Tagged: city
Downs Wander
23 Feb 2021
Just a quick trip to knock off a path or two on Clifton Down. I'm not actually convinced I walked down the paths I was hoping to, but I suppose I'll see once I upload this and look at it on the map :)
Today's highlight turned out to be retrospective—looking up Gertrude Hermes' amazing wood engravings when I got home. (By complete coincidence, I was trying to discover the location of the Stella Matutina's former Hermes Lodge in Bristol as part of my researches last night...)
Chances are we'll never see this site levelled again in my lifetime. I'm glad I snapped it last week before the boarding went up.
Picture Postcards, Bikers and Wild Food
25 Feb 2021
I almost didn't bother bringing out my GPS today, but as it turned out I may have knocked off a tiny bit of Baltic Wharf, having been diverted through there on my way back from Imagine That café by finding Cumberland Road closed. Not sure whether it was just some kind of delivery to the roadworks there or if they're surfacing the increasingly-dodgy looking bit of the one lane that's left open...
I also snapped a picturesque view of Cliftonwood, hung out with a biker gang, and found a little something to nibble on growing on the Hotwell Road.
It's an unusual shape, the old electricity substation. You can just about tell from this photo that from above it has the rough shape of a grand piano.
It's alleged (by someone, anyway) to be haunted, after a worker fell from the roof into the building, but his body was never found.
A Day Off Wander in Clifton
26 Feb 2021
I'm on the first day of a long weekend, and I certainly picked the right one for it. This may be the first proper spring-like day of the year in Bristol; it was glorious.
I headed up to Clifton, around the area where I got my Covid vaccine jab the other day, to knock off a few remaining roads in that area and because it would be good exercise for an extended lunchtime walk.
Along the way I saw some very Clifton sights, including an Aston Martin, some Jacobethan architecture, and some private college sports grounds. Mostly, though, I just enjoyed the sunshine, and took every opportunity I could to snap views across the city.
It was the interesting architectural style that first caught my eye on Auburn House here. Apparently "Jacobethan", which means exactly what you'd expect: a mixture of Jacobean and Elizabethan.
I'm glad my friend Lisa joined me today; she drove in from Shirehampton and told me that the Portway was looking rather lovely, so we set off that way. She's also braver than I am when it comes to doing urbex stuff, so this was just the opportunity to take a peek into the Portnalls Number One Railway Tunnel/Bridge Road Deep Valley Shelter whose entrance I'd found on a previous wander.
It was definitely dark and spooky and impressively big, with a side tunnel that Lisa explored that leads to a little door I don't think I've previously noticed on the side of the Portway. I didn't get many photos—even my astoundingly powerful little torch (£) didn't do much to light things up, and you're not going to get much joy hand-holding a camera in that darkness—but I did shoot a little video, which I might edit and add later.
After plumbing the bowels of the earth, we went up Bridge Valley Path to Clifton, explored some bits around the College and Pembroke Road, then came home via Foliage Cafe for coffee. Nice.
A Bristol estate agent would probably sell this as having an excellent view, too.
Oakley's House, Clifton College, Percival Road aspect, though technically it's on College Road around the corner. Named for E.M. Oakeley, who was housemaster from 1877-1883, and "...originally opened as a Boys’ House in 1870 but later became Clifton College’s first Girls’ House when the College became co-educational in 1987"
The statue in the centre is Clifton College old boy Field Marshall Haig, the "butcher of the Somme".
Lisa wasn't a fan. I'd need to know what it felt like inside to be sure. It is a bit of an oddity in the surrounding architecture, though.
Among other things, it seems this "period office building", owned by construction company Beard, currently houses the Bristol College of Massage and Bodywork, and I could certainly do with some of that right now.
Harbour Circumnavigation
01 Mar 2021
Normally I don't have enough time in my lunch hour to get all the way around the harbourside. This is a shame, as Wapping Wharf is a great place to get coffee and a snack, but it's pretty much diametrically (perimetrically?) opposite me on the harbour. Today I had the day off, so I decided to go and knock off a few streets around Anchor Road that I'd not covered, as well as visiting the site of the Read Dispensary (well, one of them) and dropping into Mokoko for one of their astounding almond croissants. From there I came back along the south side, checking out the views from as much of the Chocolate Path as you can venture down at the moment, and swapping from Cumberland Road to Coronation Road at Vauxhall Bridge.
There's a lot of meh photos on this walk—my chief output from this project could be politely described as "record shots"—but a few turned out well, especially those of Vauxhall Bridge from the Chocolate Path, which reminded me how much of a loss the current closure of the Chocolate Path is to walkers and cyclists in Bristol.
One day I'll get a decent picture of this mural without a sodding car parked in front of it.
EDIT: I never did, and now they've built flats in front of it instead!
I'm following the progress of this new building going up with a snap every time I pass this way. Last time it had the frame but not the scaffolding, I think.
This is the interesting building next door to the Read Dispensary as-was. I've always loved this window. Can't find anything out about from a quick search, though.
