Tagged: brick
Since setting up a search for Hotwells on eBay I've mostly managed to restrain myself from buying much (or in one case, was outbid, luckily for my finances.) However, I couldn't resist a 1902 flyer for a singalong at the Terrett Memorial Hall, which would have stood five minutes' walk from my flat, overlooking Howard's Lock.
I've found out a fair bit about this non-denominational seaman's mission, including tracking down both a Loxton drawing and an aerial photo of it. The main thing that's eluded me, ironically enough, is finding out who Terrett was, so as a Memorial Hall it didn't do a very good job 😀.
EDIT: Ah! Did a little more digging and found that the Bristol Archives has a Bristol Dock Company document on file called "William Terrett, Esq.; corresp. etc. re proposed erection of a Mission Hall at Cumberland Basin, 1892", so that might be worth a look once the Archives are properly open again. Given that:
Sarah Terrett died suddenly on 25 November 1889, aged 53, after speaking at a meeting of the White Ribbon Army, the temperance organization she had founded in 1878. Following her death many people sent letters of sympathy to her bereaved husband, William. One of these, from the Rev. W. F. James, a minister of the Bible Christians, makes for especially interesting reading. The Bible Christian denomination, to which Sarah and William belonged, was one of the smaller Methodist connexions, and had its heartland in rural Devon, the area where she had grown up. James recalled the hospitality he enjoyed when visiting the Terretts’ home, Church House, in Bedminster, south Bristol...
...I wonder if William Terrett built the hall in memory of his late wife. They were clearly just the kind of temperance movement people who would've founded a seaman's mission to get people together to have a nice non-alcoholic singsong rather than a night out on the tiles.
Anyway. This walk to grab a coffee from Hopper Coffee in Greville Smyth Park was mostly an excuse to post the leaflet, a few other things I found related to it, and some pictures of how the site looks now. I would suggest that the present day is not an improvement.
This was my random eBay purchase. I had no idea that the Terrett Memorial Hall had ever existed until I saw this leaflet up for sale.
There's some information on the hall on the Places of Worship database; as you can guess from the title of the leaflet it was basically a seaman's mission, with the aim "to promote the social, moral and religious welfare of sailors and provide sleeping accomodation for seamen, also free beds for destitute seafarers"
My favourite random thing on this leaflet is probably that the Surgeon Dentist is called Mr Heal.
I've been in on one of their open days, but it was a very long time ago. Basically a showcase of green technology and construction.
A Trip to the Library
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.
I'm afraid that this is a bit of a badly-curated wander, where I mostly just popped out to find out a little of the history of Underfall Yard and poke around the various open workshops, and, in hindsight, really didn't take pictures in any kind of coherent order. So there's a lot of pictures, but they don't really tell the story that, in hindsight, I seem to have been trying to tell, of the unusual electrical substation in Avon Crescent, the Bristol Electricity that predates the National Grid but is still in use, the history of the hydraulic power house... It's a bit of a mess.
But I suppose sometimes these wanders—always chronologically presented in the order I walked and took photos—simply will sometimes be a bit of a mess. Let's hope you still get something out of it, anyway...
A hydraulic accumulator, (similar to its namesake in electronics, now more commonly known as a capacitor) stores the energy. (This is done rather than just using the pumps directly as, say, you can use these weaker pumps over a long period of time to store a large amount of energy that the accumulator can release more quickly to do a job that requires more power.)
All that pumping next door has raised this accumulator—basically a big drum full of 80 tons of scrap metal—high off the ground where it normally sits these days. This is the stored energy that's sitting on top of the water in the hydraulic system, ready to be diverted to anything around the docks that needs power. Up until as recently as 2010, this was the power source that opened and closed the main Cumberland Basin lock gates. Without it no ship could have entered or left the harbour.
I've really taken all these photos in the wrong order, haven't I? This is an overview of the last many shots. The visitor centre is the right hand side of the building. The chimney behind is for the boiler that was inside in the days of steam. In the roof above the visitor centre was the header tank. The pump room we were in is where the open door is between the visitor centre part and the accumulator tower, on the left-hand end. Inside the tower is the old accumulator, and on the end of the building is the newer external accumulator, which as you can see has now descended fully to the ground as the hydraulic power has dissipated.
A little electrical detail on the Power House. Apparently it's not worked for some years, sadly.
Can you guess? Yes, the Power House was obviously something of a target during the war. It was strafed by the Luftwaffe at one point.
Before the pumps were converted to electricity, this chimney would have been pouring smoke out pretty much 24x7, as I understand it, from the boiler in the main building to the right. It's a pleasant little visitor centre now, with a nice cafe at the back. When this was a working dock I can only imagine that it must have been like hell on earth inside.
I can rarely resist snapping this house on the end of Freeland Place at this time of year, especially when the sun's catching both of the ivy-covered sides (well, Boston ivy, anyway; parthenocissus tricuspidata, I think.)
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.
I'm pretty sure from looking at some maps that this is the gate that would have led to Prince's Lane, if it were still passable.
