Tagged: car
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'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.
We popped in. I bought one of Ngaio Marsh's books of Inspector Alleyn stories. The community bookshop is run to benefit Studio Upstairs, an arts and health charity. The Bristol branch is down on the Albion Dockside estate behind Bristol Marina.
Short and Sweet
06 Sep 2021
As if to prove that I don't have to go on giant rambles, here's a quick four-photo trip up to Clifton Village for a bit of cake. No new streets, just a tiny slice of life.
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.
Have I ever looked up and noticed the view above Western Car Radio, which looks like perhaps the terraced back garden of St George's Primary? If I have, I don't seem to have snapped it before.
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...)
This, on the higher level, is the garages around the back of the houses on Cumberland Road.
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...
I wasn't expecting to see a train carriage in the Lloyds amphitheare. Apparently it's got something to do with Stephen Merchant's new drama The Outlaws. They're filming some of it down at my end of the harbour soon, too; I've had a letter through the door about night shoots that'll be closing sections of the Hotwell Road.
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...
You can see this once apparently bright and airy building has had every window bricked up.
I understand that something in or around this building still supplies the odd electrical requirements (specifically, 360V "Bristol voltage") for some bits of Underfall Yard, which is our next stop, so more about that when we get there.
While it's not a listed building, is is notable: it's one of the earliest reinforced concrete buildings in the UK, apparently, construction starting in 1905. I assume it was up by 1907, as that's when Undefall Yard installed their electric pumps.
This oddity of history predates the National Grid and was originally fed from Feeder Road power station (well, Avonbank, on Feeder Road, to be precise. We've seen a bit of that history before, as a line marker for the line from Portishead to Feeder Road.) It was connected to Feeder Road by 1906, with a 6,600V line.
I've added a couple of historic views of the building as the next two photos in the wander, but I'll also pop this link to a Loxton drawing of the Avonbank electricity works, 1908 here.
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.
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...
Here's my version. I couldn't get to the exact original viewpoint without the railings on the far left being in the way of the picture, but this is pretty close.
So, presumably the house (or possibly two?) on the end of Freeland Place, which looks to my eye just as Georgian as the rest of the terrace, must've been built after the Rownham Hotel was demolished for the road widening in 1969...
I've taken a few photos of the similar place around the corner, but I hadn't noticed there's another one of these odd mansion-mansard-bungalow-what-the-hell places here, too.
The rest of the road is just your normal-for-round-here brick boxes, really. At the end is the back of the little Winterstoke Road retail park, including PC World and Halfords, which I think are the only two shops I've ever been in there.
ODE says a "bower" is "a pleasant shady place under trees or climbing plants in a garden or wood." This road (in the Ashton district) is actually pointing in the direction of the UWE campus at Bower Ashton—I wonder if it was named because it led towards that bower?
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.
I like a lot of things about the streets of Bedminster. The view across to the rolling hills is one of them.
Spotted this new piece on Lime Road as I was wandering past on North Street. There's some interesting background, especially on the technical aspect of the painting on the Natural Adventures blog.
Recreating a Loxton Drawing on a Lunchtime Jaunt
05 Nov 2021
I did do a much longer wander earlier in the week, but that'll take me some time to process (and cast a plethora of photos into the "out-takes" pile!) In the meantime, here's my lunchtime jaunt, taken to give myself a break from doing the company bookkeeping to send to my accountant so the taxman doesn't sling me in chokey.
I've recently bought a slightly creased secondhand copy of Redcliffe Press's 1992 collection of Samuel Loxton drawings, Loxton's Bristol: The city's Edwardian years in black and white. It's a nice selection of Bristol Library's collection of the drawings. I'd noticed a drawing of 25 Royal York Crescent, a house I pass quite often, so I thought I'd wander up the crescent on the way to pick up some lunch and try to reproduce it.
On the way back I took a few photos of Clifton Hill Bank as the crowdfunder to make quite a lot of it into a wildflower meadow has just hit its target, so I figured some "before" shots might be a good investment for the future...
I tried to capture something of the feeling of the Loxton drawing by snapping a busy postman as part of the general scene :)
There's a plan to cover this with wildflowers, and I just heard that it has achieved funding, so I figured I'd take a chance on taking a few "before" photos, even though I didn't know where the planting will take place!
As it turns out, having read the crowdfunder info, this is roughly the "westernmost third" where the wildflower meadow will be planted.
The crowdfunding effort has blown past its original £1400 target and stands at £1775 so far. The original target was to cover:
- £300 for wildflower seed to sow in the next few weeks
- £100 for non-plastic signage explaining what’s happening – crucial for public support
- £1,000 for plug plants to go in next spring
They also say that most of the existing popular daffodils will stay, which is nice, as that was my favourite spring feature of the bank.
I'm embarrassed to admit how many times I walked down Cornwallis Avenue wondering what the overgrown garden was along the top without ever bothering to work out that it's the back garden of Cornwallis Crescent (east).
I went out simply wanting to knock off the very last little unwalked section of Clanage Road, over by Bower Ashton, which has been annoying me for a while as it's quite close by and I've walked the other bits of it several times. So, my plan was to nip over to Greville Smyth Park via a slightly unusual route to wander Clanage Road and tick it off.
Along the way, though, I inevitably got a bit distracted. I took a few photos of Stork House, a grand Hotwell Road building that's recently been done up a bit (I imagine it's student lets, though I'm not sure) and which I found a reference to in a book about the Port Railway and Pier the other week, and also tried to match up a historical photo of Hotwells before the Cumberland Basin Flyover System laid it waste, which included some interesting markers I'll have to do a bit more digging into...
That historical photo seems to have been taken from a higher vantage point. The most likely place seems to be the B Bond, perhaps from that fire escape, or maybe the roof? Something tells me it's unlikely they'd let me up there, but you never know, maybe one day I'll ask an archivist; I think that area's part of the Bristol Archives stores...
Because yes, we have just had a little excursion into Somerset, technically. So welcome back to Bristol, home of traffic jams.
Or possibly a caravan-park-to-be. This is the old Police stables and kennels, and dog-training ground, I think. There are plans afoot for the Baltic Wharf caravan park, forced out of its home by the plan to redevelop the area as flats (which I imagine will be touted as "affordable" and then turn out to be luxury apartments with at most 5% barely-"affordable" apartments around the back), to this site.
I think it's mostly used for sport, but the only thing I've ever used it for is the Clifton Car Boot Sale.
So that's why all the cars are there—not for the Open Day, it turned out; it's the other signs that are the giveaway. Somewhere, some people are committing a sport.
I find something intrinsically nice about this modest little terrace sandwiched in among the rather more industrial surroundings.
Apparently the proprietor's other half loves tea and can't stand coffee. I hope very much this turns into a sitcom where she runs a rival tea stall on the other side of the park with a big A-board that disses coffee.