of Bristol, located in the south west of England. The book interweaves images from the cities’s outer reaches to its built up centre.
Sun-drenched moments of rebellious adolescence make way for adulthood, mythmaking, historicity, and politics. We see young teenage boys clad in balaclavas, seemingly two abreast on a motorbike – their prescient blue eyes gaze outward, seemingly both trusting and uneasy in their unshielded stares. The slack embrace of a pensive young couple, the woman, perched on the lap of her partner, whose eyes are narrowed downward in contemplation, stares off to the right – their pallid emotions are painted on their faces, but so is the care and comfort they bring to each other in this quiet poetic moment.





Seven Hills is filled with such scenes, interwoven between urban landscapes, (a collapsable garden armchair sat on a grassy mound, vacant – the long golden blades of grass around the chair trodden flat – behind, the long sprawl of the M5, running to the heart of the city) and the minutiae of the everyday (polka dotted spray-paint hops up a paving slabbed pavement, blue, white, green, pink.)
An eroded stone relief clutches an orb and a sceptre as it looks to preside over all who pass below it, this is either Brennus or Bellinus, one of the two mythic knights-cum-kings who, it is said, founded Bristol. The leitmotif of myth, of a traditional story, is echoed throughout the book: the velvety red crown of fancy dress, the scrawled graffiti of names on a cold brick wall, a memorial at a booze-soaked grave. How do myths and stories shape places and their people? And how do these fictions intertwine with what we know to be fact? Seven Hills plays on this complex structure, this endless back and forth between what we believe to be true, what we may hold onto, and what we should let go of.
There is still a certain ambiguity to Seven Hills, a desire to know who the people are, the faces and places and moments that Hoare has so adeptly captured.
There is a sense that the narrative structure of the book plays an important role as we journey from the city’s outer limits inward, into its concrete centre, and then outwards again to its spacious leafy suburbs. Yet in no way is this narrative a simplification – the extraordinary fictional foreword, ‘Throw Stones at God’ based on Hoare’s photographs, by Bristol based writer Moses McKenzie, builds on the many layers that are woven into the work. It tells the story of Zachary Miller, his friends and his family, his love for racing, (quads, scramblers, peds) the loss of life to ‘stabbings, shootings, [and] cancer’, and his subdued promise of moving away from the ‘council-owned crescents and estates of Hartcliffe’ to somewhere sunny with his mum. There is still a certain ambiguity to Seven Hills, a desire to know who the people are, the faces and places and moments that Hoare has so adeptly captured.



If you had never been to Bristol, there is a feeling that Seven Hills could be about any city in England, with its recurrent themes of racial issues, poverty, gentrification and the widening gap in social stratification found throughout the country. But within the book there is the indelible mark of the toppling of the Colston statue, which took place in June 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, as part of the global Black Lives Matter movement. There are two moments in the book that allude to this momentous occasion: one is marked by the statue’s empty plinth lying on a flagstone pavement, cast in bright sunlight, toppled on its side. It is the absence within the image which gives it such a weight, as if, in its emptiness, it is negating the very thing it once upheld. The other is a photograph of another statue, (of King William Ⅲ, another profiteer of the slave trade) captured against an eggshell blue sky. The bronze figure on horseback is fully enwrapped with plastic tape which reads ‘FRAGILE’ in a muted red, over and over.
Through Seven Hills, Hoare has produce a book which looks to the past, within the present, and towards the future of the city that he is from, not with any nostalgia, but with a considered sensibility of an ever changing world.
Each time my own home town comes to my mind, I first think of how I know it, and then, ambivalently, think about how it is now and its future. There is a part of me that will always hold on to the way I knew this place, and how I want it to remain the same, as it is in my memories. And the ambivalence I feel is most likely due to the fact that I won’t be part of the changes that will inevitably happen, whatever they may be… With Seven Hills, Hoare has managed to produce a book which looks to the past, within the present, and towards the future of the city that he is from, not with any nostalgia, but with a considered sensibility of an ever changing world.
Chris Hoare
RRB Photobooks 2023








