There was a moment earlier this week when two things happened at roughly the same time.

In the cyberspace buzzing around Southville, Ashton and Bedminster, the news of the sudden closure of Denny’s Bakery was spreading by word-of-mouth, texts, Facebook shares and retweets.

Denny’s was one of North Street’s traditional stalwarts. A cheap and cheerful bakers where for £2 you could still get a proper cheese and ham roll – a gurt big one at that – and still have change to think about a little cake for afters.

Its demise was mourned by many but others didn’t give it a second thought – they’d never been in, probably because the outward appearance, ambience and décor was distinctly 1980s, and not in a hip retro way.

Denny's Bakery
Denny's Bakery

Instead, those people were far more likely to be salivating at the imminent arrival on the other side of the street of Hobbs House Bakery, the expanding chain of ultra-hip bakeries that began in the Cotswolds, recently arrived in Gloucester Road and is now about to open south of the river.

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Hobbs House, run by two TV-famous brothers, think absolutely nothing of not only selling yeast and dairy free sourdough bread, but of charging £10 for a loaf of it.

Hobbs House Bakery didn’t hasten the demise of Denny’s. They are not really linked at all, because they inhabit completely different worlds, despite being – as of this moment – both empty bakeries opposite each other on the same street.

Shepherd's Loaf - on sale from Hobbs House Bakery for £10

But they are linked. And they speak to a much bigger picture that hints at a battle for the very soul of Bristol.

That’s surely nonsense, of course. It’s only a bakery. It’s only a loaf of sourdough bread?

Yes, and no. Right about the same time as the reality of good value doorstopper sandwiches being replaced by artisan bread dawned on the people of BS3, one of Bristol’s most famous people was ranting on Twitter.

Geoff Barrow, the kid from Portishead who brought a new kind of music to the world that the world hadn’t heard before, had taken umbrage at being listed in Bristol Life magazine.

He said he stood against everything Bristol Life stands for, with its aspirational ads for bifold door companies, features on ‘Stokes Croft Weddings’ and artisan artichoke art (that last one, I made up, probably).

And, most tellingly, in one of his last withering tweets, he said: ‘Try not to ruin Bristol too much with your 24-day aged sourdough’.

Geoff Barrow from the band Portishead

Here, sourdough bread is something much more – it represents everything Denny’s Bakery didn’t. What is this phenomenon? This culture?

A quick flick through the pages of Bristol Life – and through other online Bristol lifestyle websites, and even half of the output from the Post’s own What’s On department – will see sourdough bread aplenty.

Anyone who’s not in it knows it when they see it. Anyone who’s in it often struggles to see it from the outside.

It’s not just sourdough bread, it’s the mashed avocado they put on it.

Fans of Denny's will be saddened by the news
Fans of Denny's will be saddened by the news

It’s not just mashed avocado, it’s the school slates, wooden chopping boards or 1980s etch-a-sketches they serve it on instead of plates.

It’s craft ale served in wine glasses that aren’t a whole pint.

It’s the name of a cup of coffee that has a title longer than this sentence.

It’s not just food and drink, either. It’s calling Bedminster, Bedmo. It’s nodding sagely at a rubbish bit of street art in Stokes Croft. It’s creative digital disruptive start-ups. It’s downshifters from London thinking £500,000 for a house in St Andrew’s is an absolute snip.

It’s telling people at dinner parties that you’re so glad you chose Bishopston over Montpelier because it still feels uber-hip and edgy, but doesn’t actually have drug addicts injecting themselves in the groin in the alley behind your house.

All these things are the global phenomenon of the ‘hipster’ – a word now so over-used to describe anything vaguely new that it’s lost its meaning.

The pizza is made with a sourdough base at Zero Zero in Easton
The pizza is made with a sourdough base at Zero Zero in Easton

Yes, I know people instagramming themselves in an artisan cheesmonger and spending £7 on a slab of cheddar (because it says it’s oak-smoked by pirates in a cave in Dorset and they can tell that to everyone who comes round) is a global thing. I know it’s not just Bristol.

But here’s the thing. There are Bristol-specific issues at play here – and while I wouldn’t dare speak on behalf of such a cultural luminary as Geoff Barrow, this is I think what he was getting at: sourdough bread and everything it stands for is destroying the very culture of Bristol it aspires to be part of.

