Tagged: bedminster
Fresh Fields
17 Oct 2021
For the first time in a while, I had the time and energy to go further afield and knock off some new roads from my "to do" list. I headed through the first Hotwells Festival to Ashton and Bedminster to cross off a few of the suburban roads south of North Street.
First, though, I decided to try to reproduce an old photo of the now-demolished Rownham Hotel just around the corner from where I live...
I presume a foxcote is like a dovecote, only for foxes. Nice to imagine them all there in their array of little foxholes.
One of those signs that makes you wonder how many deliveries you have to miss before you put a sign up.
Makes a change from a doorbell. Foxcote road had quite a lot of these little boho touches; it's clearly one of those Bemmie streets that attracts the slightly eccentric type.
Ticking Off a Few Streets in Bedminster
31 Oct 2021
There were only a few streets left to wander in the more residential bit of Bedminster, so I thought I should target those today. The streets themselves weren't that notable, though Balfour Road has a contrasting mix of old and new housing. I tried to snap a few more interesting things along the way there and back, snapping all three of the familiar bond warehouses, nipping onto North Street to find some new street art, and finding a few pumpkins for good measure. It is hallowe'en, after all...
One of the three roads I needed to knock off my list. Just a fairly average slice of suburbia, really.
There's still a few houses on Duckmoor Road (this is the corner of Duckmoor and Frobisher) that use their gardens for gardening rather than just to park cars on, and some of them even have quite big veg gardens growing.
There were quite a few signs that Frobisher Road is a sanctuary for hedgehogs. We've actually seen a similar sign at the far end, on an earlier wander that went past the end of the road.
I'd been looking at the map and wondering if I needed to walk down this, as it looked like a road. I'd say it's private, though.
Again, pretty sure this isn't a public road, and frankly it didn't look like I'd see anything interesting even if I did risk venturing to the end...
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.
Most of the front gardens on this little stretch retain what's presumably the original garden walls, all rather nicely put together in a chequerboard pattern of bricks.
It's a nice little terrace, but given that it backs onto the city ground, I'd imagine you have to be a football fan to really enjoy it here.
At this point I've already abandoned my original plan of heading straight to Parklands Road, as some friends had texted me to say there were at the tobacco factory market and would I like to join them for a coffee? Best laid plans, so forth...
Okay, diversion to Tobacco Factory for a flat white complete, now it's time to figure out how to find Blackmoor Lane or Parklands Road from this direction.
Trying to get somewhere around here is a bit like following the White Rabbit, except when you pop back up again there's more industrial estates and fewer hookah-smoking caterpillars.
“Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
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.
A Door, a Square, a Few Night Shots
04 Dec 2021
I didn't take many pictures on this quite long wander, partly because Lisa and I wandered across to Bedminster via Bower Ashton, which I've snapped quite a lot of on the last couple of walks, and also because we lost the light fairly quickly, though spending a half-hour drinking mulled wine in the Ashton might have had a little to do with that...
Before we left Hotwells I wanted to visit a door I'd heard about on Cornwallis Crescent and also take a little look at a couple of houses in Dowry Square to consider the 1960s regeneration of Hotwells.
Night fell fairly fast on our way from our mulled wine at The Ashton to North Street to have a poke around the stock of Storysmith bookshop in their new location—they've just moved here from much further east along the road.
Speaking of gentrification, I doubt you've have seen an arts & crafts cafe on North Street twenty years go.
The last Bedminster shot of our walk. There wasn't much light for photography by this time.
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.
Time for a quick (decaf) latte for the road. Coffee #1 open every day of the year except Christmas Day, apparently. As the only coffee shop open on North Street, they were quite busy. Apparently I was the tail-end of a constant stream of customers that had been going for an hour or more.
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...
The Nova Scotia pub bottom right, then behind it the chimney of the previously coal-fired pump house at Underfall Yard. In the background behind that and to the right is the Tobacco Factory, with what looks like a little red shed on its roof that I presume is actually a stairwell exit to the roof. On the left-hand side at about the same distance away is the large council block of Little Cross House. It always seems quite calm and tidy when I pass it, which is very regularly, but the Bristol Post painted a different picture in 2019 in their story headlined "Residents of 'forgotten' tower block demand council action over 'nightmare' living conditions":
People living in Little Cross House, a 13-storey council tower block in Southville, said their lives are plagued by poor living conditions, damp and mould, and neighbours from hell, drug dealers, discarded needles, vandalism and anti-social behaviour.
In the far distance, across the Southville rooftops, are the green hills of the Knowle West Health Park, I think.
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!
The bridge is in a pretty poor state at the moment, apparently. It's about to be closed for repairs until the end of 2022, though if I know anything about the quality of Council estimates for bridge repairs, I wouldn't expect to see it finished until the end of 2023...
That can't really be anything other than a slipway for the old ferry, can it? Especially as there are steps down there from the road, albeit overgrown to the point of invisibility and with their entrance bricked up, as we'll see when we get to the other side.
