Tagged: building
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.
The Loxton Collection, part of Bristol Library's Reference collection, has over 2000 pen and ink drawings that were created by Samuel Loxton in the first decades of the twentieth century for the Bristol Evening Post and Bristol Observer.
Helpfully, many of them have been scanned and posted to Flickr; you can browse more Loxton drawings including this one in the album "Loxton Illustrations: Part 3" (this picture is item #Q1071), and browse more albums of the drawings from the Library's albums page
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 was fairly sure the Terrett Memorial Hall would have faced Entrance Lock—after all, they'd be wanting to drum up trade from sailors!—and I eventually came across an aerial photo from 1934 on the ever-helpful Bristol City Docks website's Cumberland Basin page that confirmed my hunch.
I haven't had the time to find out when it was demolished, but the whole Cumberland Basin Flyover System (which you can see being built on that web page) had replaced this area by the mid-1960s.
This is photo PBA487 on that page, I think courtesy Bristol Museums Galleries and Archives.
If the Terrett Memorial Hall were still there, its frontage would be roughly where those boulders are between the curve of railing in the middle of the picture and the flyover up to the Plimsoll Bridge a little further back, facing towards the lock gate you can just see on the other side of the road.
Here we'd be facing Terrett Hall square on. Crouching at work in the middle of the picture is one of the tireless people who are constantly found sprucing up Cumberland Piazza (or at least trying their best to make it look a little less awful.)
Complete with a fisherman. Quite at the moment, but as a sport it does at least already have a reputation for social distancing.
Which sounds imposing, but apparently it wasn't that secure, at least as far as a place to store the golden regalia of Bristol's mayor and mayoress goes, anyway. Oops.
I took this photo to remind myself to see if the Archives were open at all in this time of Covid. I've never been in, but all this recentl historical research has made it tempting.
Pastures New!
17 Jul 2021
Okay, not much in the way of actual pasture to be had in Bedminster these days, like most of Bristol, but I did take advantage of the current rather toasty weather in Bristol to go and sit under a tree in Greville Smyth Park to read a book for a while before firing up the GPS and taking a little detour around some back streets of Ashton and Bedminster rather than going straight to Coffee #1 for an espresso frappé. This is the first walk in a while where I've actually crossed off an entire new street (the frankly unexciting Carrington Road) as well as exploring a couple of back alleys, just because they were there, really. Along the way I spotted a few examples of graffiti of various qualities, including a live work-in-progress by SNUB23 on Ashton Road and the finished Six Sisters project on North Street.
By all accounts a fine cafe in the greasy spoon archetype. Top right you can see a little tribute to Ashton Gate football stadium, a stone's throw away. Currently the stadium is being used as a Covid-19 vaccination centre.
It was actually the sound of Six Underground, the astoundingly good Sneaker Pimps number, coming from this direction that caught my ear before the in-progress mural caught my eye, but they both had the same source, as it turned out...
I think I'm right in saying that that's snub_23 popping up a new piece, but I'm only really basing that off some quick Instagram research and some assumptions; I'm not exactly plugged into the Bristol graff scene and I didn't want to interrupt the conversation.
I'd noticed I'd missed this end bit of Durnford Street in previous wanders, so on my way to knocking off some full-length roads (and alleyways, as it turned out) I took a snap. It's not very prepossessing.
In my defence, this little alleyway/service road looked more like a road on the map. Still, seeing as I'm here...
With bonus transom. I thought I might have snapped the transom before, but I think I was thinking of this one.
Not much to say, really. The strange mock-Tudor upper halves of the right-hand-side of the street were about the only distinguising feature, and personally I'm not sure that's distinguishing in a good way.
I've clearly sniped this one from the end of the road on a previous pass, but this is definitely the first time I've actually walked the length of it.
According to Google Street View, a few years ago this was just a modest corner house. I imagine someone's made a tidy profit.
Man on a Mission
17 Apr 2021
I went rather outside my area today, as I went to pick something up from the Warhammer shop on Wine Street (Games Workshop as-was, and before that I think perhaps a rare retail outlet for Her Majesty's Stationery Office? I may be mis-remembering...) Anyway, a friend of mine wanted something picking up and posting to him, so I figured I'd knock some streets off my list along the way.
