Tagged: clifton-village
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...
Autumn's a busy season in Royal York Crescent Gardens.
(This is also the reason the photos of Royal York Crescent that come along in a minute look slightly hazy! It's not my lens, honest...)
Loxton drawing from Bristol Library collection via Loxton's Bristol, Redcliffe Press, 1995 ISBN 1 872971 86 5.
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.
Shiny New Hope
24 Sep 2021
A quick lunchtime jaunt to Clifton Village. Along the way I admired the new sign on Hope Chapel and added to my tsundoku collection.
There's a mason at work on the carved pilaster tops on the frontage of the old Coventry (and before then, Stroud and Swindon) Building Society. They've moved everything to a central branch in town in the interests of efficiency, so now I have to go to bloody Broadmead to do anything.
(Yes, I actually went into town to get a cheque out of the building society just the other day, in 2021. I know I should chuck this old-fashioned malarkey in for a shiny electronic account, but it's for the management committee of the house I live in, so there's complexity and inertia involved...)
I have since blogged about this little find in the boxes of books outside Rachel’s and Michael’s Antiques.
Apologies for the poor picture quality; it was a quick snap from the iPhone. There's a better picture on t'blog. It's notable that this book was written by "J L", Joseph Leech, former Bristol newspaper magnate and the man who had Burwalls Mansion built, just the other side of the Suspension Bridge.
Among the many arguments about this pedestrianisation experiment, there has been quite the sub-debate over the delightfully modern COR-TEN steel steel/hideously ugly rusty* planters.
- Delete as applicable
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...
The controversy about the pedestrianisation of this section of Princess Victoria Street continues to rage on NextDoor (seriously; I just had a look and the most recent thread about it had more than three hundred comments!)
Anything to do with parking/people driving into Clifton Village is always an insanely hot topic. I've never been able to get that worked up about it, myself, but then I live within walking distance (and I'm not trying to run a business that relies on people driving to me...)
From an Avon Gorge Geology Excursion Guide I dug up:
Just south of the Observatory, on the right of the path is a children’s playground [ST 5667 7325] in the remains of a limestone quarry. In the back wall is a bricked-up adit, presumably representing the entrance to a former iron ore or lead mine (Fig. 10C). The roof of the adit is fissured and sparry, crystalline calcite can be seen in fissures.
The playground itself is in one of the the quarries used for the Suspension Bridge materials.
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.
Since I found out that Angela Carter used to live around here, I've read The Bloody Chamber, and it was bloody brilliant.
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.
This is the first time I've properly tried the experimental pededstrianised bit of Princess Victoria Street. It was okay, though the table was on quite a tilt because of the camber of the road. Excellent cake from Spicer + Cole, of course.
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.
This is the site of a proposed wildflower meadow, suggested for rewilding by West Bristol Climate Action. It's normally host to quite a few daffodils in spring, but mostly it's just lawn. (These paths curving up to the churchyard would have made rather more sense when St Andrews was still standing there.)
Not sure what progress the proposal has made, but I think a splash of wild colour would go quite well here.
Green Squares and Secret Gardens
31 Jul 2021
At the end of July I went to have a look around some of the private gardens opened up by the annual Green Squares and Secret Gardens event. Sadly it was compressed into a single day this year, for various Covid-related reasons, it seems, so I didn't get to poke around too many places. I went to:
- A talk by the oldest resident of Victoria Square
- The St Vincent's Rocks Hotel garden
- The Paragon garden
- Cornwallis Crescent gardens, both east and west
- The Polygon garden
And snapped a few things in between, too. It was a lovely day—a bit too hot, if anything—and it was interesting to get into a few places I'd only ever seen from the outside, especially The Paragon and Cornwallis gardens, which are the least visible to passing strangers of all of them.
It's a little tamer now than it was back when anti-residents' parking zone protesters drove a tank through the city to deliver their petition. This one's about an experiment to pedestrianise Princess Victoria Street.
Won't make any difference to me one way or the other, really; I just walk up to Clifton Village for my shopping. Or, quite often, in completely the other direction, to North Street in Bedminster. I like both areas for shopping, and it's good to live close enough to either to get there on foot.
Kicked off my Clifton "secret gardens" visit by attending a talk by Victoria Square's "oldest resident", who is 95 and has lived there all his life. He did mention his family name in passing, but I've got a memory like a sieve, and his name's not on the event details. Ah well.
He really brought the square to life, with memories of the children playing in the square, making their way between the two halves using the tunnel—which I learned also had enough room to store the gardener's equipment, so must have been bigger than I thought!—and with the oldest child having a garden key hanging around their neck on a bit of string, ready to use when each family used a distinctive sound—anything from a whistle to a cowbell—to call the kids back home. He also touched on delivery men, including horsedrawn milk carts that would fill maids' jusgs from their churns, and the Walls ice cream boy who would visit houses who had hung the distinctive "W" sign in their windows on a Sunday, and gave many other amazing details. I really wish I'd recorded the event.
