Tagged: daytime
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.
Strange to think that there was once, briefly, a castle here. More on that on some future wander, when I try to recreate another historical photo of the Bristol International Exhibition.
A Water-Based Wander
11 Dec 2021
I woke up on this Saturday with a headache, feeling like I'd not slept at all. As well as that, I'm still in some pain from the wisdom tooth extraction I had a few weeks ago. I moped about the flat for a while and then decided that the best thing to do was to force myself out on at least a small walk to get some fresh air and coffee.
Was there anywhere I could walk locally that I'd never been? Actually, yes! Although it's not a road, and I didn't walk it, there is actually one route that I've not travelled so far in my wanders. And it even had coffee near its far end...
So, that was my first (and probably only) wander that involved a boat. I suppose there's a chance I could get out on a round-the-harbour trip with my old friends, the Bristol Ferry Boat Company, but I don't know what their schedule is like in these Covid-stricken times. I imagine the Omicron variant won't help, either...
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...
Again, pretty sure this isn't a public road, and frankly it didn't look like I'd see anything interesting even if I did risk venturing to the end...
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...
Thanks to Bristol24/7 I know this is a sculpture called Right to Climb by Walid Siti.
A Door, a Square, a Few Night Shots
04 Dec 2021
I didn't take many pictures on this quite long wander, partly because Lisa and I wandered across to Bedminster via Bower Ashton, which I've snapped quite a lot of on the last couple of walks, and also because we lost the light fairly quickly, though spending a half-hour drinking mulled wine in the Ashton might have had a little to do with that...
Before we left Hotwells I wanted to visit a door I'd heard about on Cornwallis Crescent and also take a little look at a couple of houses in Dowry Square to consider the 1960s regeneration of Hotwells.
And here, at the other end of the terrace, is Peter Ware's old house. According to Hotwells - Spa to Pantomime, during the area's regeneration:
One house in Freeland Place was bought for £250 and Peter Ware, a charismatic local architect, bought a stunning corner house in Dowry Square for £200 including bed bugs!
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...)
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...
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...
Of course, it's not on the quay any more, because they moved the quay. However, St Mary's Facebook page has at least one picture of it from when this strip of the city centre was still the river.
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...)
Well, they may have a point. This is Vauxhall Bridge, previously the site of Vauxhall Ferry. People seem to guess it must have had some connection with Bristol's Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, but that seems unlikely to me, given that they were not long-lived and closed down before the New Cut was dug, so they woudln't have needed a ferry here...
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.
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...)
Local councillor Katy Grant had this to say in a Nextdoor post:
...many sonar and other tests have been carried out to see if felling it could be avoided. Sadly, there has been no way out, and there is a risk that the tree will imminently start to be a danger to passers-by. So this has been the sad outcome. A three metre monolith will be left behind, as a feature, and a habitat for insects and other creatures. A new beech will be planted alongside during thus winter's planting season. And six other trees will be planted along the edge of the Park Place green slope.