I first headed for the St George's Road area, walking down the narrow Brandon Steps and finding some strange wall art on Brandon Steep, then headed to the Old City via Zed Alley. The Warhammer shop visit was friendly and efficient, and, mission accomplished, I treated myself to a sausage roll and a flat white from Spicer + Cole, to take away and eat in Queen Square with its current decoration of hearts. I finished off with a detour up Park Street, looking out for St John's Conduit markers, before finally crossing Brandon Hill on the way home.
Quite a long wander, all told, and I'm a bit knackered today...
Who was it that decided that petrol stations had to be ugly? It's not like oil companies don't have money...
Apparently they're a "Cloud and Cyber Security Specialist". Let's not let them near this website, please; I wrote a lot of the code in a hurry when I was tired...
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.
If one tried to conjure an image from just the phrase "HMS Flying Fox", this probably isn't what would spring to mind, is it? It's not a ship, it's not flying, and it's not a fox, for starters.
Royal Navy Reserves HQ for Wales & South West of England, I think it says on the sign at the far end.
Note the Egyptian kings on pillars at the top of the pilasters bracing the doorway. No earthly clue what they're doing there. As usual, Bristol's historical sources seem to peter out south of the river.
Wikipedia says on Egyptian Revival Architecture:
By the end of the 19th century, the style had very nearly disappeared, but in 1922 with Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb the style underwent a dramatic revival it was used particularly for cinema architecture and sometimes for factory buildings.
...and given the surroundings it wouldn't entirely surprise me to find that this was originally a factory, at least, though the 1940 date in between the Egyptians suggests they were a little late with the styling.
This may be somewhere around my actual destination today, though perhaps a little too much toward the east.
The buildings and green space on the hill in the background are the Knowle West Health Park. I'm pleased to have figured this out by using an OS map and a ruler and projecting a line from where I'm standing through the Tobacco Factory flag that you can just see poking up from Bedminster (you can see it on the corner of the building in this earlier pic](https://omm.gothick.org.uk/image/7175), then looking for densely-packed contour lines further out of town. Very old-school, but it worked!
I'm probably heading in more of a Bedminster Down direction. It's a similarly elevated green space further west, which is hidden behind the bond warehouse on the right in this pic.
I nearly didn't take this photo, having snapped this view so many times before, but I do find it almost completely irresistible.
I've often wondered about writing some kind of neural-computing based app that could look through all of my photos for snaps of this view and mash them all together into a time-lapse, or something, but that would be quite the project.
Raised section of the Metrobus route. I've been this way before on a Wander, but also, on a day when there weren't any buses, actually walked that ramp. It was fairly underwhelming.
I did know this existed at some point, I think, but I'd completely forgotten that there was a level crossing within my mile. We need to wander over it, too, as this road, Ashton Vale Road, is one of the roads within my mile that I've not ventured down yet.
Partly that's because no bugger wants to walk down roads like this with me, as it's basically just industrial wasteland, especially in this interregnum period, where there's not even the buzz of industry to keep things interesting, but seeing as we're here...
"Hello? Yes, I'd like to order a cubic mile of bland industrial building, please. No, anything'll do."
A Cliftonwood Revisit with Lisa
10 Jul 2021
Lisa had a couple of hours to spare before going up in a hot air balloon (exciting!) so we went for a quick local walk, revisiting a bit of Cliftonwood we've seen before, exploring the secret garden I'd visited before that I thought she'd enjoy (I didn't take any new photos there) and then pushing on to another garden, Cherry Garden. Last time we passed this way, I'd noticed the gate, but we hadn't gone in as I'd assumed it was private. I'd since found it on CHIS's list of communal gardens in Clifton, so I wanted to have a look inside this time, and try to figure out whether it was private-communal or public, and possibly Council-owned, like several of the other gardens in Clifton.
Photo taken from the book Bygone Bristol: Hotwells and the City Docks, by Janet and Derek Fisher.
