Tagged: brick
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...
Why yes, I'm still trying out the new wide-angle lens. Never mind the quality, feel the width.
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...
And I was right, the alleyway didn't really lead anywhere apart from people's garages and back gates, but at least 99 Smyth Road had a nice decorative number on the garage to look at.
I presume a foxcote is like a dovecote, only for foxes. Nice to imagine them all there in their array of little foxholes.
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.
A glimpse of Cornwallis Avenue across the back gardens between St Vincent's Road and Dowry Road.
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...)
The original entrance to the Ashton Court Estate, apparently. The Clifton Lodge entrance is rather grander.
It's always a treat to find a new alleyway, especially when it seems to be leading in the right direction. I reckon we're going to emerge somewhere near the far end of Parklands Road. This also might be a handy shortcut if I ever want to come back to The Ashton from home...
The whole little area here seems to be called Park Farm, and the area is marked as Park Farm on some fairly old maps. By the looks of it there certainly used to be a Park Farm here, but I don't know if any of it remains farmland or if it's all just residential now.
I think some of it, on the far side of these houses, is now the little estate where the Bristol Wood Project lives, where I once saw some pipers practising, and I suppose some of it may have been turned into the allotments, which would make sense for farmland...
It really is quite countrified all of a sudden. There used to be a couple of barns next to this house; the Bower Ashton Website has some interesting old pictures up.
Jersey Cottage is, unsurprisingly, the place the "cow man" used to live, according to this interesting bit of oral history you can listen to on the Ashton Gate House site.
Away from the A road it's very quiet, the loudest sound along this lane was the squabbling of the hosts of sparrows and other tiny bramble-dwelling birds.
Got to be Bower Ashton Residents Association, right? No particularly hot gossip, sadly. I'm always on the lookout for some local undercurrents on a community noticeboard.
I sort-of like what the architect has done with the odd angles of the porch and balcony, and I do like the asymmetric roof, but on the whole I don't think the oddities are bold enough to really do it for me.
Can't find out much about this place. Not sure I've ever seen any activity there, but I probably only pass by outside normal Monday to Friday working hours. Looking back on a post-War OS map, it's marked as a concrete works, back in the day. There's a tiler and a mason registered at the address, so it certainly still has some connection with stone.
It's certainly not very decorative, with its razor-topped fencing. I suppose the gabions full of rip-rap are at least in keeping with a stone yard...
Docks Heritage Weekend Day One
09 Oct 2021
I could spend a lot of time at the Docks Heritage Weekend, poking my nose into industrial places along the harbourside that are usually closed off, but throw open their doors once a year to show off a bit of the backstage area of Bristol's floating harbour. In fact, I warn you: the next wander is a long one, and will have quite a few photos.
However, for today's wander, on the Saturday, my friend Lisa needed a shorter walk than our usual long rambles, as she's recovering from an operation and still a little under the weather, so we just wandered into town for some food and back, with me making mental notes of the places I wanted to come back to on the Sunday... We walked through Underfall Yard, along to the L Shed (this is the warehouse next to the M Shed museum, where they still have the kind of fun old industrial stuff that used to be crammed into the M Shed's predecessor, the old Industrial Museum), through the street food market in town to Ahh Toots for cake and then back home. So, still quite a walk, but no hills and not so much of Lisa having to hang around waiting for me to fool around taking photos as usual, at least...
The Patent Slip is actually a grade II listed building. Personally I live in a II*-graded building myself; not sure I'd want to slum it down here.
I recently indulged myself by buying a little piece of history. I've mentioned Samuel Loxton and featured and linked to his drawings before, often in the eminently browsable Loxton Collection albums that Bristol Libraries has on Flickr. So when I saw a Loxton drawing of Hotwells pop up on eBay, I decided to get myself a little treat.
I don't think there's any Loxton drawing that features the road I actually live in—it's not very visible from anywhere else, not being one of these Clifton terraces that's perched at the top of a hill, or anything like that, and it's invisible in most views of the area. However, this Loxton drawing, Hotwells, Looking across the river from near the Clifton Bridge station, is probably the closest near-miss I've seen.
I decided to wander out one morning and see if I could reproduce the picture, and also take a photo or two of what's now become of the Clifton Bridge Station, which is still just about discernible in places.
