CROFT
CROFT
CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Annie Davey & Cerys Larsen
MANAGING EDITOR
Shayma Al Saraf
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Anushka Holding-Savic
Social Commentary
CO-HEAD EDITORS
Ronnie Sadé
Rosie Moore
Arts & Culture
CO-HEAD EDITORS
Sophie Chin
Erina Mannan
Wellbeing
CO-HEAD EDITORS
Lydia Lewis
Alice Williams
Travel
HEAD EDITOR
Emily Peyton
Fashion
CO-HEAD EDITORS
Siân Clarke
Ollie Quinn
Alice Graves
Music
HEAD EDITOR
Iris Eastaugh
Photography
Lilah Mai Culliford
Anushka Holding
COPY EDITOR
Ronnie Sadé
SOCIAL MEDIA
Anushka Holding
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Anushka Holding
COVER
Anushka Holding
EDITORS' LETTER
As the term comes to a close, we stretch out from the long hours hunched over desks and attempt to recover ourselves from the library fatigue. After months of rigid routines and projects that have become a part of us, the end has arrived: some of us breathe a sigh of relief, others feel the weight of uncertainty, and for many, there’s a thrill as we step into the freedom of summer.
Yet, in this anticipation, we are left staring into the unknown. At every stage of university, this period brings something different. As final years, we are experiencing a tapestry of emotions that is difficult to describe: at once nostalgic, joyful, bittersweet, and unsettling. The people and places that have become our family, and the routines we’ve grown so accustomed to, will soon be behind us.
The theme of this issue, ‘re-’, draws on the seasonal shift we are experiencing; nature renews as the flowers bloom, the sun lingers longer, and the air pulses with the promise of rebirth. Personally, we too are at a crossroads, asking: What now? Where next? We mirror the season, eager to discover our next chapter.
This issue was assembled during the chaos of exams and dissertations with remarkable speed. Across the following pages, we focus on art and visual pieces to encourage in our readers an appreciation for the power of the arts in shaping how we see ourselves and the world. The shorter written pieces offer, we hope, a glimpse of poignant reflection in the whirlwind of post-exam life.
As we look ahead, we are proud of how The Croft has engaged with the socio-political climate we face both on campus and across our global communities. Even as we embrace the essence of renewal, we remain aware of the relentless horrors that continue to unfold around the world. It is our hope that our communities continue to make space for diverse voices and stories. We leave our readers with a message of hope: despite the darkness, disinformation, and uncertainty, our words and our art have the power to shape the future. With each issue, we hope to have exhibited the talent, resilience, and hope our generation has to offer.
This edition is full of personal reflections that we hope resonate with our readers, reminding us of the shared emotions and challenges that connect us all. We are very grateful to everyone who contributed to our project this year. Our editorial team, our writers, our artists, as well as our musicians and event venues, remind us of the weight of human connection in an increasingly digital world.
No matter how many times we feel called to renew, we hope to always make time for reflection. Hope is, after all, something we all share.
Lots of love, Annie, Cerys, Shayma and Anushka from The Croft Executive Team <3
Re-bordering: How the Sea Became a Political Stage
Cerys Larsen
In the wake of significant local election gains by Reform UK – a party that has cultivated and harnessed pervasive anti-immigration sentiment – Prime Minister Keir Starmer unveiled plans for new migration policies and delivered a warning that the UK risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’. Criticised for language that appeared to echo Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Starmer has defended his phrasing, insisting it reflects the need for managed migration to promote community cohesion and integration.
Starmer has reanimated the potent symbol of Britain as an island that has gained renewed political salience in the past decade: from the divisive campaign to leave the European Union in 2016 to the growing media visibility of migrant crossings in the English Channel. He leans into the island-image of Britain – insular and protected by the surrounding seas – as a symbolic measure to both isolate and exclude. Britain is re-bordered; Starmer has staged a political performance of control at a time of perceived instability.
Since November 2018, the English Channel has seen a growing number of migrants attempting to cross from Calais to Dover in so-called ‘small boats’. Although these crossings represent a relatively small number of total migrant arrivals and asylum claims, they are often disproportionately over-represented in media and political campaigns. In recent years, political messaging and media coverage of the crossings have revived historical visions of the Channel as a natural barrier that protects national interests and defines Britain as detached from Europe and the rest of the world.
