Tagged: door
I have no idea how anyone managed to smack this street furniture so hard, or what direction they came from to do it. It's a pretty straight 30mph road right there, and this is only one side of the dual carriageway. Never seen so much as a near-miss there.
Underpass
25 Nov 2020
A quick lunchtime jaunt for coffee. I've often wondered about the dots on the wall of the underpass. Apparently they're not intelligible Braille. Maybe it's Marain :D
One of the other sides of this clock is very broken. At least these two show the same time, even if they're wrong. By my calculation, this broken clock is right six times per day.
Must be going through some hard times at the moment. I've been in a few times since I used to live at Baltic Wharf in the mid-nineties, and it's always been a slightly edgy-but-nice local pub that's reasonably welcoming of strangers, too. Plus it's a well-worn stop off for people on the way home from the footy.
Up for the flu jab
21 Nov 2020
A trip up the hill to get my winter flu jab. I'm not sure I really needed it this year, what with avoiding Covid—I haven't had so much as a sniffle in more than a year—but seeing as they offered... Instead of the doctor's surgery on Pembroke Road, they'd taken over Christ Church, presumably to give more room and ventilation for the necessary social distancing at the moment. As usual, it was their typically efficient operation, and I was in and out in about three minutes.
On the way there and back I snapped as much as I could, but I wanted to be home in time for the first online Times Crossword Championship. As it turned out, I needn't have bothered, as the technology at the Times couldn't keep up with the demand from competitors, and their system just collapsed under the weight of page-views. They tried again the day after, and it collapsed just as badly. Maybe next year...
This wander is split into two parts, as I turned my tech off to go into Christ Church for my jab. The walk home can be found over here.
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.
I'm not sure why this door in particular caught my eye. Maybe it was the lion, or the fact that it's number 42. However, talking to my friend Gary (whose house is also featured in this walk!) about One Mile Matt, I found out a fascinating tidbit: this house has a built-in pipe organ!
“Charismatic and eccentric” is certainly one way to describe a home for sale in Bristol that comes with an inbuilt pipe organ taking up much of one floor.
The four-bedroom house has been owned by the same family for three generations and is now for sale for £500,000.
Bristol24/7 understands that the house most recently belonged to a former church organist who who died last year just before her 99th birthday.
Her husband built her the organ at their home on Cliftonwood Crescent in Cliftonwood so that she could practise at home.
It's such a bold red, you can't really help but snap this doorway if you go past with a camera.
The Gridiron and Bower Ashton Part Two
03 Dec 2021
On my last wander, to Bower Ashton, I was intending to knock Blackmoors Lane off my list "to-do" list, but got a bit diverted. I also took a little look into the history of the Gridiron, once a cheaper alternative to dry dock that was nestled just south of North Entrance Lock.
Today I had to go to send a parcel off somewhere, so I decided on going to the North Street Post Office via Blackmoors Lane. I didn't have much intention of anything else, but as luck would have it I walked out both at low tide and also as some lockkeepers seemed to be having a bit of a training session, and one of the more senior people was (a) happy to answer a few random questions on the Gridiron and (b) actually knew a lot about it, as Gridiron maintenance had been one of his jobs, more than twenty years ago...
I've snapped this before; it just looked particularly attractive today. Al's Tikka Grill has some rave reviews on TripAdvisor. Maybe I'll give it a try one day.
This is about halfway along the Gridiron. You'd sluice water back and forth from this point to rinse the silt off the Gridiron as part of its regular maintenance. This was still being done until around the year 2000, when it apparently became more trouble/cost than it was worth for the dwindling number of boats using it.
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...)
I'm not sure I've ever walked or even driven past the Ashton before, and it's only a mile away from me—in fact, my mile radius line divides it roughly in half. Tripadvisor suggests that its solid 3-star review average is made up of people having either one-star or five-star experiences, which is sometimes the hallmark of a great place that's happy to be rude to idiots...
Maybe this is the place to have a celebratory meal when I finally decide I've actually walked all the roads within my mile...
The whole little area here seems to be called Park Farm, and the area is marked as Park Farm on some fairly old maps. By the looks of it there certainly used to be a Park Farm here, but I don't know if any of it remains farmland or if it's all just residential now.
I think some of it, on the far side of these houses, is now the little estate where the Bristol Wood Project lives, where I once saw some pipers practising, and I suppose some of it may have been turned into the allotments, which would make sense for farmland...
Do people get paid a little rent by the Post Office if they stick a post box in their wall? I know you can get paid for telegraph poles and suchlike...
Got to be Bower Ashton Residents Association, right? No particularly hot gossip, sadly. I'm always on the lookout for some local undercurrents on a community noticeboard.