Tagged: art
Greville Smyth Path Completionism
02 Feb 2021
I needed to get away from my desk at lunchtime, and I saw a little segment of path in Greville Smyth Park that needed knocking off my "to walk down" list, so that gave me a target. Sadly Hopper Coffee's little Piaggio Ape wasn't there to sell me a coffee. I hope Rich is all right, not seen him so far this year.
Anyway, a fairly uneventful walk. They're putting new boundary fencing up around Hotwell Primary School (I wandered down Albermarle Row to see what the pneumatic drilling was about), the house on Granby Hill that's been covered in scaffolding and swaddled in protective sheeting has finally been revealed in its cleaned and refurbished form, and they were doing something to the flyover that leads up from the end of the Portway/Hotwell Road to the Plimsoll Bridge. Nothing much else to report.
In Between
06 Feb 2021
A lovely walk in the early spring sunshine with my friend Lisa. We headed directly for Jacobs Wells Road, to start off around the scene of one of our earlier walks, but this time took in Jacobs Wells from QEH upward, stopping to snap some photos of a Bear With Me, some interesting areas between Park Street and Brandon Hill including a peculiarly quiet enclave with a ruined old build I'd never found before, then crossed the Centre to grab take-away pies from Pieminister (I had the Heidi Pie) and head back to my place down the harbourside.
Need to head up a few of these. There's another street back there somewhere, plus the paths I've not walked on Brandon Hill
Unlike the other day, there at least wasn't water flooding out of the well house today.
Apparenlty the statue appeared on Word Suicide Prevention Day (10 September) in 2020.
Very long story short: it's a cut-down replica of the Bristol High Cross. The original used to stand in the centre of Bristol, erected in 1373 to commemorate the granting of a charter by Edward III to make Bristol a county, separate from Somerset and Gloucestershire, and now stands in the Stourhead Estate. This replica was made in 1851, and originally sited on College Green.
Facing us is Charles I, who used to look down Broad Street, and whose beard appears to have fallen off. On the right is Elizabeth I (Corn Street); on the left, Henry VI (Wine Street), and out of sight around the back is James I (High Street.) Directions and ID courtesy the interesting Wikipedia article.
I found out during later research into the Hughes family (including [James] Donald Hughes, who lived at 23 Berkeley Square) that it was Ellard Hughes, Donald's younger brother, who saved the upper part of the cross from the scrapheap and had it re-erected here. His father, Walter William Hughes, was an estate agent and general man of property with strong College Green connections, including being involved in the purchasing of land for the Council House, now City Hall1. I think it was during that work that the cross was removed from College Green.
This Tweet from Nick Howes shows the full cross standing in the centre of College Green in an aerial photo from 1931-2.
1 Source: A College Green Man, Article by William R Hughes on the many connections his father Walter William Hughes (1833 - 1909)
had with life round College Green, Bristol, Bristol Archives 30508, Deeds and documents of the Hughes family, estate agents of Bristol, 1791-1910.
A wander to knock off a couple of bits around Clifton Park that I'd missed out on previous excursions. This one took in the drinking fountain near Sion Hill and explained a little of how the Seven Years War, which ended in 1763, still has some history on display near Manilla Road.
Lots of information at Memorial Drinking Fountains, which starts with a general overview:
Located on Sion Hill at the junction of Gloucester Row and Observatory Road this drinking fountain was erected in 1866. It can be found on the south side of Clifton down near the suspension bridge.
Seated on a two tiered square granite plinth, drinking fountain number 8 from Walter Macfarlane & Co.’s catalogue was manufactured at the Saracen Foundry at Possilpark in Glasgow, the most prolific architectural iron founders in the world. The structure is 9 feet 6 inches high and consists of four columns, from the capitals of which consoles with griffin terminals unite with arches formed of decorated mouldings.
(Photographic Lack of) Worcester Terrace
09 Feb 2021
A nice walk, but something of a failure, photographically. I went to knock Worcester Terrace off my list, a not dissimilar terrace to Vyvyan Terrace, but one street further away from me. Like yesterday, it was very chilly but this time I went prepared with an extra layer and a winter coat. I think this may have been my downfall, as it may have been the X100T's control wheel brushing against the coat that put it in aperture priority mode at f/16, which I didn't notice at the time, and made most of my photos a little too blurry to use. Apparently in this mode, the X100 doesn't bump up the ISO if it can tell things might be a little too wobbly. Ah well.
So, a nice enough walk, and technically I did Worcester Terrace, but if you didn't take a photograph, were you really there? I'll have to go back...
Arlington Villas and WH Smith Destruction
10 Feb 2021
I actually dashed up to Clifton to take a look at Arlington Villas, just around the back of St Paul's Road, one of those slightly odd little enclaves of overlooked housing that you know is there, but you never have a reason to visit or travel down. As it turned out, interesting though the (public) garden is, I actually took far more pictures of the now-completely-demolished site bounded by King's Road, Boyce's Avenue and Clifton Down Road where WH Smith and other places used to stand.
It's interesting to imagine how nice this little area would be if turned into a permanent public square, but of course the developers already have their planning permission to build it right back up again.