Among other new tidbits I can recall:
- Number 4 was blown to smithereens during WWII, hit so badly by a German bomb that bodies were blown into Mortimer Road. Grim.
- The "pinch point" made by the railings below the Arch House were motivated by a battle between the residents, and the Council and Merchant Venturers (who basically built/owned the Square, hence the adjacent Merchants Road) over a road that was planned to run diagonally through the square (as actually happened with Queen Square). The pinch point was constructed to preserve the maximum width of the existing right of way through the corner, making it too narrow for cars.
- The Victora Square Hotel used to be the vicarage for St Andrew's Church. Our Oldest Resident attended Sunday School there.
- The old [Church/Church Hall](htt
The Victoria Square event was at 11am, and I didn't have a lot of energy, so hanging around until 2pm for the Richmond Terrace Garden to open would've been too much for me. Maybe next year! The event might be back up to the whole weekend by then, rather than being squeezed into a single day.
This section of Victoria Square, the second side to be built (Lansdown Road is the oldest—Regency—bit) is called Royal Promenade, and it built to resemble a palace. William Batemen Reed built it, then went on to build the Queens Hotel opposite the Victoria Rooms, which every Bristolian I know would more likely recognise by the description "the old Habitat at the top of Park Street" :D
Apparently if the Royal Promenade were symmetrical, the windows of 7 and 8 would be the same size. As it is, 8 is clearly very slightly grander.
Nobody's quite sure why the Royal coat of arms appears here. Nobody royal appears to have given permission for it, and Victoria, as far as anyone can work out, never stayed here.
The weather appears to have been kinder to the unicorn than the lion.
You can't see the join. Number 4 was obliterated when a bomb hit it in 1941, taking significant chunks of numbers 3 and 5 with it. Clearly they did a good job of the post-war restoration. There's a mention of the bombing on one of the BBC's People's War pages.
Nipping Up the Zig Zag to the Shops
19 Aug 2023
It's been a long while since I did one of these walks.
I'm thinking of finishing up the project by walking one or two last bits of road, thus being able to declare with all honesty that I've done my best to walk every public road within my mile (and quite a few alleyways besides.) As a prelude, and just because I felt like it, I decided to drag out the camera and GPS on this little wander to the local shops.
I may not personally be a fan of evangelical Christianity, but at least they keep the place looking nice. It's still very tidy since the recent renovation, installaltion of solar panels on the roof and repainting of the HOPE CHAPEL sign.
Also looking nice and fresh since my last wander is the pair of community noticeboards, with a plethora of local news.
I found out recently that I was a winnner of one of the Hotwells & Cliftonwood Community Association 500 club prizes, which, alongside my membership, is a fun way to give money to the local organisation that puts up these noticeboards and does so much else for the community.
More notices, including a couple of newcomers to the local businesses: Hopewell, an estate agency, has opened up just down Hopechapel Hill in the place of The Landmark Practice (an environmental consultancy firm that seem to have moved out to Long Ashton) and HappyBack, who I'd noticed appearing down on the Hotwell Road a month or two ago.
My exercise for the day is to be a short sharp shock: first we descend down Hinton Lane to the Hotwell Road, then I'm going to ascend the Zig Zag, and possibly die in the process. My fitness has suffered recently because although I've been keeping my step count up it's mostly been on the fairly flat commute to work and back, so hills are coming as a bit of a shock to the system at the moment.
I would absolutely love to have lived in this area before World War II, before the widening of the road knocked down so many interesting things and replaced them with a few busy lanes of traffic, before the tramways were bombed into oblivion, and while you could still wander down to these moorings and catch a White Funnel boat out to Ilfracombe, or at least wander down to Hotwells Station and catch a steam train out to Shirehampton, Sea Mills or Avonmouth. Pre-1934 I could even have skipped the arduous walk up the Zig Zag and taken the 40-second ride up the funicular railway to Clifton Village...
I was concerned about the state of Rock House, or at least its southern half, the last time I took a closer look at it while passing. Happily it seems to have been bought by someone prepared to fix up that drooping balcony. Here's hoping these repairs continue and my next photo of the place shows both sides of this old house (dated back to at least 1731 by a William Halfpenny engraving, no matter what the Listing says.)
Just behind Rock House you can see a bit of the Colonnade, sawn off at the end to make room for the widened Hotwell Road, I believe. Back in the day, according to 1925's The Bristol guide; being a complete ancient and modern history of the city of Bristol, the Hotwells and Clifton:
For those who prefer exercise to silting, there is the Colonade with shops, built beneath the rocks, and a parade about 800 feet long, shaded with trees, by the side of the river, so that the company may enjoy a dry and pleasant walk when it rains, or an airy, cool, and shady walk in the warmest season: also during the influx and efflux of the river, they may be entertained with the sight of the Merchant's ships, Steam packets, and Coasting vessels that generally pass up or down.
