Tagged: art
The more I research it, the more I find that Hotwells had far better transport links back in Victorian and Edwardian times than it has today. Along with buses that went to more useful places than the City Centre, there were trams, the funicular up to Clifton, the landing stage for paddle steamer services and two railway stations all within easy walking distance of me.
Today I took a day off work as preparation for doing the bookkeeping for my tax return1, and took a wander along to the site of what would have been my nearest station, Hotwells (or Clifton, as it started out in life), nestled in the shadow of the suspension bridge, the Bristol terminus of the Bristol Port Railway and Pier.
From there I wandered down the Portway, following the original line, until I got to the area around Sneyd Park Junction, where the tunnel from the slightly later Clifton Extension Railway joined up with this originally-isolated BPR line. Then I headed up to Clifton through the "goat gully" at Walcombe Slade, seeing the few above-ground bits of evidence of the tunnel (which is still in regular use) along the way.
It was a lovely day, and a good walk, and it was interesting to daydream of the times when I could have walked a few minutes from my flat down to Dowry Parade, caught a short tram ride to Hotwells Stations, and then headed from there to Avonmouth, perhaps even to board a transatlantic passenger service. The completion of the Clifton Extension Railway that linked the Avonmouth station with Temple Meads made relatively direct transatlantic travel from London via Bristol possible, with passengers travelling up from Paddington to Temple Meads, on to Avonmouth on the Clifton Extension Railway and Port Railway and Pier line, then perhaps catching a Cambpell's paddle steamer—which sometimes acted as tenders for large steamers—to a larger ship that was headed out for Canada, say.
1 I've learned that the best approach is to take two days off and deliberately do something that's not my bookkeeping on the first day, as otherwise I just inevitably end up procrastinating and feeling guilty on the first day no matter what. I have an odd brain, but at least I'm learning strategies for dealing with its strange ways as I get older...
2 Information mostly gleaned from Colin Maggs' The Bristol Port Railway & Pier and the Clifton Extension Railway, The Oakwood Press, 1975.
This photo comes from the M Oakley Collection via a scan from Branch Lines Around Avonmouth, by Vic Mitchell and Keith Smith, ISBN 190447442X. My reproduction quality isn't great, but hopefully you can see Hotwells Station as it was in its early years, including the turntable at the far end, just in front of the stationmaster's house, to the left of the booking office.
Later the turntable was removed and the tracks extended all the way to the end to make the most of the limited platform space; the engine would move onto the centre run-around track in advance, then pull the carriages into the station on the other track using a draw-bar instead of using the turntable to run around them after it had pulled them in.
My favourite tidbit from Colin Maggs' The Bristol Port Railway & Pier is the last bit here:
Around the turn of the century, a stationmaster at Sea Mills kept poultry, pigs, a cow and used his pony and trap to fetch swill from the docks. He sold eggs to passengers and provided the the Superintendent at Bristol with butter and new-laid eggs. Another character was a driver nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’. He enjoyed scaring the dockers to death by rushing through the tunnels into Hotwells, once misjudging his braking power and crashing into the buffers.
Must've been quite unnerving, racing out of the tunnel straight towards the cliff face at speed!
This is the Pembroke Road ventilation tower, sometimes known as the "pound tower", as it's next to the pound the Downs maintenance people use for equipment storage.
From To Keep Open and Unenclosed, the Management of the Durdham Down Since 1861, Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 2005:
...construction of the tunnel began immediately at Cooks Folly Wood, the top of Pembroke Road and two other points. The Pembroke Road shaft was subsequently retained to ventilate the tunnel. The sinking of this shaft had reached rail level by May 1872 when Captain Beaumont's compressed air diamond drilling machine came into use. Most of the machinery associated with the diamond drilling machine was on the surface: the machine had a 4" diameter compressed air service from a 50 hp steam engine at the surface. By comparison, the engine to lift spoil and water from the tunnel was only 20 hp. The drill had to be cooled by water which was run into trucks and presumably wound to the surface. Dynamite charges were set in the holes after the dynamite had been softened by steam before use! On 10th May 1872 four pounds of dynamite exploded while being 'softened' at 2.30 a.m. blowing off the engine-house roof and smashing windows in the three houses facing the Downs at the top of Pembroke Road. Fortunately no-one was injured and when the glazier called at one house he found that the occupant had slept through the whole episode!