The listing claims that this is St Peter preaching, but (a) that seems odd for St Paul's church, plus this literally has "HEAR WHAT ST PAUL SAITH" above the head of the main bloke who seems to be preaching. Is there something I don't know, or has the listing made a boo-boo?
Another day, another coffee. I think I may have knocked a tiny footpath in Baltic Wharf from my list of leftover paths in the area, but mostly this walk was about getting out into the crisp February cold and enjoying the walk. On the way I posted a letter at 13 Dowry Parade (home of a surgeon called Willam Falls back 1830, according to Pigot's Directory of Gloucestershire...) and pondered the strange duality of Dowry Parade and Hotwell Road, then wandered through the Dowry Parade end of Cumberland Piazza, enjoying the clean lines of the glyph graff, before taking the causeway route past a Cumberland Basin empty of water but full of seagulls, to make my way south of the harbour.
Brief Jaunt to the not-so-Hot Well
13 Feb 2021
It's been very cold the last few days, so seeing as it was low tide at a convenient afternoon hour, I just wandered out to see if I could see the hot well steaming. I've been told that you sometimes can, on a cold day, but today, as with every other day I've tried, there was nothing in evidence.
It may be that the emergent spring has already filtered through too much cold river silt by the time it hits the surface these days, or even that it's running cooler than it used to. But perhaps I've just been unlucky.
Little Victories
16 Feb 2021
There's a dearth of my favourite coffee places on a Monday and Tuesday at the moment. Both Twelve and Imagine That are closed on Monday and Tuesday, and Rich from Hopper Coffee doesn't seem to have come back from Christmas break. Today I pushed on a bit further than normal around the harbour and got to Little Victories, the always-reliable sister cafe to Small Street Espresso, based at Wapping Wharf. Along the way I saw graffiti, my second reference to one of Bristol's twin cities in two days, and a rather sleek little boat outside Rolt's Boat Yard.
Bristol has been twinned with Hanover since 1947. Yesterday I walked the length of Hanover Lane; today I passed Hanover Place.
Very Brief Hotwells Wander
18 Feb 2021
Really just a quick loop of the Cumberland Basin. I was going to go further, and it was a nice early spring day, but I hadn't slept that well and I wasn't really in the mood. Ah well. Not every walk is great. At least I got out of the house for a bit.
161 is used by Anti Fascist Action as a code for AFA (A=1, F=6, by order of the alphabet), sometimes used in 161>88[3] (88 is code for Heil Hitler among neo-nazis, as H=8)
I went to get my first dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine today. Handily, the vaccination centre was Clifton College Prep School in Northcote road, next to Bristol Zoo, a road that's just within my 1-mile range that I hadn't visited before.
I parked up near Ladies Mile and tried to find a few of the tracks marked on the map I'm using, but couldn't see most of them. Whether that's just because they've disappeared over time, or with the recent lack of use or waterlogging from the 24 hours of rain we just had, I'm not sure. It was a pretty fruitless search, anyway.
The vaccine shot was virtually the same setup as when I got my winter flu jab back in November, except for the venue. I snapped a couple of pictures of the school while I was there, but I was in and out in five minutes, and you probably don't want to linger around a vaccination centre, I suppose.
Instead I wandered around the compact block of the Zoo, now sadly scheduled for closure. By coincidence I finished E H Young's Chatterton Square this morning: set in Clifton (fictionalised as "Upper Radstowe") near the Zoo, the occasional roars of the lions that can be heard by the residents of the square (Canynge Square in real life) form part of the background of the novel. The book's set in 1938 (though written and published post-war, in 1947). It seems a shame that the incongruous sounds of the jungle will no longer be heard from 2022. All I heard today were some exotic birds and, I think, some monkeys.
I was told not to drive for fifteen minutes following the jab, so I wandered out of my area up to the top of Upper Belgrave Road to check out an interesting factoid I'd read while looking into the history of the reservoir at Oakfield Road, that the site of 46 Upper Belgrave Road was a bungalow, shorter than the adjacent houses, and owned by Bristol Water, kept specifically low so that the pump man at Oakfield Road could see the standpipe for the Downs Reservoir (presumably by or on the water tower on the Downs) and turn the pump off when it started overflowing. Sadly I couldn't confirm it. There is one particularly low house on that stretch, but it's number 44, and though small, it's two-storey, not a bungalow, so nothing really seems to quite fit in with the tale.
I'm writing this about nine hours after getting the jab, by the way, and haven't noticed any ill effects at all. My arm's not even sore, as it usually would be after the normal flu jab. In twelve weeks I should get an appointment to get the second dose.
I think I've looked this up before, but there's no harm in repeating myself, I suppose:
Jack Harding was the property owner’s father-in-law. He grew up in the Mendips and served during the War as a Private in Singapore. Sadly he went missing in action, never to be found. The mosaic is based on an old mono image of Jack, used by Oliver Budd to create a colour painting on which he modelled the mosaic. It depicts the Mendips, a BSA motorbike, which Jack used to ride around the Cheddar Gorge, and bombers crossing the sky.