Amplified by a media landscape that shapes public perception and political debate, the Channel crossings are turned into a spectacle used to justify increasingly harsh border policies, including heightened surveillance around Calais and the UK border. Those seeking refuge on British shores are pushed into evermore dangerous journeys across these waters. As safe and legal migration routes have all but vanished, the ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ framing of these crossings has been harnessed in the political and media narrative to criminalise the very act of movement across the Channel.
In this re-bordering, however, Britain tends to forget its deep and entangled history with the sea. Britain has long struggled to effectively acknowledge its role in the forced migration of millions of enslaved people across the Atlantic: a history that contributed in no small part to the wealth of modern Britain. A belief in the restless, openness of the sea, as not so much a boundary but a route that carried power and people across the globe, was fundamental to this colonial and imperial history. Our selective memory reveals how a historic ambition to capitalise on the mobility of the oceans, attempting to effectively monopolise these spaces, continues in an effort to shape how these waters are understood in today’s political landscape.
By returning to the island-image, Starmer reinscribes national geography with a narrative that supports the government’s agenda. Yet this is not a new phenomenon. It is no coincidence that the Conservative party’s promise to ‘Stop the Boats’ was first adopted by politicians in Australia, another island nation. The slogan casts the island and its surrounding seas in binary terms – inside versus outside – and frames migrants undertaking the crossings as threats to be contained and expelled. In a recent interview, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak conceded that the slogan was ‘too stark’ and ‘too binary’. Because the Channel crossings are, of course, rooted in complex geopolitical realities of forced movement. These journeys confront politicians with a truth that they struggle to accept: Britain cannot control human mobilities at sea by simply controlling the narrative.
Those crossing the watery borderlands of the English Channel are not abstract threats. They are human beings, navigating the world’s busiest ocean shipping lane and one of its most dangerous migration routes. Yet political and media narratives, shaped by bounded metaphors of isolation and exclusion, often obscure this reality, framing the sea as unbreachable and seeking to reinforce the illusion of control that the island-image affords. But the sea has never truly kept the world out and, crucially, this rhetoric might weaken our ability to foster the community that Starmer warns we are at risk of losing.
Returning Home, Romanticising the Past
Growing up, I always associated the word ‘home’ with the place my parents lived, the place I left from every morning and returned to every evening. Since moving to university, however, my understanding of this word has changed; I have become wary of returning home because of the nostalgia it evokes. It is no longer the place of comfort it used to be.
Last week I moved out of my flat in Bristol. With coursework finished and exams over, it was time for my summer to begin. I felt so far away from the type of person I was at university, a place where I had become more independent and confident and being back in my home town meant regularly walking past all the places that marked out my childhood. I passed my old primary school and students in my old PE kit on my way to work. I felt like I had changed while everything around me refused to follow suit.
I think I have always felt this strong attachment to certain places. The longer I stay in one place, the more chance there is of memories becoming attached. Sometimes I like this; I associate Brandon Hill with picnics on sunny days and the White Bear with pub crawls last year. But this is more complicated when it comes to my home town and the house I spent over 18 years growing up in. I can’t seem to take a single step without encountering something that reminds me of the past, my life before university. Even the thought of A-level revision and failed friendships stirs up a sense of nostalgia. This is probably just a case of looking back on the past with rose-tinted glasses. l know I don’t want to go back but moving forwards also seems scary, especially in the place that was the backdrop to my younger years, so I get stuck in this cycle of nostalgic longing.
Place nostalgia is not unusual. It is normal to associate a place like my home town with memories of growing up, but this does not mean returning there should trap me in the past. Perhaps I should try to create fresh memories at home, to bring a bit of my uni-self back with me. It does not have to be anything drastic, but just cooking dinner for my family shows that I am taking on new responsibilities. As a student, I am living in two cities with two different sets of friends and two very different lifestyles. But this is something to feel grateful for, so it is time I stopped romanticising the past.
Reposting doesn’t feel as radical anymore
Ronnie Sadé
A key tenet of my peers’ and my engagement/discourse with global issues rests on an emphasis on openness, of the heart and thus the mind. I take that very seriously and endeavour to use this productively, even if I don’t necessarily feel its impact.
However, I increasingly feel that the scale and parameters under which we hold ourselves accountable to this principle are becoming slightly out of control. More specifically, I am referring to social media activism.
We use social media as a tool to depict our identities - who we spend time with, how frequently, where this takes place, what we’re eating, etc. It is an intentional and curated performance of one’s sense of self.
