We wrap up the Unpacked summer season with a chat that’s punchy in more ways than one as Neil sits down with Kingswood’s rising boxing star Tiah-Mai Ayton, a year on from her turning pro with Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing.

The 19-year-old started out kickboxing aged six and has been beaten just three times in any of the disciplines she’s tried since. She’s enjoyed a meteoric ascent since entering the boxing ring at 13, and took a gold medal at the 2024 World Boxing Under-19 Championships.

Tiah turned pro in May 2025, winning six straight fights since then, and has her sights set on becoming undisputed world champion.

So what lies behind that success? In this episode – the last before we take a break for summer – we talk to Tiah about her journey to the big time.

We get into family life, the sacrifices young athletes have to make while their mates are out partying, the benefits martial arts can bring to girls, and to kids struggling at school – and of course the growth of women’s boxing and her ongoing part in that.

Whether you’re already a fan of the sport or not, we recommend you wrap your ears around this one. Enjoy and have a great summer, we’ll see you in September.

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

In the hours before this episode hit the streaming platforms, England beat Mexico in a famous 3-2 victory at the Estadio Azteca, keeping their World Cup dreams alive and setting up a meeting with Norway – fresh from knocking out Brazil – in the last eight of the competition.

Yes, this week we’re all about the football, in conversation with Liam Smith, who coaches a group of players every bit as culturally diverse as today's England squad, at grassroots level here in Bristol.

He’s head of football development at Bristol Central youth football club, based at City Academy in Redfield – and is a man on a mission to empower young people to enjoy and express themselves through the sport. 

How can community clubs hold tight to that ethos in an increasingly competitive youth football environment – where only 0.5% go on to make it through the academy system to become pros? What are the qualities that help those players succeed? What does the diversity of the kids he coaches – and of the elite national players – say about the country we live in now? And does he really believe England can win this thing?

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

Talk Club, set up in a Bristol pub seven years ago, offers a space for men to get together and discuss their mental health. That’s something too few of us still do, as shown by the horrible statistic that in the UK, a man dies by suicide roughly every 90 minutes – the length of a football match.

With this episode recorded during Men’s Health Week, and with the World Cup bringing many men together in a highly emotional state, it seemed an appropriate time to sit down with Gavin Thorpe, one of Talk Club’s two founders.

The clubs have rapidly expanded, to 150 branches across the country. But with suicide still the biggest killer of UK men under 50, the need to talk remains urgent. Why are we men so reluctant to open up about what’s getting us down? Are Talk Club’s activities moving the needle? And do young men – far more in touch with emotions than their grandads – offer hope?

Content warning – this episode, as you might have guessed, contains discussions of suicide and mental ill health. But it’s a great chat, and by no means all doom and gloom – hope you enjoy.

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

In December the government announced plans to invest £500m in the country’s youth services – which were gutted during austerity – and create 50 major new and revitalised youth hubs – including at Docklands in St Paul’s. Shockingly this is the first time there has been a national youth strategy in a couple of decades.

Our guest today is a man who – like your host Neil – has a long history of working with young people. He’s the outspoken Ben Carpenter, founder and CEO of local youth and community organisation Grassroot Communities.

The pair reflect on the state of youth services, and whether the government’s plans go far enough. We get into the massive new Youth Zone opening in south Bristol this month – what are the pros and cons of these kinds of places? And with young people facing massive challenges from financial insecurity to online harms to knife crime, we ask what services should be there for them in an ideal world. Enjoy…

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

This week we welcome back to Unpacked Paul Smith. Last time we had him on the show, in 2020, he was in the local news every week as the councillor in charge of Bristol's housing. For most of the last six years he's been out of the public spotlight, but in the last few weeks has been selected to help locals decide how to spend millions of pounds of government money in the place he grew up – Hartcliffe.

While he's not lived there for more than 25 years, it’s a place he remains passionate about – enough to have written a book, Hartcliffe Betrayed, about how the neighbourhood has been failed by people in power, ever since it was planned after the Second World War.

Paul, himself a former local Labour councillor for Hartcliffe, and more recently the CEO of a housing association, now finds himself trying to ensure Hartcliffe doesn’t get betrayed again. The programme he'll be leading, Pride in Place, will see £20m invested in the area over 10 years.

So why is Paul the right man for the job? How will he ensure that local people get a proper say in how that money – less than it sounds – is put to work? And what would success look like?

Sit down and find out, in a hard-hitting and sometimes humorous edition of Bristol Unpacked…

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

Welcome back after a short break to Bristol Unpacked, and the start of our new season running through until summer.

For the first episode we welcome Yassin Mohamud, a Green councillor for Lawrence Hill, the ward that includes Barton Hill, which as well as sitting within the controversion East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme was the scene of the disastrous Barton House tower block evacuation in 2023. It's a busy, diverse inner-city area where there is always plenty to keep local politicians on their toes.