(Then on an even stranger whim I decided to check out a possible little cut-through from Cumberland Road to the harbourside I'd been eyeing up on my commute to work, so walked to Wapping Wharf for a croissant via this potential new route, but that bit's not quite as interesting...)
I don't actually know what "we cap £" means. I do know that it always seemed irritating that the Metrobus worked by having to buy a ticket in advance at fiddly little machines next to the stops, and that being able to just buy a ticket by tapping a card once you were on the bus would seem wildly futuristic if I hadn't had a Oyster card decades ago in London...
Having just tried to read the 2,500-ish word explanation of Tap & Cap, I'm still not sure exactly how to use it, but hopefully it at least means that Bristol bus drivers will no longer swear at you if you don't happen to have exactly the right change sorted out in advance...
Most days on my way to work I pass, at a little distance, an intriguing-looking set of steps that run from the back of the modern housing development on the harbourside to somewhere around here. I've been getting increasingly curious about whether they're a way from the harbourside through to Cumberland Road that I've never discovered. So here I am, on the Cumberland Road side, about to find out.
A Morning of Research and a Cafe in a Castle
25 Sep 2021
I needed to pop to the library, as they'd kindly dug a book out of the reserve store at the B Bond warehouse for me and emailed me to let me know it was ready. So, I took a little trip to town, straight down the Hotwell Road, and spent a few hours reading before stretching my legs with a walk to a new cafe in the actual castle (or remnants thereof, anyway) of Castle Park, before heading back home down the other side of the harbour. As well as books and coffee, I bumped into a remote-controlled pirate ship, which isn't something you see every day, even in Bristol.
The sign about the wildflower meadow on Clifton Hill Bank is part of the consultation I mentioned the other day.
The chambers were apparently once the entrance to the castle's great hall. Historic England has this section of the castle at 13-14th century
I was interested to see it, but a little underwhelmed, if I'm honest. A fairly bland interior and a perfectly adequate flat white—not much "wow" factor.
Rear of King Street. I would say "interesting frontage", but presumably this is interesting backage.
It's bad enough that the terrace opposite was demolished, without some hurriedly-qualified HGV reversing into the new1 buildings on this side...
1 I suppose "new" is relative. But on most of the maps I've been looking at recently these flats don't exist yet. I think the earlier buildings included a smithy and at one stage what looks like a tap-room, the Stork Tap, for the larger Stork pub that used to occupy what's now Stork House on the main road below. You basically couldn't move in Hotwells without falling into a pub throughout most of its history. The modern-day suburb seems positively teetotal in comparison...
Mostly the Metal Animals of a Clifton Garden
30 Aug 2021
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...
I don't know enough about fruit trees to know what this was, but I can tell you that the fruit was apple-ish and very sharp indeed.
Unusual to see an espalier on a north-facing wall. This one faces the little car park behind Freeland Place
I'm no arborist. I have no idea whether the big-arse mushrooms growing from the side here are just plain old benign mushrooms or a symptom of the fungal infection that killed this poor old beech tree.
Museum of the Moon, and a Bit of Redland
21 Aug 2021
Lisa and I mostly went out to have a look at Luke Jerram's Museum of the Moon as its tour hit Bristol Cathedral—I missed it when it was previously in town, at Wills Hall, I think—but we also took a trek up to Redland. Lisa's kind enough to indulge my strange current fascination with the Edwardian eccentrics that made up the Stella Matutina, so we swung by a couple of places with a vague connection to the Bristol branch of the organisation. Well, it was good walking, anyway...
As a stunning bonus, one of the picture's descriptions has more information than you'd probably want on the Bristol Port Railway and Pier's Clifton Extension Railway line, but I did happen to coincidentally write up this wander after reading about the extension line during my lunch hour at work today. It's a thrilling life, I tell you...
"They afterwards built, in connexion with their convent, an asylum for the reception of about one hundred sick and aged poor, means for the maintenance of whom they obtained by soliciting alms from door to door"
More from ChurchDB:
"The order was founded by St Jeanne Jugan, after she rescued two poverty-stricken elderly women from the streets of Paris during the French Revolution. The Sisters' work continues today, in providing care for the elderly - for an account of this, see the article Celebrating the Little Sisters with big hearts published in the Bristol Post on 15th October 2012, reporting on the celebration of 150 years of their work."
And even more on Wikipedia, of course...
