Tagged: facade
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.
The extra strip of modular shops and eateries at Wapping Wharf seems to be doing quite well.
The logo tells me that this is related to Pigsty, the pig-related food place on the end of Cargo 1. And apparently I'm right—this is The Jolly Hog HQ, and The Jolly Hog—butchers, and sausage specialists—own and run the Pigsty. I hadn't realised that they were such a big business.
The rather derelict looking building on the corner of Prince Street and Royal Oak Avenue was at one point a Seaman's Mission & Instutue, and more recently an evangelilcal church of some kind. It was damaged during the war and seems to now be some kind of Frankenstein's monster of architecture with an odd modern frontage. The rather more together-looking (but still, frankly, unattractive!) building to the left is Prince House.
Edit to add: (19 June 2022): Know Your Place has just tweeted some amazing photos of the chapel interior (here's some more) that have just been added to the Community Layer on their incredibly useful website.
As I mentioned, these pomegranates were made by Catherine Hughes, daughter of the estate agent who commissioned the cafe.
The Hughes name is one to conjure with. I'm specifically interested in the Hughes family as I've been researching the Golden Dawn1 for a novel, and at least three Hugheses were members of its later offshoot, the Stella Matutina. Catherine Hughes (Lux Orta Est), who made these tiled pomegranates was, I believe, the first Imperatrix of the No. 28 Bristol Hermes Temple of the Stella Matutina, running it to begin with from her home at St Vincent's Studio, Redland, just off the top of Whiteladies Road.
We'll be hearing a bit more about some other members of the Hughes family in a little bit, as I decided to turn this wander into a bit of a magical excursion, for fun and research and because of handy timing and geographical coincidence.
I don't know if these pomegranates from 1904 predate Catherine Hughes's interest in magic per se, but they were made years before she joined the Stella Matutina, in early 1908, so I can't say that they were created by a practising magician!
1 No, not the Greek nutters. The British Victorian, er, eccentrics.
The side window canopies are copper, as you can probably tell by the green streaks below them.
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...
"They afterwards built, in connexion with their convent, an asylum for the reception of about one hundred sick and aged poor, means for the maintenance of whom they obtained by soliciting alms from door to door"
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...
Formerly a house, now a nurses' home, according to Historic England. Seems to add up, as it appears to now be on the grounds of the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital, which is "being used as the student health service for Bristol University"
On the left of the door is the service wing, apparently. It's a sprawling old place, and seems very awkwardly shoehorned into this corner. It looks from old maps like it was backing onto a quarry for a while, before that was filled in and the homeopathic hospital was built there.
Yes, I'm back on the magical research. According to RA Gilbert's Golden Dawn Companion, this was one of the meeting places of the Hermes Temple of the Stella Matutina. I'm guessing one of the members lived there, but I'm not sure who. I'd probably need to cross-check the census records with the membership rolls, and the latter are quite patchy, anyway.
Cotham House seems to make more architectural sense from the back. Maybe this was originally the front?
I don't know if there's any connection between the Bristol Hermes Temple and the Bristol Steiner School specifically, but I know that at least one of the Temple Chiefs met Rudolf Steiner and became quite enamoured of anthroposophy, so it's interesting that the school is so close to where Catherine Hughes, one of the first three chiefs, used to live, just down the road from here.
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...
I don't know enough about fruit trees to know what this was, but I can tell you that the fruit was apple-ish and very sharp indeed.
Unusual to see an espalier on a north-facing wall. This one faces the little car park behind Freeland Place
More dual numbering. I was curious, as I think the first couple of houses of the Colonnade were demolished at some point, so I wanted to see whether (a) the old numbers were there at all, rather than just the new Hotwell Road numbers, and (b) if they maybe started at number 3...
Since I found out that Angela Carter used to live around here, I've read The Bloody Chamber, and it was bloody brilliant.
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.
The scaffolding is down and there's a nice new sign (reminiscent of a historical one, I think,but I can't find the photo at the moment because Know Your Place Bristol is down) and you can just see the newly-installed solar panels on the roof behind it.
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...)
A Morning of Research and a Cafe in a Castle
25 Sep 2021
I needed to pop to the library, as they'd kindly dug a book out of the reserve store at the B Bond warehouse for me and emailed me to let me know it was ready. So, I took a little trip to town, straight down the Hotwell Road, and spent a few hours reading before stretching my legs with a walk to a new cafe in the actual castle (or remnants thereof, anyway) of Castle Park, before heading back home down the other side of the harbour. As well as books and coffee, I bumped into a remote-controlled pirate ship, which isn't something you see every day, even in Bristol.
It's nice to see a new business open up on this stretch of the Hotwell Road. Since Asia Channel disappeared (and took with it my favourite local source of crispy beef) and the Hotwells Pine folks retired, it's all been looking a bit tatty.
This place has already garnered several good reviews from locals on Nextdoor and Google Reviews. I must try it at some point.
The sign about the wildflower meadow on Clifton Hill Bank is part of the consultation I mentioned the other day.
The chambers were apparently once the entrance to the castle's great hall. Historic England has this section of the castle at 13-14th century
I was interested to see it, but a little underwhelmed, if I'm honest. A fairly bland interior and a perfectly adequate flat white—not much "wow" factor.
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...)