Importantly, in recent years, social media activism has become an important measure of one’s loyalty to certain causes/ideals. But to what extent? If I don’t post about something, do people assume I don’t care? How do I decide which parts of my political identity are ‘shareable’?
Your silence makes you complicit is a notion that resonates with me. In the sense that I think we should be encouraging one another to engage critically with the world around us and be explicit in our solidarity. However, the way we are using social media to discuss global issues is, inadvertently/ironically, deterring me from partaking.
We unanimously accept the performative and often inauthentic nature of social media, and I am finding it hard to exclude waves of activism from this. This is compounded by the reactive and polarising pressure to declare one’s stance on global issues via reposting. Do I need to care, or just prove to you that I care, and is that enough for you? Where do you draw the line and is this productive?
My issue is not social media activism in a vacuum. It is accessible and widespread and has been a crucial vessel for so many causes. Also, I feel like I’m at this purgatorial stage of life where I know what I care about and am keen on discussing it, but struggle to have a widespread, tangible impact. The most digestible way to do this is to spread the word. I wholly accept that and do not take that for granted.
I am more so preoccupied with whether reposting is as radical as we think it is anymore; are we just ticking a box?
This leaves me wondering if it is productive to treat our approach to social media activism as foolproof. It is important that we critically engage with the means through which we form political consciousness within ourselves and others. And keeping this in mind, I find myself often thinking - when the one channel through which we can communicate our positions on current discourse is one which is inherently performative, how do we exclude our activism from falling into similar traps? It is wholly for the cause? Or to pacify an anxiety of others’ perception of us?
Praha
Ernesto & Carlos
Lilah Mai Culliford
Jude & Theo
Lilah Mai Culliford
Pool
Lilah Mai Culliford
Anushka Holding
Bibi
In Which She is Bodmin Moor
In the starless night she has endowed me with a name just as the winter rain becomes bottomless Dozmary.
The fox stills, low, aching, on the open field. If instinct is a compass then new blood is North: two unblinking eyes upon a leveret.
Her thigh is warm as the seared grass where four teenagers lit a campfire. Her milk belly unfurls, waxing moon.
I am the smooth pebble dampening under her tongue, she rolls me in the same yawning mouth that bore a red-billed chough — it climbed, slick, out of the dark to perch on her bottom teeth and survey his peat dominion.
If she is the wide-open landscape, then I speak only to return what has always belonged to her.
Olive Mills
Anushka Holding
Born Again: Why Our Obsession with Reinvention Runs Deep
Caroline O’Beirne
What does it mean to redefine your life? For some, it involves developing a new beauty and fitness regime to achieve certain beauty standards. For others, it is about setting new career goals or practising mindfulness and gratitude. As a whole, our society is obsessed with being able to redefine ourselves. This fuels the success of countless industries; but at what cost to their integrity?
As seen in fairytales like ‘Rapunzel’ or ‘The Little Mermaid’, modern society is captivated by metamorphosis. The Ancient Greeks also incorporated this theme into their stories such as, for example, Ovid’s metamorphoses with the story of Pygmalion. The myth describes Pygmalion, a great sculptor, who, disgusted by the mortal women around him, decides to create the perfect woman out of marble. He eventually falls in love with this statue and, after witnessing his devotion, the goddess Aphrodite brings it to life and they live happily ever after. Whilst it has been celebrated as a great love story, there are clearly some outdated notions of beauty that reflect the standards that women have had to live up to: never being able to compare to the perfect Galatea.
Perhaps our interest with redefinition comes from the Christian beliefs of rebirth and renewal. There are various denominations that have developed as a result of the Bible teaching 1 Peter 1:23 which reads: ‘For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and eternal world of God’. The most famous of these movements is Evangelicalism. Evangelicals believe that you are not automatically born into Christ’s family and that you must, therefore, change your old ways in order to enter God’s family. Religious values continue to shape the cultural norms we live with today.
No matter which angle we choose, our society’s continuous obsession with glow-ups and redefining oneself originates from a long tradition of tales of metamorphoses, exhibited by the popularity of coming of age stories where characters learn vital moral lessons and may even transform for the better. But in the age of social media we are increasingly troubled by these narratives, flooded by content that promotes ‘facial harmony’, ‘lookmaxing’ and the rise of SkinniTok. As many 90s and 00s movies show us, buying your way into beauty fails to constitute real personal growth. In the words of Cher Horowitz, ‘I decided I needed a complete makeover, except this time, I makeover my soul’.