I was surprised to find that "thank-offering" is actually in Chambers' dictionary, and not at all surprised to find it means exactly what you'd expect.
The inscription is from Psalm 114:
Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob; Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.
Cotham House seems to make more architectural sense from the back. Maybe this was originally the front?
I had no idea who had done this when I snapped it, but on a later wander I found this bit of street art only a few hundred yards from my front door which seems to confirm the artist as @maybepaints.
Can't resist a plaque. The original name of the organisation was "Guild of the Brave Poor Things", but that's Victorians for you.
I don't know if there's any connection between the Bristol Hermes Temple and the Bristol Steiner School specifically, but I know that at least one of the Temple Chiefs met Rudolf Steiner and became quite enamoured of anthroposophy, so it's interesting that the school is so close to where Catherine Hughes, one of the first three chiefs, used to live, just down the road from here.
A Long Wander Of Miscellany and Magick
08 Aug 2021
This was a wide-ranging wander. I started off crossing the river to Bedminster, to walk a single little cul-de-sac, Hardy Avenue, that I'd managed to miss on at least one previous walk. Then, pausing only to explore a few back alleyways, I headed for a few destinations related mostly by the Hughes family, who I've been researching a little as part of background for a possible novel, as several of them were involved in the Stella Matutina.
However, mostly it's the artistic side of the family I wanted to explore today, as that's where most of their public history lies (as you might expect, there's often not much in the public record about the workings of an occult organisation.) First I visited College Green, where the façade of the Catch 22 Fish & Chip shop still bears the work of Catherine Edith Hughes. Then I wandered up to the top of Park Street to pop into the Clifton Arts Club's annual exhibition, as Catherine, her half-brother Donald, his wife Hope and at least two other Hugheses were members. Donald was chairman for 40 solid years; Hope was Secretary for eight, and Ellard and Margaret Hughes, two more Hughes siblings, were members along with Catherine.
Finally I walked home with a small diversion to Berkeley Square, to confirm the location of Donald Hughes's house by checking for a particular plaque by the front door.
I must admit I'm not entirely sure where all this research is really leading me, but I'm finding it quite interesting to bump across the faint lines of history that link the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, to modern, quotidian Bristol.
As I mentioned, these pomegranates were made by Catherine Hughes, daughter of the estate agent who commissioned the cafe.
The Hughes name is one to conjure with. I'm specifically interested in the Hughes family as I've been researching the Golden Dawn1 for a novel, and at least three Hugheses were members of its later offshoot, the Stella Matutina. Catherine Hughes (Lux Orta Est), who made these tiled pomegranates was, I believe, the first Imperatrix of the No. 28 Bristol Hermes Temple of the Stella Matutina, running it to begin with from her home at St Vincent's Studio, Redland, just off the top of Whiteladies Road.
We'll be hearing a bit more about some other members of the Hughes family in a little bit, as I decided to turn this wander into a bit of a magical excursion, for fun and research and because of handy timing and geographical coincidence.
I don't know if these pomegranates from 1904 predate Catherine Hughes's interest in magic per se, but they were made years before she joined the Stella Matutina, in early 1908, so I can't say that they were created by a practising magician!
1 No, not the Greek nutters. The British Victorian, er, eccentrics.
The side window canopies are copper, as you can probably tell by the green streaks below them.
Must've taken some time to put together. And done with some skill, to still look so good nearly 120 years later.
City Museum and Art Gallery. Though when it was donated by Henry Wills (you can just see The Gift of... in the inscription) it was just The Bristol City Art Gallery.
Here's a startling coincidence. When I came to Berkeley Square last time, to see if I could sense somehow where the Stella Matutina vault had been stored, I had no idea which house might have contained it. I did, however, joke that I was attracted to number 23 because of the number of the house and the colour of the door.
I've since found out that Donald Hughes lived in Berkeley Square, and was likely to have been the person who stored the vault after the temple became dormant in the 1950s (I think this may have been following his wife Hope's tragic death here in 1951.) And I also found out (in some communications of the Bristol-Hannover twinning committee, improbably) that he had a plaque to John Loudon McAdam fitted to his house when he lived there, in tribute to this illustrious former occupant.
And... What's that I see, just to the right of the door?
Yes. This was Donald Hughes's house, and likely the last resting place of the vault of the Bristol Hermes Temple.