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...)
I love the little details in this piece by Philth and N4T4. — see how it's signed by N4T4 in the hair on the left... It's on the corner of Clift House Road and the bit of Coronation Road that heads toward North Street and has replaced this previous piece.
I have no idea who this is, but that doesn't mean he's not incredibly well-known, it just means that I know very little about, probably, comics.
The Gridiron and Bower Ashton Part Two
03 Dec 2021
On my last wander, to Bower Ashton, I was intending to knock Blackmoors Lane off my list "to-do" list, but got a bit diverted. I also took a little look into the history of the Gridiron, once a cheaper alternative to dry dock that was nestled just south of North Entrance Lock.
Today I had to go to send a parcel off somewhere, so I decided on going to the North Street Post Office via Blackmoors Lane. I didn't have much intention of anything else, but as luck would have it I walked out both at low tide and also as some lockkeepers seemed to be having a bit of a training session, and one of the more senior people was (a) happy to answer a few random questions on the Gridiron and (b) actually knew a lot about it, as Gridiron maintenance had been one of his jobs, more than twenty years ago...
I've snapped this before; it just looked particularly attractive today. Al's Tikka Grill has some rave reviews on TripAdvisor. Maybe I'll give it a try one day.
This isn't so much of a photo as a reminder to talk about the amazing malty smell that wafts out and inhabits this whole stretch of North Street when there's some brewing going on. Presumably it's the days when they're boiling wort.
I skipped the photography for the part of the wander where I went to the Post Office on North Street to send my old phone back to Apple for some trade-in, so here we are back at the end of Spike Island, heading back toward Hotwells.
Last photo of the day: I had the luck to walk past AcerONE as he was putting the finishing touches to this new piece under the flyovers of the Cumberland Basin. It's called Avon Gorge. I love the stylised, stained glass feel to it.
He said he still had some shading to do, so I'll try getting another snap of the finished article on another day.
A Constitutional to Burwalls and Back
21 Dec 2021
The recent lack of posts here is mostly due to my feeling very run down following having a couple of wisdom teeth extracted. Having had an emergency appointment yesterday1, hopefully I'll be on the mend now, though it does mean I'm on the kind of antibiotics where you can't touch alcohol for the whole of the Christmas period. I have tried to keep myself a little distracted from the pain by working on the nuts and bolts of this website—you should notice that the front page loads rather faster now than it used to, and that there's a shiny new statistics page that I'll probably be continuing to work on. Oh, and you should find that the tags below the photos are now clickable and will take you to a page of all other wanders that have photos with the same tag.
Today I felt like I needed to drag myself out of the house, but I didn't want to go too far, and I needed to get to the Post Office up in Clifton Village to post a Christmas card (spoiler for my parents: it's going to be late. Sorry.) As luck would have it, idly looking at the map I spotted that I'd missed off a section of Burwalls Road in the past, and that's basically one of the long-ways-round to Clifton Village, crossing the river to Rownham and walking up the hill on the Somerset side before coming back across the Suspension Bridge.
As I was heading for Burwalls Road I decided to make Burwalls itself the focal point of the walk, but unfortunately the mansion grounds are private and the place is hard to snap. Still, at least it gave me a destination. Burwalls was the mansion built by Bristol press magnate Joseph Leech, who I've mentioned before after buying a vintage book he wrote on a previous wander. There's a good article about the house on House and Heritage which has some photos from angles I couldn't ever get to. (Well, maybe with a drone, but it seems like the kind of area where they may be kitted out for clay pigeon shooting, so I probably wouldn't risk it.)
1 My dentist admitted that she probably needed to keep her internal monologue a bit more internal after we started the appointment with her staring into my mouth and immediately saying, "oh, that's weird." These are words one doesn't want to hear from a medical professional.
