Tagged: alloy-wheel
I managed to knock off a reasonable chunk of the roads I had left to walk around the University at the north-eastern extremity of my mile on this nice sunny walk. As well as being impressed by the number of big townhouses now occupied by various departments, I took some time on my way there to check out a war memorial, and some time on the way back to do a little extra wandering of Berkeley Square.
A nice warm Bank Holiday Monday saw me walk back over to Bedminster to do justice to something we glimpsed on my last wander. Along the way I spotted a couple of new pieces of street art tucked away on the south side of the Cumberland Basin Flyover system, so this turned into a micro-graffiti walk.
I imagine I've seen the stall there at places like the Tobacco Factory Market, but I've got a terrible memory for things like that.
I hadn't really planned to go out for a wander yesterday; I just got the urge and thought "why not?" (Well, the weather forecast was one possible reason, but I managed to avoid the rain, luckily.)
I wanted to finish off the A369—as it turns out I may still have a small section to go, but I've now walked the bulk of it out to my one-mile radius—and also a few random tracks in Leigh Woods. I'm still not really sure that I'm going to walk them all, especially after discovering today that "the map is not the territory" applies even more in the woods, where one of the marked tracks on the map wasn't really that recognisable as a track in real life... I'm glad I'd programmed the route into the GPS in advance!
Anyway. A pleasant enough walk, oddly bookended, photographically at least, by unusual vehicles. Leigh Woods was fairly busy, especially the section I'd chosen, which was positively dripping with teenage schoolkids with rah accents muttering opprobrium about the Duke of Edinburgh. I'm presuming the harsh remarks were more about taking part in his award scheme than the late Consort himself, but I didn't eavesdrop enough to be certain...
There's something about a slightly brassy classic car that makes we want to turn up the Lightroom sliders a bit too high.
The far east of the intersection of my one-mile radius and Bedminster, anyway. I was feeling a bit tired this morning, so I motivated myself to get out of the door by imagining one of Mokoko's almond croissants. That got me on my way, and I wandered across to Bedminster, through Greville Smyth Park, along most of the length of North Street (looking out for new Upfest 75-pieces-in-75-days artwork as I went) and then onto some new roads at the far end.
I only wanted to knock a few streets off my "to do" list, but by the time I'd diverted here and there to check out various bits of graffiti and other attractions and come back via the aforementioned purveyors of Bristol's finest croissants, I'd walked 7.4km. Not bad for someone who woke up tired, and at least I've done something with my day. I'm very glad the weather broke (we had tremendous thunderstorms yesterday), even if some of the pictures might've looked better with a blue sky. I was getting fed up with walking around in 29°C heat...
Lisa and I went for a longish walk, but I didn't take many photos. Mostly we just wandered and nattered. Unusually, my target was outside my 1-mile radius on Burlington Road in Redland, where I snapped quite a few photos of the collection of artistic animals by Julian Warren. This was mostly to provide a fairly arbitrary destination for a roundabout walk in Clifton...
We popped in. I bought one of Ngaio Marsh's books of Inspector Alleyn stories. The community bookshop is run to benefit Studio Upstairs, an arts and health charity. The Bristol branch is down on the Albion Dockside estate behind Bristol Marina.
I had an unsuccessful wander last week, on Tuesday afternoon: my GPS died within about five minutes of leaving the house, and I didn't notice, plus I found hardly anything I'd been looking for. On the plus side, as I was wandering around Park Street I decided to nip into London Camera Exchange on the offchance they had a secondhand Canon 17-40mm lens. I've been thinking of buying one for around a year, I think.
Long story short: not only did they have one, but due to a mistake with their price labelling which they kindly honoured, I now have a shiny new (to me) wide-angle lens and it cost me less than £300, which is a very good price for one of these in good condition (and including a lens hood.)
So, rather than try to salvage Tuesday's walk, here's a walk where I basically just bimbled up to Clifton Village for a coffee and wandered around taking photos of as many wide views as I could find. I took a lot more photos than these seventeen, but as you might expect, a new lens takes some practice getting used to, so most of them ended up in the "outtakes" pile.
Bower Ashton is an interesting little area just south of the river from me—in fact, the Rownham Ferry used to take people over from Hotwells to Bower Ashton, operating from at least the twelfth century to around the 1930s.
It's a strangely contradictory little area, with a cluster of old and new houses sandwiched in between the busy A-roads and significantly more industrial area of Ashton and the bucolic country estate of Ashton court roughly east to west, and also between Somerset and Bristol, north to south.
I've been around here before, mostly poking around Bower Ashton's arguably most well-known bit, the Arts faculty campus of the University of the West of England, but I'd missed at least Parklands Road and Blackmoors Lane, so I initially planned just to nip across briefly and wander down each in turn. On a whim, though, I texted my friends Sarah and Vik in case they were out and about, and ended up diverting to the Tobacco Factory Sunday market first, to grab a quick flat white with them, extending my journey a fair bit.
To start with, though, I nipped to a much more local destination, to see something that you can't actually see at all, the Gridiron...
(I also used this wander as a test of the cameras in my new phone. I finally upgraded after a few years, and the new one has extra, separate wide and telephoto lenses compared to the paltry single lens on my old phone. Gawd. I remember when speed-dial was the latest innovation in phones...)
One of the businesses on this little estate of random things is Rob Perry Salvage, which presumably explains the odd row of wrecked cars parked in the access lane.
I noticed I had a few things on my "potential wanders" list that could all be done relatively close to home, and in a fairly straight line, so I set off at lunchtime to recreate a photo of a now-defunct pub, wander behind a Spar (which turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, but I admit it's a low bar) and spend some time browsing in Dreadnought Books before coming home via a coffee from Spoke & Stringer, a little diversion up Gasworks Lane and a tiny bit of the Rownham Mead estate I'd somehow previously skipped.
On St George's Road. This is where I ended up spending most of my stopping time on the walk. I managed to resist most temptations and came away having only spent £2 on a paperback of The Mill on the Floss. I read Silas Marner a while back and really liked it, so I've been wanting to try some more Eliot.
I shall add it to my tsundoku collection.
I didn't really set out with a theme of flowers and gardens in mind for this walk. I just fancied heading up to Clifton Village to get lunch. As it turned out, though, Spring was springing, so a minor theme emerged as I started off with the graveyard flowers of Hope Chapel and wandered up to see the beginnings of the new wildflower garden at Clifton Hill Meadow.
I'm in the habit of going over to the Tobacco Factory Market on a Sunday. I think I've walked all the routes around that way, but as a Plimsoll Bridge swing let me cross the road to the far side of Brunel Way on my return journey and I took a couple of photos of the brownfield development at the old Ashton Gate Depot site I thought I'd call it a Wander and pop some photos up.
This small tribute caught my eye from the far side of the road. Sadly there are fatalities on Brunel Way most years. It's not the kind of accident black spot you find elsewhere in Bristol, but I suppose any 40mph dual carriageway with a lot of traffic will, sadly, have a death toll.
This drew my eye beyond to the new building going on on the old railway depot/tile merchant/etc. I wanted to cross to have a look, but the road seemed too busy.
Odd fact: Here I'm technically standing in Southville and taking a picture of Bedminster, as the dividing line between the two Bristol wards runs down the middle of Brunel Way at this point. Of course, everything in the distance isn't in any Bristol ward, as we're also looking at the Somerset border, which runs along the far side of the UWE Bower Ashton Campus.