But how? Surely it’s just the latest fad in food and culture? Surely there’s no harm in it?

Of itself, of course, that is the case. But take another step back. For the past few years now, not a month goes by without Bristol being named as the coolest place to be. Or the trendiest. Or the hippest. Or the best.

Everything produced by lifestyle magazines, Sunday supplements and glossy publications filled with pictures of sourdough bread served on Frisbees instead of plates by bearded chefs screams ‘move to Bristol’.

Why Bristol? There are many reasons, but one of the main ones is its reputation as somewhere alternative and edgy, independent and creative. And if there’s one thing the bearded sourdough crowd love is to think of themselves as alternative and edgy, independent and creative.

Bristol is currently seen as somewhere at the forefront of all things hip and progressive, and has been since about 1990.

Culturally, that’s Inkie and Banksy and street art. That’s Massive Attack and Tricky and Geoff Barrow’s Portishead. That’s St Paul’s soundsystems and Gloucester Road and house parties in squats and illegal warehouse raves.

What Geoff Barrow is trying to say, confined as he is by the restrictions of Twitter, is that there’s a devastating irony in the sourdough hipster culture arriving en masse in Bristol, as it has done in the past five or ten years.

The irony is that it has moved here specifically because, in part, of the alternative culture reputation, but then it has appropriated a clichéd version of that culture for itself, while at the same time stifling and ultimately killing off the cultural soil that produced it in the first place.

It’s like The Borg in Star Trek: Seeing something creative and fresh and taking it over to be a homogenised, sanitised version.

There are, right now, two very different kinds of Bristol. There’s the Sourdough Bristol and there’s the Denny’s Bristol. A Venn diagram of the people who mourned the loss of Denny’s and the people who look forward to Hobbs House Bakery arriving opposite would have few doing both in the space where the circles cross.

Bristol has now reached peak hipster
Bristol has now reached peak hipster

Anyone who takes the shades of grey and makes it black and white is horrendously generalising, so forgive me, but all along North Street – and any other street where gentrification is a thing – there are pubs and shops that are Sourdough Bristol, and pubs which are Denny’s Bristol.

Denny’s Bristol is trips to the Mem or Ashton Gate, a Saturday morning putting the world to rights in a St Paul’s barbers, a night out clubbing, karaoke in the local, and the kind of thing people literally take for granted everywhere. Ordinary Bristol life.

Sourdough Bristol is a different kind of ordinary Bristol life, and the two rarely meet. Far from the divide getting narrower and more blurred, it seems wider and more pronounced.

Why? Because it is very hard for the two to exist side by side.

Sourdough Bristol also means the price of the cheapest house in Montpelier is £300,000. It means the rent in St Paul’s going up from £800 a month to £1,200 a month.

It means having to move out. It means finding somewhere out in Fishponds or Kingswood or Yate and leaving Glo Road – as Bristol Life casually called it on Twitter this week – to those who arrived for a piece of the Bristol that spawned Massive Attack, Banksy and Portishead.

And this is the nub of it: The ‘Bristol Sound’, such as it was, was born from the traditional Bristol. Hindsight now tells us it was a culturally creative fervour that produced art and music that still resonates around the world, but at the time those in it would’ve gone for lunch at Denny’s, not Hobbs House Bakery. Clearly, Geoff Barrow still would.

Geoff Barrow's tweet about Bristol Life

Now where and how would the 2017 generation version of Tricky meet his Martina Topley-Bird? Now, the room above which pub in 2017 would this generation’s Rob del Naja and Grant Marshall put on shows? Now, which youth club would become a Mecca for teenagers to start a career in street art?

If you chat about the city for more than a few minutes with John Nation, the chap who set up that street art project in Barton Hill’s youth club all those years ago, and he’ll soon point out the irony that a generation ago the city’s authorities were arresting him, shunning and condemning him for being the Fagin to a generation of young spray-can artists. Now they laud him and make his tours of street art one of the city’s promoted tourist attractions.

Street art has been claimed by Sourdough Bristol too, but only the cool bits in the cool areas. You never see Visit Bristol encouraging tourists to go to Withywood or under Brunel Way.

If Bristol is so cool because of its cultural melting pot, alternative take and radical music and arts scene and laid-back vibe, the irony is that the Sourdough gentrification, as Geoff Barrow points out, homogenises that like cultural bleach. That’s why he was so angry.