It's lovely backing paper, but a bit bare. Not so much to advertise in the current climate, I suppose.
Joseph Leech doesn't appear to have had a coat of arms, and it's not the University of Bristol's (they were another former owner), but I struck lucky with my third guess: the Wills family crest apparently features three martlets around a chevron, as on the right, and three wyverns, as on the left... Can't find anything that's exactly like this one, but them I'm not exactly au fait with heraldry.
George Wills, of the Wills Tobacco family, was Burwalls' owner after Joseph Leech.
I was just about starting to feel better—the antibiotics seemed to have kicked in for my dental issues, and it had been some days since I'd left the house, and I was at last starting to get itchy feet. So, a wander. But where? Well, there were a few industrial bits near Winterstoke Road in the Ashton/Ashton Vale areas of Bristol that needed walking. I knew they were likely to be quite, well, unattractive, frankly. So why not do them while I wasn't feeling exactly 100% myself? Maybe it would fit my mood. Hopefully you're also in the mood for a bit of post-industrial wasteland, for that's what some of this feels like...
Then, at the last minute, I thought again about the Bristol International Exhibition—I've got a book about it on the way now—and that gave me another goal, which could just about be said to be in the same direction, and I decided to walk significantly further than my normal 1-mile limit and try recreating another historical photo...
Sadly I don't know much about the Ashton area; it's just on the edges of my mile and I rarely have cause to go there. It's brimming with history, I'm sure: the whole South Bristol area rapidly developed from farmland to coal mines to factories to its current interesting mixture of suburbs and industrial work over the last few hundred years. As a more working class area less attention was paid to it by historians, at least historically-speaking, than the Georgian heights of Clifton, and much of it has been knocked down and reinvented rather than listed and preserved. I see here and there some of this lack is being addressed, but I'm afraid I'll be very light on the history myself on this wander, as most of my usual sources aren't throwing up their normal reams of information as when I point them at Clifton, Hotwells or the old city.
Here's the BBC report. This was posted on a telephone junction box in the "Daveside" area, the little strip of Festival Way that's used as a skate park in between the old railway depot and the White City allotments.
Don't say I never take you anywhere. Of all the places I've wandered, I think I can truthfully say that this is best candidate for the "arse end of nowhere" award. Welcome to the ETM Recycling Centre at the end of Ashton Vale Road.
The plethora of advertising billboards in this area is depressingly predictable, but at least this advertising is both local and well-thought-out. Local heroes Aardman Animation are advertising their new feature Robin Robin on the left, but have a related Christmas message to the "Robins", whose stadium is just around the corner. Bristol City apparently earned the nickname by playing in a strip with a red top and white shorts.
A Random New Year's Day Wander
01 Jan 2022
I picked a fairly arbitrary reason for a wander today. Really, I just wanted to do a New Year's Day wander just to get out of the house and to set a precedent for the year to come.
My ostensible reason was to investigate what looked like a road on my map that quartered the lawn in front of the Ashton Court mansion. As it turned out, this is just a muddy footpath/desire line similar to a half-dozen other tracks nearby, and must be some kind of bug or misclassification with the mapping system I'm using, but that's not important. What's important is that I went for a little walk on the first day of the year. As a bonus, I did happen to wander down a couple of sections of new footpath, so technically I broke some new ground too, which is nice.
It didn't take long for someone to scrawl the sentiments of the season on a bus shelter.
Near and Far
05 Jan 2022
I took advantage of a rare recent day where it wasn't tipping down with rain to get away from my desk on a lunchtime workday and head up to Clifton Village. I'd hoped to snap a reproduction of historical photo which I'd worked out had been taken from the Suspension Bridge, but the gods were not smiling on me. Still, taking only a nice long lens with me worked out very well as the lovely haze of the day made more distant views quite dramatic...
I swear this caryatid must've been modelled on Stephen Fry. This is St Vincent's Priory, a very strange building on Sion Hill that's just been renovated. Next time I pop up I'll try and get a photo of it looking clean and shiny now the scaffolding's down, but I only took a telephoto lens with me on this trip.
