Tagged: commemorative-plaque
Museum of the Moon, and a Bit of Redland
21 Aug 2021
Lisa and I mostly went out to have a look at Luke Jerram's Museum of the Moon as its tour hit Bristol Cathedral—I missed it when it was previously in town, at Wills Hall, I think—but we also took a trek up to Redland. Lisa's kind enough to indulge my strange current fascination with the Edwardian eccentrics that made up the Stella Matutina, so we swung by a couple of places with a vague connection to the Bristol branch of the organisation. Well, it was good walking, anyway...
As a stunning bonus, one of the picture's descriptions has more information than you'd probably want on the Bristol Port Railway and Pier's Clifton Extension Railway line, but I did happen to coincidentally write up this wander after reading about the extension line during my lunch hour at work today. It's a thrilling life, I tell you...
More from ChurchDB:
"The order was founded by St Jeanne Jugan, after she rescued two poverty-stricken elderly women from the streets of Paris during the French Revolution. The Sisters' work continues today, in providing care for the elderly - for an account of this, see the article Celebrating the Little Sisters with big hearts published in the Bristol Post on 15th October 2012, reporting on the celebration of 150 years of their work."
And even more on Wikipedia, of course...
Can't resist a plaque. The original name of the organisation was "Guild of the Brave Poor Things", but that's Victorians for you.
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...
Specialists in hydraulic machinery. They had a long history of hydraulic development before 1954, having started in the late 1800s.
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...
A Random New Year's Day Wander
01 Jan 2022
I picked a fairly arbitrary reason for a wander today. Really, I just wanted to do a New Year's Day wander just to get out of the house and to set a precedent for the year to come.
My ostensible reason was to investigate what looked like a road on my map that quartered the lawn in front of the Ashton Court mansion. As it turned out, this is just a muddy footpath/desire line similar to a half-dozen other tracks nearby, and must be some kind of bug or misclassification with the mapping system I'm using, but that's not important. What's important is that I went for a little walk on the first day of the year. As a bonus, I did happen to wander down a couple of sections of new footpath, so technically I broke some new ground too, which is nice.
This sounded like a fragment of poetry to me. All Of Ending Bicycles, perhaps a work by Keats?
Easter Monday Gardens and Flowers
18 Apr 2022
I didn't really set out with a theme of flowers and gardens in mind for this walk. I just fancied heading up to Clifton Village to get lunch. As it turned out, though, Spring was springing, so a minor theme emerged as I started off with the graveyard flowers of Hope Chapel and wandered up to see the beginnings of the new wildflower garden at Clifton Hill Meadow.
I first heard of Clerihews in the Times crossword: The Clerihew is:
a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
The reason it's relevant to this plaque on a house just around the corner from mine is that the very first Clerihew was written about Sir Humphry Davy:
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
(Sir Humphry is indeed credited with having been the first to isolate sodium, six years after moving out of this house...)
From the window of the community bookshop. A book I'm vaguely thinking of writing involves the Tarot, and I'm a little tempted to go on this.
I've been pretty awful at reading so far this year, apparently averaging about one book per month. That's a far cry from 2019, say, where I got through 41 books in the year. Today's wander was prompted by my rubbish reading, as I needed to go hand back some books to the library, because I'd managed to renew them so many times that I hit the limit on renewals. Oops. Several of them were still unread.
So, off to the Central Library for me, tail between my legs. On the way there I did my best to recreate a historical photo of Dowry Square; while I was in the area I walked under the adjacent Norman arch and poked around behind the Cathedral, and I also had a little diversion to the city centre and came back along the south side of the river, hitting some trouble with the lock gates as I finally crossed the harbour back towards home.
I got interested in Bristol's medieval water supplies after poking around near Jacobs Wells Road and Brandon Hill. It was during that research I found out about a pipe that's still there today, and, as far as I know, still actually functioning, that was originally commissioned by Carmelite monks in the 13th century. They wanted a supply of spring water from Brandon Hill to their priory on the site of what's now the Bristol Beacon—Colston Hall, as-was. It was created around 1267, and later, in 1376, extended generously with an extra "feather" pipe to St John's On The Wall, giving the pipework its modern name of "St John's Conduit".
St John's on the Wall is still there, guarding the remaining city gate at the end of Broad Street, and the outlet tap area was recently refurbished. It doesn't run continuously now, like it did when I first moved to Bristol and worked at the end of Broad Street, in the Everard Building, but I believe the pipe still functions. One day I'd like to see that tap running...
There are a few links on the web about the pipe, but by far the best thing to do is to watch this short and fascinating 1970s TV documentary called The Hidden Source, which has some footage of the actual pipe and also lots of fantastic general footage of Bristol in the seventies.
On my walk today I was actually just going to the building society in town, but I decided to trace some of the route of the Carmelite pipe, including visiting streets it runs under, like Park Street, Christmas Street, and, of course, Pipe Lane. I also went a bit out of my way to check out St James' Priory, the oldest building in Bristol, seeing as it was just around the corner from the building society.
There are far too many pictures from this walk, and my feet are now quite sore, because it was a long one. But I enjoyed it.
I bumped into my friend Lisa in town during yesterday's wander, and we decided to have a wander today, too. We managed quite a long ramble, starting up through Clifton and nipping down Park Row to investigate the two tower blocks I'd noticed popping up behind Park Street yesterday, then took in a few roads I'd not managed to get to before, including cutting through the grounds of Bristol Grammar School.
As well as ethnology, James Cowles Prichard was a psychiatric pioneer, serving as the—believe it or not—Commissioner for Lunacy, and was also the first person to define "senile dimentia" in the English language.
The Red Lodge is the sister historic house museum to The Georgian House, this one being Tudor/Elizabethan. These plaques really are rather handsome.
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...
The Mall Gardens
19 Apr 2021
Just a quick errand to the Post Office to send off Mollog's Mob, but afterwards I bought a flat white and a new plant from Foliage Cafe and headed for The Mall Gardens to enjoy sitting in the sun and reading a book on the first day this year that's been properly warm enough for it. Nice.
The Mall Gardens does actually have some signs up letting people know it's a public garden, but I think it was only my researches for this project that brought the number of public gardens there are in Clifton to my attention, and reminded me that I could make use of this space in Clifton Village, a little closer to the coffee shops and a little more sheltered than Clifton Down.