The Hotwell Road really needs more facilities for pedestrians. I spotted plenty of other walkers just on my brief trip along this short section, but all of us were being forced out to share the road with the busy traffic or prevented from crossing to the safer side and back as we made our way.
Thin pavements and a lack of crossings really show how much the car is king in this bit of Bristol, despite the gorgeous landscape.
I did take a couple of other pictures of zigs and zags in the Zig Zag, but they didn't turn out too well; possibly my hands were shaking too much from the exertion of climbing this violently steep old track.
From near the top of the Zig Zag you can look down a couple of levels and see how vertiginous it is.
The reward at the top is the viewing platform of the Suspension Bridge, always busy with tourists.
I was actually planning to take an unexpected short-cut through a pub as an interesting little diversion on this wander, but sadly the pub was closed—I suppose before midday it's a bit of a reach to expect any pub to be open, even on a Saturday—so I headed for the shops instead. I'll have to do the short-cut trip one afternoon...
First I browsed the books at Rachel's & Michael's Antiques on Princess Victoria Street, where I bought CFW Dening's Old Pubs of Bristol as it mentions Hotwells a few times, then I grabbed my lunch from Parsons Bakery. There didn't seem to be anything new or interesting to snap along the way, so we'll now skip to the last couple of photos I took on my way home...
Avoiding the Accounts
26 Nov 2020
I took the day off my day job to do my accounts—or at least do enough bookkeeping to send them to my accountant. I hate doing the books. I woke up late, tired and with a headache and decided to bunk off for a walk around Cliftonwood, Clifton Village and Clifton instead, taking in a couple of good coffees along the way. Thanks, Foliage Café, and Twelve for the flat whites.
More Cliftonwood
05 Dec 2020
Back to Cliftonwood for a wander that included some of the belle views of Bellevue Crescent and other bits of the easternmost part. Highlights included watching someone bump-starting an elderly Nissan Micra in the narrow confines of Bellevue Crescent.
As well as a general walk, I also wanted to test the secondhand extender I'd just bought on the 70-200 lens. So here's a random corvid. Young crow, I reckon. About jackdaw size, but the proprortions and colours seems a bit more juvenile crow to me, anyway. I'm no expert. He lives on Clifton Hill, so he must be from a rich family, anyway.
EDIT: It seems I was right! It's a baby carrion crow.
Sequel Injection
07 May 2021
I saw this tweet the other day and started thinking of my second Covid-19 vaccination as my "Sequel Injection" (to a geek, it's funny. You'll have to take my word for it.) Whatever you call it, this morning I went and got it.
It was in the same place I got my initial injection—my left arm! No, okay, it was at the Clifton College Prep School. I didn't take any photos of the event itself; the NHS production line is so efficient you barely have time to do anything else, even if the privacy of other patients wasn't a factor.
Along the way I mused at all the road resurfacing going on in Clifton, and also discovered a secret (okay, not-well-known and possibly slightly trespassey) way into Canynge Square, and on the way back I knocked off a few streets from my "leftovers list" of north-east Clifton. I've got much of Clifton done now, with the only obvious "to dos" on the east side of Whiteladies Road...
It was quite a long walk, and I'm feeling pretty tired now, though that might be the effects of the jab too, I suppose. Anyway. Tomorrow and Monday I'm walking outside Bristol, I think, and I imagine my feet will need some recovery time on Sunday, so it might be a while before I post another Wander.
The Fujifilm X100T that I mostly use for these trips is a great camera, but it's also a fixed lens, approximately that of a 35mm focal length on a full-frame camera. So I quite often can't fit in whole buildings, whole terraces, or whole suspension bridges :D
Looking at the old OS maps, it seems this must have been where all the local cabbies hung out. The Cabmen's Rest has a urinal, drinking fountain, and horse trough, all on this little corner. Perhaps the little wall marks the edge of an old shelter; there's a box on the map there but it doesn't give much away.
Ther's a little shelter/bandstand-looking thing in the background of a few historic photos from the area like this one of a horsedrawn omnibus but it's hard to tell what's where.
I tried to figure out what this used to be—didn't have a lot of luck, but the next snap is taken from an old OS map showing that this area has been a stand for public transport since long before the modern bus stop here.
There were a lot of closed roads in Clifton this morning. I watched the white van at the end make its way carefully around the ROAD CLOSED signs at the village end of Observatory Road, drive past me, and get to where you can see it in the distance here before the driver was sent back with a flea in his ear from the workman on "stop the idiots driving through the newly-laid tarmac" duty.