This bridge was only put up to replace the ferry in the 1930s, so it's not surprising that the ferry facilities are still pretty obvious from this side.
We have, in fact, wandered down there on a previous walk.
You can see the New Gaol entrance there on the left, poking out incongruously from the modern flats, with the spire of St Mary's rising from behind it in the distance.
Presumably this was the entrance to the stairs down to the ferry, long ago bricked up. There certainly seems to be a stairway behind it, though it's hard to tell for sure...
Well, it slopes down to the riverside at the top of the slipway. I presume there are still steps under there.
Leaning over the wall, we can see the overgrown steps from the bricked up gate leading down to the start of the ramp down to the ferry crossing.
The old ferry crossing, the newer 1930s bridge that replaced it, and the shiny new flats and shops of Wapping Wharf on the far side.
The Bedminster branch of Asda—pronounced as "Asdawl" by proper Bristolians including my friend Cindy—is enormous and pretty much always busy. It used to be my local supermarket when I lived at Baltic Wharf; I now have a couple of smaller "metro"-style supermarkets I tend to visit now I live in Hotwells. I think the last time I came here I was after something from the pharmacy that my local place didn't have.
I'm sure I must have seen/noticed this giant pile on the corner of the New Cut and Bedminster Parade before, but It's quite well-hidden from the road.
I mostly went out to hang out with my friends Sarah and Vik in Bedminster, but along the way I thought I'd take a closer look at something a little nearer home: the last crossing point of the Rownham Ferry.
The Tobacco Factory, Bedminster's will-known theatre and bar, bought a farm in 2018 and now has a farm shop attached. always trying to be innovative, bought a farm in 2018 and now has a farm shop attached. I sometimes pop in on a Sunday, though it's the Sunday market that pops up in the back yard that actually lures me over there.
The windows of the Bedminster terraces are often interesting. Here's a colourful octopus from my wander back to Sarah and Vik's place to do a crossword or three.
(The general setup is that Sarah and I attempt a Guardian cryptic, and Vik is very entertained by Sarah's increasing annoyance at the stretching of the English language, bad puns, obscure words and generally terrifying wordplay.)
If you were following this route you'll have noticed I just magically took a shortcut through a bunch of houses. That's because I've elided the bit of the route that goes to Sarah and Vik's place and stays there for an hour or two.
A sign of the times: all the new build homes of Balfour Road have solar panels on top. I bet they're grateful of that, given the current energy price crisis.
It's interesting to be able to look pretty much a mile back and see the familiar buildings of home. Descending from the top right in the distance we can just see the Observatory on Observatory Hill, then the end of Royal York Crescent, then the Paragon just eclipsing the suspension bridge, then below the bridge on the left there's Windsor Terrace and the more modern Windsor Court flats just visible behind the Bedminster foreground.
In the distance is EE's temporary cell tower, which I've mentioned before, put up in November 2020.
Thought I'd grab a close-up of one of the Six Sisters. This one's Oodles of Poodles by "Lucas Antics", aka Alex Lucas & Paul Fearnside, apparently.
Inflating in the field behind Ashton Court mansion, by the looks of it, the usual venue for the Balloon Fiesta.
Getting back to the Rownham Ferry, the Ashton Avenue Bridge is one of the reasons it was closed. On the excellent Bristol City Docks website you can find a photo called "Rownham Ferry c1906 with Ashton Avenue Bridge nearly built.".
As you'll see in that photo, at low tide the Rownham Ferry was basically just a bridge made out of boats, so it probably still seemed a quick shortcut compared to walking all the way to Ashton Avenue Bridge. I imagine the foot traffic gradually migrated to the new bridge as the ferry was a more daunting prospect at high tide, from what I can gather. Also, the combined road/rail bridge would have allowed people to get the train across the river, rather than stopping at Clifton Bridge Station and using the ferry, I think.
A Coffee and a Curve
27 Mar 2022
I wanted to have a wander along to the Tobacco Factory Market for some shopping, and checking the map for any leftover nearby streets I noticed a tiny curve of road on the way into the modern flats at Paxton Drive that it didn't look like I'd walked down before. I wouldn't take me too far out of my way, so I decided to head there first and then across to North Street to get my groceries and a coffee...
Which then becomes North Street, my destination. I need a coffee and some lunch and some veg.
A Swing of the Plimsoll Bridge
24 Apr 2022
I was originally going to head over to the Ashton area to see if I'd missed any bits around the football stadium—and also to grab some lunch from the Tobacco Factory Market—but in the end I got a little distracted by having accidentally chosen exactly the right time to see the Plimsoll Bridge swing on one of the first busy days of Spring, where a lot of pleasure trips tend to head out down the Avon (and possibly the New Cut) from Hotwells.
In the end I mostly snapped that, and just a couple of photos from the Ashton area where I grabbed some lunch but didn't do any new exploring.
Pikto's piece on the side of the Coopers Arms was looking particularly eye-catching in the sunshine...