I didn't go inside, just shot through the gate with a steady hand. I have been in there, though, on one of the open day tours.
From The Bristol Hotwell, by Vincent Waite, ISSN 1362 7759, Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 2002 reprint.
...in 1867 the new Pump Room was in turn demolished so that Hotwell Point could be removed and river navigation made safer. Thus the spring was lost after a long and eventful history. After much public agitation and complaining in the local press the spring was enclosed and piped to a small grotto hollowed out in the rock. Here a pump was set up in 1877 and an attendant provided by the Bristol Docks committee. In 1880 Dr. Griffin wrote a warning letter to the newspapers claiming that his analysis of this pump water proved that it was not from the original spring which in any case was too far away to retain its correct temperature. Yet up to 1913 the pump was still in use, and sometimes supplied as many as 350 persons a day. Then the long-threatened pollution of the water by the river became too obvious to be ignored and the pump was closed. The entrance, blocked up by a small wooden door, can still be seen in Hotwells Road near the Suspension Bridge.
The wooden door is no longer here, but this is definitely the place.
Yup, this is an access gate for the railway folk, presumably an easy route to this end of the tunnel. It's possible there's somewhere public to snap the tunnel from—there's a bridge further out of town toward Sea Mills, and there's a chance you could see the tunnel from there, but today's walk is already quite long enough, thank you.
From here the Clifton Extension Railway (from 1877) would have joined up with the line from Hotwells (completed twelve years earlier) at Sneyd Park Junction, a few hundred feet further out of town, and then proceeded to Sea Mills and beyond, terminating at Avonmouth. That bit of the line still runs; it's only the bit from Hotwells to here that was pulled up to make room for the Portway road, making Sneyd Park Junction no longer a junction.
Here a little fact I like: when the Bristol Port Railway ran out to Avonmouth from both Clifton Down station at the high far end of the tunnel near Whiteladies Road, and also from Hotwells, they offered a special splilt return ticket that let you walk down the hill from your home to Hotwells, take the train out to Avonmouth, then return to Clifton Down instead, so you could walk down the hill to home rather than walking back up. A lot of the dockworkers took this option, and it gladdens me to find that even these hardy folk were so put off by the hills of Bristol that they went for the lazy option!
I think this is the very first time I've set foot on Clifton Down Station platform. I believe this is the platform for the "up" trains, if I'm getting my terminology right, but I think it's a fairly arbitrary choice, as much of the line is single track.
I have, however, spent an evening in there. They do a good Old Fashioned and an excellent Manhattan, from (somewhat hazy) memory.
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...
Interesting to see a flatscreen TV left out in the traditional "please take this away for free" place, even if it is only a little Alba.
It seems I got back just in time to photograph this sluice channel in North Entrance Lock before it was covered by the rising tide (the outer gates were open.)
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.
I think the whole of (admittedly-short) Albemarle Terrace had wreathes on the doors. Nice.
Here's a working office that I'd heard of: V Cars are one of Bristol's biggest cab firms, and the only one whose phone number I have memorised. On my first trip in one, back in 1999 (in a differently-named, earlier incarnation, I think), the driver said to remember the number as "Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Boxing Day". Most (all?) central Bristol phone numbers were prefixed with a 9 back then, so you just needed to add 25, 26, 26...
There was even a cab dispatcher at work behind the window, from what I could see. It reminded me of my childhood, when my mum worked as a dispatcher at Radio Cars in Ilford.
I do at least appreciate the fact that Bristol City Timber has a traditional wooden front door.
I may have been speaking too soon when I said that earlier picture was the arse-end of nowhere. This is the delightful end of East Court, which I think is actually a public road and therefore on my list of roads to walk. Rarely have I been so unexcited to see the end of a cul-de-sac.
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.
I noticed I had a few things on my "potential wanders" list that could all be done relatively close to home, and in a fairly straight line, so I set off at lunchtime to recreate a photo of a now-defunct pub, wander behind a Spar (which turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, but I admit it's a low bar) and spend some time browsing in Dreadnought Books before coming home via a coffee from Spoke & Stringer, a little diversion up Gasworks Lane and a tiny bit of the Rownham Mead estate I'd somehow previously skipped.
While we're on a theme of things to find down alleyways...
We've had a wander around the old gas works site before but I wanted briefly to focus on one tiny detail, which is to be found in this alleyway called Gasworks Lane.
And here's the detail of Gasworks Lane I find interesting.
Part of my preferred walk to work is over the cobbles below Redcliffe Parade. It's not one of my favourite bits, because the going is treacherous and you have to look down at your feet all the time to make sure you don't come a cropper on the old and very uneven cobbles.
Here in Gasworks Lane things are different. Apparently the council used an interesting new technique that, according to Bristol247, they've experimented with in a few places across town.
The idea is to keep the classic look of the cobblestones but smooth out the ride for pedestrians and cyclists by taking the existing stones, cutting them in half to give a nice flat edge, then re-laying them lumpy-side down.
I'd not noticed it until I read the article, but I appreciate this technique now, and it'll be interesting to see how much more it gets used around the city.