I'd broadly planned to figure out the vantage point Loxton had used for his drawing by lining up Windsor Terrace with The Paragon, so I started taking bearings fairly early.
I don't actually know what "we cap £" means. I do know that it always seemed irritating that the Metrobus worked by having to buy a ticket in advance at fiddly little machines next to the stops, and that being able to just buy a ticket by tapping a card once you were on the bus would seem wildly futuristic if I hadn't had a Oyster card decades ago in London...
Having just tried to read the 2,500-ish word explanation of Tap & Cap, I'm still not sure exactly how to use it, but hopefully it at least means that Bristol bus drivers will no longer swear at you if you don't happen to have exactly the right change sorted out in advance...
Most days on my way to work I pass, at a little distance, an intriguing-looking set of steps that run from the back of the modern housing development on the harbourside to somewhere around here. I've been getting increasingly curious about whether they're a way from the harbourside through to Cumberland Road that I've never discovered. So here I am, on the Cumberland Road side, about to find out.
And that, on the far side, is my regular commuting route in the mornings (and often the evenings—I only walk along the north side of the harbour if I'm late for work or if I fancy a change, as the Hotwell Road is a bit too trafficky to be that pleasant.)
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...
The Patent Slip is actually a grade II listed building. Personally I live in a II*-graded building myself; not sure I'd want to slum it down here.
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'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...
It's very hard to get a decent look at this building. This is the top half of the back of it.
You can see this once apparently bright and airy building has had every window bricked up.
I understand that something in or around this building still supplies the odd electrical requirements (specifically, 360V "Bristol voltage") for some bits of Underfall Yard, which is our next stop, so more about that when we get there.
While it's not a listed building, is is notable: it's one of the earliest reinforced concrete buildings in the UK, apparently, construction starting in 1905. I assume it was up by 1907, as that's when Undefall Yard installed their electric pumps.
This oddity of history predates the National Grid and was originally fed from Feeder Road power station (well, Avonbank, on Feeder Road, to be precise. We've seen a bit of that history before, as a line marker for the line from Portishead to Feeder Road.) It was connected to Feeder Road by 1906, with a 6,600V line.
I've added a couple of historic views of the building as the next two photos in the wander, but I'll also pop this link to a Loxton drawing of the Avonbank electricity works, 1908 here.
And here's the Loxton picture of the exterior, from the Bristol Libraries collection. Seems such a shame to have bricked up those lovely windows.
Most of the gear in this docks machine room is belt driven from a motor we'll see in a bit. The motor is electric but the drive system is pretty much the same as it was in the days of steam.
You can tell the pumps use some fairly hefty electric just from the size of those top cables.
A hydraulic accumulator, (similar to its namesake in electronics, now more commonly known as a capacitor) stores the energy. (This is done rather than just using the pumps directly as, say, you can use these weaker pumps over a long period of time to store a large amount of energy that the accumulator can release more quickly to do a job that requires more power.)
All that pumping next door has raised this accumulator—basically a big drum full of 80 tons of scrap metal—high off the ground where it normally sits these days. This is the stored energy that's sitting on top of the water in the hydraulic system, ready to be diverted to anything around the docks that needs power. Up until as recently as 2010, this was the power source that opened and closed the main Cumberland Basin lock gates. Without it no ship could have entered or left the harbour.
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...
And I was right, the alleyway didn't really lead anywhere apart from people's garages and back gates, but at least 99 Smyth Road had a nice decorative number on the garage to look at.
So presumably this isn't just the back of 107 Smyth Road, but the back of HMS 107 Smyth Road.
Old house? I think the dwelling of an old man would probably mansus senis, but I was never very good with Latin at the best of times. For all I know it's a highbrow joke on Milton's panegyric to Manso...
I presume a foxcote is like a dovecote, only for foxes. Nice to imagine them all there in their array of little foxholes.
A Wide Angle View
30 Oct 2021
I had an unsuccessful wander last week, on Tuesday afternoon: my GPS died within about five minutes of leaving the house, and I didn't notice, plus I found hardly anything I'd been looking for. On the plus side, as I was wandering around Park Street I decided to nip into London Camera Exchange on the offchance they had a secondhand Canon 17-40mm lens. I've been thinking of buying one for around a year, I think.
Long story short: not only did they have one, but due to a mistake with their price labelling which they kindly honoured, I now have a shiny new (to me) wide-angle lens and it cost me less than £300, which is a very good price for one of these in good condition (and including a lens hood.)
So, rather than try to salvage Tuesday's walk, here's a walk where I basically just bimbled up to Clifton Village for a coffee and wandered around taking photos of as many wide views as I could find. I took a lot more photos than these seventeen, but as you might expect, a new lens takes some practice getting used to, so most of them ended up in the "outtakes" pile.
Pretty sure I couldn't have snapped the whole length of this terrace with my previous-widest lens, the 24-70. Fits fine in the 17-40.
Set back on the end of Worcester Terrace is Worcester House. I've never succeeded in getting a good snap of it. Today does not seem to be an exception. Oh well.
I've mentioned the spire before, I'm sure: colloquially known as the "three pin plug", it's apparently meant to represent the Holy Trinity.
I'm not a fan of the asymmetry of the front door and, erm, garden path? Drawbridge? Skywalk?