In the week this episode goes live Yassin will be sworn in as Bristol’s Lord Mayor – the first in our city to come from the Somali community. While it’s mostly a ceremonial role, he’s pledged to use to bring people back together and ensure everyone feels listened to.

We’re keen to hear more about how his background in community work and dealing with difficult issues might help him do that. We’ll also get into the importance of his identity, and how his new platform can help challenge anti-immigrant attitudes – which were amplified last year by Reform’s West of England mayoral candidate Arron Banks, who accused Bristol’s Somalis of being at the forefront of crime. Hope you enjoy, we'll be back again in two weeks. 

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

This week we welcome Lewis Wedlock to discuss his work as a ‘masculinities educator’ with young people in schools in Bristol and across the country. In our age of controversial 'hypermasculine' online influencers – perhaps most famously, Andrew Tate – this can be an eye-opening experience, to put it mildly.

Of course the ‘manosphere’ of which Tate is part has broken massively into the wider consciousness recently. Last year the hard-hitting Netflix drama Adolescence went viral, followed just a few weeks ago by Louis Theroux’ documentary Inside the Manosphere. Many people – including Lewis – questioned whether that film should have done more to challenge the men making a fortune out of packaging idealised, unobtainable and sometimes toxic versions of masculinity on social media and podcasts.

People outside of that world – and especially parents of boys – can find it both terrifying and bewildering, in terms of its appeal.

So this week we’re seeking to get into why it’s so attractive and what its impact is. We’ll ask be exploring what Lewis – who has a book out, called Masculinity in Schools – believes a more positive vision of masculinity can look like.

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

What happens to families when a parent ends up in prison? That’s the question we’re getting into this week on Unpacked with Kerri Matthews, a director of Bristol's EveryFamily charity.

Over more than a decade EveryFamily, which started as a SureStart children's centre, has developed specialist services working with families where a parent is in prison – something Kerri, a mum herself, has been at the heart of. It leads on supporting families affected by parental offending across South Gloucestershire, Somerset and, via a contract with Avon and Somerset Police, Bristol.

So what is the impact on a child when their parent is jailed – something that’s been likened to a bereavement? What’s it like working with mums and dads to open up about their own feelings and relationships – and parenting – in the tough environment of a prison? And looking at the big picture, what needs to change in how we work with children and families, to give people the best chances in life?

Neil and Kerri get into all this and more, in this week’s Bristol Unpacked – hope you enjoy.

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

This week Unpacked gets into the difficult topic of trauma: what is it, who does it effect and how does it manifest?

Our guest is someone who speaks wisely both from a personal and professional perspective, on how trauma, passing through generations, can affect not just individuals but entire communities.

Heather Williams is CEO of Knowle West Park, and has spearheaded the organisation through a turbulent time in the south Bristol estate in the aftermath of the tragic murders of young boys Max Dixon and Mason Rist.

Coming from across the local postcode divide as a longtime Hartcliffe resident, Heather’s approach has been informed by her own 30-year personal journey to break the chains of abuse she experienced as a child. Bringing up her daughter as a young single mother, she became the first member of her family to go to university before moving into community work and then becoming the leader of a local organisation doing vital work around health in its widest sense.

In another essential episode, she and Neil get deep into questions of harm, healing, and how people can be empowered to lead their own communities and tell their own stories. Enjoy.

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.

Dr Edson Burton wears many different hats, both figuratively and literally. He’s a writer, performer, historian, poet, well-dressed man about town, and – as you’ll know if you follow his social channels – physical training enthusiast. So who better to wade into one of the thorniest issues of the day: what is our culture, and who does it belong to?

In a freewheeling chat with Neil, Edson speaks about his personal experience of moving between worlds: working-class Bedford roots to academic institutions; Radio 4 to grassroots venues; poetry to dancefloors. Rather than “cutting himself off” from any part of his life, he describes identity as something we carry — and something that keeps evolving.

That applies not only to individuals but also Bristol, and to the wider UK as it wrestles with economic and political changes, the temptation of populism and questions over who we even are as a nation now. With our city vying to become UK City of Culture in 2029, Edson and Neil explore how culture can people can get out of their silos and find the things that unite us. It’s an epic chat that Neil admits he'd have happily carried on for another few hours – enjoy.

The Bristol Cable is Bristol's community-owned cooperative newsroom – fiercely independent journalism that puts people before profit. Since 2014, we've been holding power to account through investigative reporting, community campaigns, and democratic media ownership. Because when journalism serves the community, not shareholders, real change becomes possible.

Support independent journalism and help us bring more vital conversations to Bristol: become a Bristol Cable member.