The scene was born out of a lack of mainstream clubs catering for the emergence of hip hop music, with street and underground parties a mainstay.

Many DJ crews formed in the early '80s playing hip hop, house and soul in disused venues with sound systems were borrowed from the reggae scene: City Rockers, 2 Bad, 2 Tuff, KC Rock, UD4, FBI, Dirty Den, Juice Crew, Rene & Bacus, Soul Twins, Fresh 4 and Bristol ultimate DJ Masters The Wild Bunch.

The scene was influenced by the city's multiculturalism, political activism, and the art movements of reggae, punk, hip hop, hippies and new age.

[2] In music, the Wild Bunch sound system, based in the St Pauls, Montpelier and Bishopston districts and modelled on the Bronx DJ crews of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, began playing hip hop, reggae, funk and rhythm and blues tracks but with added ambient effects, leading to the development of trip hop music.

Salon magazine has said that trip hop was spawned in "the bohemian, multi-ethnic city of Bristol, where restlessly inventive DJs had spent years assembling samples of various sounds that were floating around: groove-heavy acid jazz, dub, neo-psychedelia, techno disco music, and the brainy art rap".

These artists include Massive Attack,[13] Portishead and Tricky and others such as Way Out West, Smith & Mighty, Up, Bustle and Out, Monk & Canatella, Kosheen, Roni Size, and the Wild Bunch.

Del Naja of the band Massive Attack was initially a graffiti artist, "indeed, his first ever live gig was as a DJ accompanying artwork he had produced in a gallery in Bristol".

Anarchist Ian Bone's The Bristolian news sheet achieved a regular distribution of several thousand, with its satirical exposés of council and corporate corruption.

Its pages especially feature subvertising and other urban street art to complement news, views and comments on the local activist scene as well as tackling issues such as drugs, mental health and housing.

The 1970s women's liberation paper Enough was succeeded in the 1990s by the environmental and pagan Greenleaf (edited by George Firsoff), West Country Activist, Kebelian Voice, Planet Easton, the anarcho-feminist Bellow and the present-day punk fanzine Everlong, all of which have been published in Bristol.

An article in 2008 in The Telegraph stated that: "Racial matters have always carried a historical resonance in Bristol, a city made affluent on the profits of tobacco and slave-trading.