Brades
"Government House, the rum shop, and cricket on the radio — Brades doesn't try to be anything it isn't."
Brades is not on anyone’s itinerary. The guidebooks that cover Montserrat at all tend to send you to Plymouth’s exclusion zone, Centre Hills, the black sand beaches, and then on your way. Brades sits in the hills of the northwest, a loose assemblage of government offices, rum shops, a market building, the island’s administrative infrastructure, and the daily rhythms of a community that has been getting on with things since the capital was buried in ash thirty years ago. I went there because I wanted to see where the actual administration of an actual island actually happens, and what I found was one of the most unperformed places I have encountered in the Caribbean.
The Chief Minister’s office is here. The legislative council meets here. The government radio station broadcasts from here — Radio Montserrat, which I had been listening to in the car since I arrived, a mix of local news, gospel, reggae, and cricket commentary that seemed to cycle through in no particular order and at a pace that suited the island perfectly. In Brades the radio is ambient, coming from shops and from vehicles and from open windows, and the cricket commentary — whatever match is being played in whichever series is current — provides a kind of ongoing narrative to the day.
I sat for a while at a rum shop that did not have a sign outside, just an open door and a cooler and a man who poured my drink into a plastic cup and handed it over without asking what I wanted, having concluded from a glance that what I wanted was the same rum with the same measure of ice that everyone else wanted. The rum was a local blend, sweet and clean and serious, and the two men at the table near the door were discussing something about drainage on a hillside road in a way that made it clear they had been discussing it for some time and would continue to do so regardless of resolution. This is the texture of Brades: people working through the actual logistics of a small island life with competence and without performance.
There is a weekly market near the main road where local produce comes down from the hillside farms — dasheen, christophine, seasoning pepper, the small sweet bananas that grow in Montserrat’s interior and taste nothing like imported fruit. The seasoning pepper here is sold fresh and also as a sauce and also, from one woman who had set up at the end of the row, in a paste that she packaged in small jars with handwritten labels. I bought three jars. By the time I left the island I had used them all.
What Brades offers is not sights but context. Spend a morning here and the rest of the island — the geology, the exclusion zone, the new capital being built at Little Bay — makes more sense. Because Brades is where you see what an island of four thousand people looks like when it has been governing and administering and feeding itself and arguing about drainage and listening to cricket for thirty years since a volcano buried the original plan. It looks, mostly, like any other small town. Which is exactly the point.
When to go: Brades is active on weekdays, when government offices and businesses are open. Market day brings the most life to the main road — check locally for current schedule. The rum shops keep their own hours, as rum shops should.