28 May 2021
Another dash to Greville Smyth Park for a coffee from Rich at Hopper, but at least this time I managed to divert a bit and knock off a small section of Cumberland Road I'd managed to miss on previous excursions. Along the way I muse on a strange residence in between a warehouse and a tannery, and wonder if the Mayor might be deliberately letting the Cumberland Road Flyover area go to seed...
Perched between the C Bond and the Thomas Ware tannery, I've always been curious about this odd residence with its tall mansards and unusual layout. It is, apparently, 8 and 9 Clift House Road. If it wasn't for the big busy route in front it could be in the middle of the countryside, really.
I imagine having that both the road and the tannery—operating since 1840 and still going strong, apparently—rather detracts from property value, but perhaps it's actually owned by the tanners and tenanted by people who are used to the smell anyway...
29 May 2021
I met my friends Sarah and Vik at Riverside Garden Centre today; I needed to buy some compost for repotting my wildly-overgrowing aloe vera, and I went a little bit out of my way to knock off a stretch of Ashton Road. It was a pleasant enough walk in the surprisingly warm (and surprising-not-tipping-it-down-on-a-Bank-Holiday-weekend) weather.
Interesting mixture. Behind Ashton Road, to the right and behind me in this pic, is Ashton Gate stadium, home to Bristol City, which goes some way to explaining the two big pubs (next two photos) on this stretch.
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.
08 Jun 2021
I had to return a book to the library—Ellic Howe's Magicians of the Golden Dawn, very interesting, thanks for asking—so I decided to pick the Central Library as my drop-off point and walk down a segment of Deanery Road that I've surprisingly overlooked so far. In any normal time I'd have been walking to work that way quite often, or heading through at the weekend on the way to do some shopping in the city centre, or for a coffee at St Nick's, but those excursions have been quite thin on the ground for the last year or so, for obvious reasons.
I've never been inside a single building on Deanery Road itself; the Library is technically on College Green and the rest is mostly student accommodation or Bristol College buildings, by the looks of things. It's a fairly mediocre street, used merely to get to other places. (St George's Road, which merges into it, at least has the distinction of several good shops verging from the practical and long-lived car radio fitters to the excellent little Dreadnought Books, sadly currently closed for refurbishment...)
After dropping off my book I came home via the harbourside, the better to enjoy the nice sunny blue skies of the day.
19 Jun 2021
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.
I love the individual wipers on each of the lights. Anyway. This was the last photo, mostly because I've walked the route from this point to home hundreds of times after walks in Leigh Woods, and nothing new really triggered my mind's photograph sensor along the way this time.
03 Nov 2020
A very local exploration today, but there are still bits of the near field that I never need to walk down, so it didn't take me long to find somewhere I haven't been in a decade or more, the little enclave of smaller Victorian houses around Oldfield Road and Sandford Road. I'd really like to live in one of those houses, but I doubt I could afford it.
04 Nov 2020
You never know what you'll find when you go for a walk in Bristol. This gorgeous Mustang was in the Marina car park. Nice. I also surprised myself by getting a good photo of The Hand (to give it its full title, Green Hand of a River God, by Vincent Woropay. Thanks, @mfimage!)
I considered going down to the end of this engineering bit behind the Harbourmaster's office, but I know it's a dead end and I don't think the woman walking her dog did. It felt like it would be a bit weird to follow someone down a dead end, so maybe I'll go back another day. On the other hand, I don't think it counts as a public road..
There seems to be a bit of a fad for scrawling vaguely scientific-sounding bollocks about viruses around here. A femtosecond isn't even a unit of size, and if latex was permeable to viruses, then condoms woudln't prevent STD transmission...
Also, of course, viruses don't generally travel alone. The size of breath droplets that would typically carry the Covid-19 virus, for example, is about 1 micron, which an N95 mask will filter out very well. Plus, you generally need to inhale a significant number of them—the "viral load" people talk about—to become infected.
05 Nov 2020
I spotted the fog and decided to go for a morning walk rather than a lunchtime walk today. It was cold on the Portway, but it was worth it. Most of my One Mile Matt photos are "record shots", but it's nice to get the chance to do something a bit more artistic.
06 Nov 2020
It's surprisingly easy to overlook the giant Wesleyan Grenville Chapel—now converted into flats—if you've lived here a while. Other sights that seem to slip from my memory include the modest Ashton Avenue, a tidy terrace of little houses on a road that presumably gave its name to the Ashton Avenue bridge.
One little house crammed in on the end of Avon Crecent, opposite all the others, and next to the old electricity station that I believe may still supply an unusual voltage of electricity to Underfall Yard
09 Nov 2020
I like The Paragon as a terrace, especially the bowed porches. On the other side of the road, a house attic has a stone lion surrounded by rocaille leaves, according to its listing.
I also love the detail of the arrows in the wrought iron of The Mall's balconies. Today I discovered Westfield place, a road I'd never encountered that runs up to the rear of the Coronation Tap. (It's a famous local cider pub, but I've only been in a couple of times. I'm more of a beer man.)
There's a private garden; from Google Maps it looks like it's mostly around to the right of here, behind a wall. It abutts the back gardens of Prince's Buildings and Windsor Terrace, I think, so might even have a way out onto Prince's Lane, or did have at some point in the past, before everything got quite overgrown back there.
The rain made me think of shelter, and then I remembered the SECRET TUNNEL (which isn't that secret, but if you can't spot the entrance here I won't blame you.)