In November 2004 residents in Barton Hill celebrated the opening of Bristol’s first ever ‘one-stop health shop’. When the Wellspring Healthy Living Centre opened 20 years ago it was the first centre of its kind in Bristol.
A small group of residents formed a community-led planning group at Barton Hill Settlement and formulated an idea of creating a centre in the heart of the community which would meet all their health needs. Although the centre has survived almost 15 years of central government spending cuts it has lost some of the vital services which made it a one-stop shop.
When Anne Joslin and Sue Kelly came together with other locals to formulate a plan for the new building, their vision included a GP surgery, dentist and pharmacy alongside physio and complementary therapy services. Their vision was a success and their bid for £2.6 million of the £50 million Community at Heart Grant funding that was available at the time was a success.
Anne, who is currently a board member of what is now Wellspring Settlement, still has vivid memories of the work she took on 20 years ago to benefit the health and wellbeing of her local community. Anne said: “We decided to put ourselves forward for the New Deal for Communities money. I was on the Board of the Settlement at the time.
“Six of us from the Settlement gave a presentation, and it was the best bid so the money came to this area. Unfortunately the Settlement was not in a position to continue the development work, there were just so many strands to the project, so we opened the planning group up to the community and more and more people got involved.”
Sue, who was also part of the initial group, remembers the day the centre first opened: “We had all these big important people turn up, trying to push to the front of the photos and take credit. But we wouldn’t let them!
“We’d done all the work, we’d been there since the beginning, we deserved the credit, not them! I’m glad we were so strong on it because we’d achieved this, and I doubt very much any of them would have come up with the same sort of Healthy Living Centre.”
But 20 years later, the centre no longer has a dentist or a pharmacy. The dentist permanently closed prior to the pandemic and the Boots pharmacy closed in 2021 as part of the company’s decision to close several branches across the country which were not generating profits.
While the loss of dentists serving NHS patients is rooted in reforms that pre-date the austerity measures implemented in 2010, the difficulty in finding a dentist taking on new NHS patients has become particularly challenging in recent years. When a new dentist opened in St Pauls in February 2024 offering to register new NHS patients the queues continued for three days.
While Barton Hill’s dentist closed quietly before the public had woken up to how serious the country’s dental crisis was, the loss of its pharmacy a few years later did not go unnoticed. Efforts were made to replace Boots with an alternative provider but their application was refused by the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire ICB in 2022 after the area was assessed as not being in need of a new pharmacy.
The gap created by the pharmacy closure has now been filled by Headway- a brain injury support centre which was previously located in Frenchay. But unlike St Pauls where the community successfully campaigned for a new dentist after Bupa on Ashley Road closed, the dentist previously located on Beam Street was never replaced.
Nevertheless, Wellspring still exists and those who were instrumental in its creation will be celebrating its 20th anniversary on Saturday November 20 from 1.30-4pm. The Beam Street building and what was previously Barton Hill Settlement merged into what is now Wellspring Settlement in 2021 to ensure the stability of the two community organisations.