Naming of a street to be named after a cigarette brand owned by Imperial Tobacco and the famous Wills family in Bristol, England, has been rejected by the city’s Labour mayor after the mayor vetoed the street name for ‘Navy Cut Road’. The case of this street’s name concerned the lack of visibility of the building from which the name was originally proposed with the same building, and the industrial and historical contribution of Imperial Tobacco to the past life of the city, and the jobs it provided to numerous workers, especially since the road in question passes through a financed housing development project which is built over it on the site of the Imperial Tobacco factory which closed in 1990 and was demolished in 1996.
The proposal to name the street after a brand of cigarettes provoked the expected backlash from the anti-smoking campaign. Director of England’s largest anti-smoking organization Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) said on being informed of councilor’s Cllr Eddie decision to commemorate Bristol’s old tobacco industry that “Naming a street after a cigarette is a form of advertising called ‘brand-sharing’ which if a business were to do it would be illegal. It’s legal only because it’s the council not a business doing it, but while it may be legal it’s still morally unacceptable. Bristol City Council is responsible for promoting the health and wellbeing of the population, while this will undermine it, something the street-naming team clearly doesn’t understand. We urge the council to reconsider.”.
Cllr Eddie’s paid answer to ASH director Deborah Arnott was that “Bishopsworth is a plain-speaking, no-nonsense place and we don’t take kindly to politically correct busybodies pushing their noses into our affairs. The ‘woke’ warriors of ASH are nothing more than ignorant Leftie professional agitators and they should refrain from lecturing Bristolians as if we were uninformed and not grown-up. Bristolians know our city boasts a ‘gritty’ identity based on manufacturing and trading and we should not shy away from acknowledging our past. After all, should the Bedminster coalfield and the sacrifices of its miners be airbrushed from history because of modern concerns about fossil fuels? Within living memory, the tobacco-producing Wills family employed over 25,000 workers in Bedminster and thousands more people benefited from jobs in nearby businesses. The decline economically and socially in Bedminster can be traced directly to the relocation of the tobacco factories in the early 1970s. It would be insane not to acknowledge the importance of this industry to generations of Bristolians in, amongst other things, our street names”.
Bristol City Mayor Marvin Rees from the Labour Party vetoed the official naming of the road as Navy Cut Road and said that the chosen name would be announced soon. He stated that “we are not going to name streets after cigarette brands”, and the street naming group that this along with the rest of the proposed names could not prevail because of commercial connections.
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