Olive Mills
I.
You will never know this part of me
The part that rolls her r’s, deepens her voice
The part that revels in soups, countless meat and sauce combinations, sweet mains
The part that smells Detox soap on her hands and pours nettle oil into her hair
I have forsaken her too
Left in the cubist outlines of the city
Her language too hard to comprehend the intricate complexities and similes and metaphors, the so-called unattainable ‘cit pro jazyk’
Wet and weak snow slips below me
As I trudge through the puddles leading down to the metro
Eyes wet with fear
Will you ever know this part of me?
II.
It was only last summer you were here
In the sweltering heat
Our bodies moving in unison on the new IKEA bed
It was only last summer you were here
And I cried my body out into your chest
Breaking at the thought of you not holding me
Of not being able to brush my lips on your arms
I did the same with him too
It’ll probably become a habit I like their arms
Strong yet soft
The induction of so much pain but also the brewers of honey
The next one has strong arms too, I’m looking forward to grazing my lips on him soon
It was in this very bed that you entered me without an audible yes
Where I felt like moss in an old forest, a motionless cockroach
But you like it you said
Mind-numbing lifelessness
III.
I spill over myself every night
A punch of iron hits my nose with pleasurable disgust
Burning myself with hot water
As I crouch, wide open, feeling the drip down my thighs
Feels like I should be making a statement
A statement to be made on the white floor of a gallery, or in Tracey Emin’s basement
But it is only my body, drenched in burning water and feeling bloody
I spill over myself every night of Christmas
And over you tonight
Your fingers fed me, they tasted coarse
DJ HEYZA
Bristol’s ‘90s Trip-Hop Legacy: Shaping Today’s Soundscapes
Beezer
Rose Chaplin
Although initially rejected by artists who felt it to be limiting, the term ‘triphop’, popularised in the early 90s by music journalists, conjures notions of sensual psychedelic lyrics over fat dubby beats, of dreamlike amalgamations tinged with melancholy that suddenly surge into euphoria. Trip-hop and Bristol are intrinsically linked. With roots in sound system and dub/reggae culture and a championing of playful sampling techniques, the layered atmospheric sound was pioneered by Massive Attack’s iconic 1991 Blue Lines, the yearning of Portishead’s 1994 release Dummy and Tricky’s shadowy 1995 album Maxinquaye – all legendary in the city’s sonic heritage. I would also include Björk’s Debut, which, released in 1993 when she had been spending time in the city during a relationship with Tricky, synthesised electronic trance with fluid lyrics.
Reflecting on the legacy of this iconic era for Bristol, it made me consider how the spirit of trip-hop has pervaded into the contemporary. The 2023 self-titled debut album from a.s.o, a collaboration between Alias Error and producer Lewie Day, perfectly encapsulates the cinematic quality that 90s trip-hop evokes; think opaque lyrics and smooth grooves that seem to melt together over obscure synths, at once alluring and unsettling. This album really hits in a cafe, dissociating as you stare out the window at a rainy street.
Another 2023 release is ‘In A Dub Style’, a collaboration EP of Bristol artists that includes the jazz influence of Ishmael Ensemble, Rider Shafique’s poignant lyrics and the deep dub fusion of Dubkasm, creating a slow and psychedelic record. Play this loud on a speaker on a summer evening in the park.
Anika is an artist and musician who has been based in both Bristol and Berlin, whose songs, with heavy bass and obscure faraway lyrics, defy easy categorisation in the true spirit of trip-hop! In particular, I would recommend her 2010 self-titled album, which is perfect to listen to through your headphones on a late-night city bus ride.
A final recommendation is Canadian duo Freak Heat Waves’ eclectic and unpredictable 2023 record Mondo Tempo. The album’s nostalgic, drowsy vocals fade in between punchy drums and dynamic synths, creating something that feels like September and the final surges of summer.
These relatively recent works reimagine the vast and ambiguous sound of 90s trip-hop that has transmuted and continued to be experimental and evocative. Although the term isn’t often used to describe more contemporary music, Bristol’s 90s trip-hop legacy lives on in thick basslines, sublime and seamless beats and lyrics that evoke a particular moment and sensation – perhaps a sunset, a late-night boogie or a broken heart.