You can see the gate from the previous photo at the start of Narrow Quay. Plenty of other changes in the area, too: the statue of Neptune stands at the head of the water; there are no Cascade Steps yet; cranes still stand on Broad Quay, and you can just about tell that there's still a main road running right across the middle of Queen Square in the distance.
The gate stands half-closed; presumably before the E and W sheds were converted into the cinemas, bars and restaurants of the Watershed and other publically-accessible attractions there was still some need to keep the (working) dockside a little more secure, and I'm guessing it might have been locked at night.
The gates are listed and have apparently been there since 1894.
I'm assuming it doesn't get opened much, or there'd be a little more pruning going on. Still, very pretty for a garage...
A Longer-than-it-looks Walk With Lisa
06 Jun 2021
The track on the map doesn't tell the whole story of this walk with Lisa around and about Clifton, Berkeley Square, Brandon Hill and the harbourside, because the batteries on my GPS ran out while we were on the roof of Trenchard Street car park, it seems. Oh well. I think I did most of the area I was interested in finishing off around the University; there were only a few new bits around Brandon Hill that won't be on the track, and I can easily do them again.
Still, technology woes aside it was a nice walk, albeit a bit warm for climbing all those hills, and sat on the harbourside watching the world go by for a while, too. It was good to see the Bristol Ferry Boats carrying people around again, especially.
I've sometimes idly wondered what this thing on the side of Richmond Heights is. I'm told by KYP Bristol (who certainly know their local history) that it used to have the name of the building on it, but the letters fell off.
This means that somewhere out there, a student almost certainly has all the letters they need to make a large sign saying "CHERISH MID THONG"...
No idea why there's a window in this wall. The wall looks a lot older than everything surrounding it, so perhaps it's just some historical vestige leftover in between bits of University development.
We're just outside my mile radius here, but Osborne Villas Looked too tempting to just walk past.
Looked a bit to me like number 16 had tilted over to the left a bit since it was built...
John Carr's Terrace
16 Mar 2021
I wanted a nice simple lunch-hour walk that took me past a cafe today, and I managed to find the perfect road to knock off my list of targets to do it. Situated just off Jacobs Wells Road, right next to Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, John Carr's Terrace, and Rosebery terrace above it, which I'd completely forgotten existed, are a little cul-de-sac that many Bristolians will have wandered past a thousand times without ever seeing.
There's a reason it's next to QEH:
Known traditionally as "The City School", Queen Elizabeth's Hospital was founded by the will of affluent merchant John Carr in 1586, gaining its first royal charter in 1590.
John Carr's terrace itself isn't much to write home about, architecturally, but I like the secluded feel of it, and I really liked Rosebery Terrace with its little houses, commanding position and friendly, slightly tumbledown feel.
On the way home I popped into Foliage Cafe for a coffee and a very pleasant nutella and banana pastry, then walked home past the refurbishment of the old Thali Cafe into a new and interesting clinic...
Now the well house seems to have stopped overflowing and the sign board is no longer cordoned off, it's time for a closer look. Lots of good info here.
Just adjacent to QEH, John Carr's terrace is named for the 16th-century English merchant and founder of the school next door.
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...)
Maybe I'll have to go have a look at the front of these houses; I think I missed them on earlier walks
I decided to try out the three lenses on my new iPhone camera. This is the "telephoto" lens. It does a reasonably creditable job, though the phone is oversharpening things a bit and I'm not sure I like the colours much.
And here's the middling lens on the camera. Not bad, though on every shot I've taken on the iPhone so far where it's been able to see blue sky it's managed to oversaturate it for my tastes. Still, I guess they're aiming at the mass market, and the mass market does seem to like oversaturated colour and the sharpening turned up to eleven.
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...
The South West Broadcast Centre for Celador Radio, it says. That certainly explains the big dipole antenna on the roof. I haven't heard of Hits Radio, but I suppose I'm generally more your Radio 4 type.
The original entrance to the Ashton Court Estate, apparently. The Clifton Lodge entrance is rather grander.