Clifton Down Dash
02 Mar 2021
A quick wander up to Clifton Village to wander down a path or two either around Observatory Road that I'd missed out previously. On the way around I took a moment to take in the incongruous 11 Windsor Terrace, smiled at a couple of mounted police, stopped to smell the crocuses, grabbed a coffee in Foliage and came home through the Polygon accompanied by the delightful Spring sound of a woodchipper running at full blast. Nice.
A lot of Scion Hill seems to be scaffolded at the moment. They're taking it down at the Avon Gorge Hotel, though. I think they've been repainting, among other things—the White Lion bar seems no longer to be white.
If the half on the right were there on its own, it would probably look fine. As it is, it seems to be being shown up by the more-recently-cleaned half on the left.
Of Bridges and Buoys
04 Mar 2021
A trip to Imagine That coffee, so no fresh roads knocked off my list, but I stopped off to snap a couple of the engineering-related bits of the docks: the Campbell Buoy (used by P&A Campbell for mooring their paddle steamers) and Brunel's "other" bridge, the foot/horse swing bridge that now sits sadly disused in the shadow of the Plimsoll Bridge at Howard's Lock.
Brunel's Other Bridge ("Bob") was originally made to carry traffic over the South Entrance lock.
As part of the redesign/replacement of the North Entrance lock by Docks Engineer Thomas Howard, it was shortened and moved here, to the lock now known as Howard's Lock.
It was decommissioned in 1968 after the giant Plimsoll swing bridge that dwarfs it in the picture was put in as part of the Cumberland Road Flyover system.
A team of dedicated volunteers have been restoring it and documenting the process, and the bridge itself.
I bought a vintage post card from eBay this week. It's a well-known photo of the Hotwells landing stage, showing what's likely to be a P&A Campbell paddle steamer moored there. (Just yesterday I snapped a photo of their buoy on display at Underfall Yard with its information sign.) It was posted from here to Canada in 1936, and has now returned via a presumably quite circuitous route.
Local journalist Maurice Fells (really local—I could probably hit his house with a well-flung teacake from here) notes in The A-Z of Curious Bristol (£) that:
For tens of thousands of people, the pier at Hotwells was the starting point of their day trip as they boarded steamers with names like Glen Avon, Glen Usk and Britannia. The salty tang of the sea was never far away as the steamers headed for Ilfracombe, Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon and Portishead on the Devon and Somerset coast and Barry, Porthcawl and Tenby in South Wales.
The landing stage is long-abandoned. A variety of economic issues, including fuel prices, the increasing prevalence of the motor car, the construction of the Severn Crossing giving easier access to Wales, and the collapse of Clevedon Pier during safety testing in 1970, which prevented larger pleasure boats from stopping at the resort, all led to dwindling trade.
I went to have a poke about there today, not staying for long as it's a cold day and the wind was biting. I couldn't reproduce the postcard's view—you'd need to risk life, limb and presumably a trespass prosecution—but I did try to judge the rough viewpoint and angle of the photo by lining up with Rock House, the Colonnade and the Suspension Bridge and snapped a photo looking back to where the original photographer would have stood on the pontoon.
This Bristol City Docks history page has many good photos of the landing stage and the nearby Port and Pier Railway line (whose tunnel I was in the other day) and the Hotwells Halt railway station, which was just the other side of the suspension bridge from here.
I headed to Bedminster to do a crossword with my support bubble today. On the way I delved into a couple of bits of Hotwells history, first of all snapping a "now" shot to go with a historical photo of Holy Trinity I happened across recently, and second of all to snap the Britannia Buildings.
The Britannia Buildings are a little strip of offices on a corner of the Hotwell Road. They've mostly been the headquarters of a cleaning company for years, but I've often wondered what this distinctive curve of offices, its ground floor standing proudly out from the upper floors, used to be. Well, after my last wander, where I poked about the landing stage just down the road, I found out! Researching the paddleboat company P&A Campbell I came across this nugget in The A-Z of Curious Bristol, by Maurice Fells (£):
The firm of P & A Campbell was the main steamer operator in the Bristol Channel, with its local headquarters in offices close to the Hotwells pier and overlooking the harbour at the Cumberland Basin. Campbell's named their offices Britannia Buildings, after one of the ships in their White Funnel Fleet.
So! Turns out the Britannia Buildings were named after a paddle steamer—you can see some pictures of Britannia here.
In related news, I've now bought three of Maurice Fells' local history books, and they were hand-delivered by the author on Sunday, a half-hour after I ordered them online (through a message exchange on Nextdoor!) Not even Amazon Prime has managed to deliver me anything that quickly...
Noticed this interesting roof feature on 14 Oldfield Place as I was crossing the road to get a longer view of the Britannia Buildings.
On this little stretch, the place I've visited the most is Friendly Records. They are friendly, and they do sell records.
I couldn't find any historical reason why this surgery on the ground floor of a 1960s tower block has an entrance that looks like this. Might be one to ask my more local friends about. I'm guessing this was here on the site when they built the tower block and they wanted to keep it, but it's only a guess.
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.
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.
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.