Lunchtime Reproduction (of an old photo...)
17 Jan 2022
This was basically the quick lunchtime jaunt I tried to do at the beginning of January, only this time I actually managed to get to roughly the viewpoint I'd been hoping for to recreate a historical photo of the Bristol International Exhibition.
I did this walk about a month ago, but I've been a bit poorly and not really up to doing much in my spare time, and it's taken me this long to even face processing even these few photos. Hopefully normal service will be resumed at some point and I can carry on trying to walk any roads and paths that I need to do to make this project feel complete...
Gargoyles? Caryatids? Gargyatids? Caryoyles? There's probably a proper name for them, knowing architecture...
This is St Vincent's Priory, a very odd building on Clifton Hill. According to Maurice Fells' excellent Clifton: History You Can See:
Its name conjures up visions to the sounds of monastic of an ancient religious foundation with its hallowed walls echoing chanting. But St Vincent's Priory is a private house and the likelihood is that it was built as such and probably conceived as an architectural folly...
From Bristol's Lost City, by Clive Burlton, available from Bristol Books; photograph from the author's own collection.
(And extra credit goes to my parents for buying me the book for my birthday! Thanks!)
The Bristol International Exhibition site, presumably around 1914 or not long after. You can see the Rownham Ferry in use, too. I still find it pretty amazing that there used to be a busy ferry and a significant railway station on this little scrap of land that I just used to know as the grassy bit at the start of the towpath, let alone a replica of Bristol Castle!
Bedminster Trip for New Walking Shoes
26 Feb 2022
I needed to buy new walking shoes—my old ones were squeaking and it was driving me up the wall—so I ordered some for collection from Taunton Leisure on East Street in Bedminster, and decided to make picking them up an official wander.
I didn't cover any new ground within my mile, but I did take advantage of the trip to take in a few interesting things just outside my normal radius, mostly New Gaol-related. Along the way there are a couple of sanitation-related diversions, including a visit to a rare manhole cover. You can hardly wait, I can tell!
Hadn't spotted this one before. It's hidden away a little, tucked inside the entrance to the disused public toilets under the ramp for one of the Cumberland Basin flyovers.
You can pretty much take the word "disused" for read when it comes to public toilets in Bristol. Protesters recently wrote an open letter to the council demanding the re-opening of some of the many closed toilets.
The lack of access to public toilets in Bristol is not simply inconvenient – it raises issues of equality, and of dignity. Lack of toilets has led to the use of public spaces as substitute toilets – effectively open sewers in our city
As someone whose main form of exercise is walking through the city, I've definitely noticed the decreasing availability of public loos over the years. I can only imagine that my need for them will increase as the years go by...
The Thomas Crapper manhole is at the bottom of the steps there. It's not exactly a salubrious location, as you can see.
Fishing for Facebook "Like"s by the look of those thumbs-ups. Angus is a well-known Bristol-based artist. We've seen a large piece before.
The traditional double-doors-in-the-pavement-and-vent-pillar combo that marks a subterranean electrical substation in Bristol.
This is Little Miss Sunshine, by Will Blood. Apparently the visible skeleton is something of a theme.
More by Maybepaints. Don't stop to think about the physics of it, just enjoy the artwork. And that's the end of the walk! Let's hope these new shoes don't turn out to be squeaky...
In Which We Begin and End with Love
05 Mar 2022
I had a lot to get done around the house, so as soon as I heard there might be a shiny new piece of street art near me, under the Cumberland Basin flyovers, I immediately decided that was all the excuse I needed to set off on a round-the-harbour lunchtime walk to get some fresh air and see if I could spot it. So, here's a circular wander that takes in graffiti, boats, wildlife and graffiti again...
A brand new piece by AcerONE and SEPR, replacing their earlier collaboration.
It's nice to have someone brightening up the space under the flyovers regularly.
There's a few more shots of this one when we return here at the end of the walk.
And we're back where we started. Incoming from the left is @beardedjourno, who is about to take the banner photo for this article, I believe :)
In the background on the right you can see another piece by AcerONE (also known as Luke) that I've previously featured.