Clifton Hill
23 Nov 2020
I've just got to the bit in Fanny Burney's Evelina where our eponymous heroine visit a grand house on Clifton Hill during her stay in Hotwells. It was interesting to wonder if it could be any of the places I passed in my lunchtime jaunt, which took in both Clifton Hill and Lower Clifton Hill.
From Evelina (1778):
"Yes, Ma'am; his Lordship is coming with her. I have had certain information. They are to be at the Honourable Mrs. Beaumont's. She is a relation of my Lord's, and has a very fine house upon Clifton Hill."
Library, Bookshop, Coffee
03 Jul 2021
I was headed into town to return RA Gilbert's biography of AE Waite to the library and along the way I noticed that Dreadnought had finished their refurbishment, but wouldn't be open until midday. That left me some time to kill, so I bimbled around the old St Augustine's/Gaunt's area for a while, then headed up Park Street for a coffee and a snack to eat on Brandon Hill before heading home the way I'd came so I could pop in and buy a pamphlet on the Hot Well I'd been interested in for a while.
Speaking of Toni and Guy, I guess the salon used to be a Halifax. Given the glue remnants, it seems a newer plate has fallen off at some point, revealing a bit of history.
According to the listing, this plot has:
PLANNING GRANTED to erect a DETACHED MEWS HOUSE ( 1743 Sq Ft ) with GARAGE and courtyard garden.
Looks a bit of a tight fit, but it's a nice location and there are very few small whole houses in my neighbourhood, especially not modern ones. Round here it's mostly grand old Georgian stock that's been chopped up into flats, and even the "modern" blocks are getting on a bit.
Location-wise it might be a fair bit noisier than my place, because it's closer to the Hotwell Road and would also instantly become the closest house to Hotwells Primary's playground. On the other hand, unlike my listed building, you'd actually be able to have double glazing and there wouldn't be any immediate neighbours on any side...
I'll be interested to see what the price is like when it eventually gets built.
Up until recently it was just used as an off-street parking spot and always looked rather run-down, so I'm generally in favour of replacing it with a small house.
I imagine this is the house whose owners also own the plot with planning permission; it seems to be the end of their back garden.
These nearest houses were originally called Chapel Row; they're an extension of the western end of Dowry Square, built 1725-1727. Most of the houses in this area were built from the 1720s onwards as the popularity of the Hot Well caused a demand for lodging space closer than College Green, where people generally stayed before.
Number 262 here, the closest, is presumably owned by the same people who own the little plot of ground that's for sale, given that it's basically at the end of their back garden.
It was called Chapel Row because a chapel used to stand in the middle of this terrace, long before Carrick House was built at the far end.
On the ever-helpful Church Crawler you can see some pictures of the original chapel Dowry Chapel, and its successor, St-Andrew-the-Less. St Andrew (-the-Greater) was of course St Andrew's in Clifton Village.
Pevsner apparently said of St-Andrew-the-Less:
is an unforgiveable crime against the architecture of Dowry Square and chapel Row. Of no value either in its own Gothic forms. The spire is particularly nasty.
Personally, I thought it looked rather nice, but I'm used to Bristol's jumbletechture. It definitely lasted until c. 1963 as there's a picture of it around then (in the background of the devastation wrought by the demolition to clear the way for the Cumberland Basin Flyover System) in Hotwells - Spa to Pantomime.
Though what caught my eye was the barely-visible slogan on the side wall in the middle of the picture: "I DID MY FIRST GRAFFITI HERE WAY TOO LONG AGO".
Anyway. Then I popped along the walkway to return the biography of AE Waite I've just finished, and to discover if the library's reference section had re-opened yet. It hadn't.
A protest was starting to form on College Green on my way past. As well as this one, there was also a Kill the Bill march that closed the M32 followed by "delirious" England fans having a mass celebration in the city centre, so I'm glad I wandered home pretty early. I wouldn't fancy being the Bristol Waste cleaning team as I write this, on Sunday morning...
When a samba band turns up, I leave. Several of my friends have greatly enjoyed performing in samba bands, and I find virtually everything about them makes me want to run in the opposite direction.
Something tells me that this side passage that leads through to the side door of the chapel has been here quite some time.