Tagged: font
Lunchtime Reproduction (of an old photo...)
17 Jan 2022
This was basically the quick lunchtime jaunt I tried to do at the beginning of January, only this time I actually managed to get to roughly the viewpoint I'd been hoping for to recreate a historical photo of the Bristol International Exhibition.
I did this walk about a month ago, but I've been a bit poorly and not really up to doing much in my spare time, and it's taken me this long to even face processing even these few photos. Hopefully normal service will be resumed at some point and I can carry on trying to walk any roads and paths that I need to do to make this project feel complete...
Gargoyles? Caryatids? Gargyatids? Caryoyles? There's probably a proper name for them, knowing architecture...
This is St Vincent's Priory, a very odd building on Clifton Hill. According to Maurice Fells' excellent Clifton: History You Can See:
Its name conjures up visions to the sounds of monastic of an ancient religious foundation with its hallowed walls echoing chanting. But St Vincent's Priory is a private house and the likelihood is that it was built as such and probably conceived as an architectural folly...
Bedminster Trip for New Walking Shoes
26 Feb 2022
I needed to buy new walking shoes—my old ones were squeaking and it was driving me up the wall—so I ordered some for collection from Taunton Leisure on East Street in Bedminster, and decided to make picking them up an official wander.
I didn't cover any new ground within my mile, but I did take advantage of the trip to take in a few interesting things just outside my normal radius, mostly New Gaol-related. Along the way there are a couple of sanitation-related diversions, including a visit to a rare manhole cover. You can hardly wait, I can tell!
Hadn't spotted this one before. It's hidden away a little, tucked inside the entrance to the disused public toilets under the ramp for one of the Cumberland Basin flyovers.
You can pretty much take the word "disused" for read when it comes to public toilets in Bristol. Protesters recently wrote an open letter to the council demanding the re-opening of some of the many closed toilets.
The lack of access to public toilets in Bristol is not simply inconvenient – it raises issues of equality, and of dignity. Lack of toilets has led to the use of public spaces as substitute toilets – effectively open sewers in our city
As someone whose main form of exercise is walking through the city, I've definitely noticed the decreasing availability of public loos over the years. I can only imagine that my need for them will increase as the years go by...
The blurb for The Cuckoo Cage sounds fun:
In this unique experiment, twelve authors have been tasked with resurrecting that tradition: to spawn a new generation of present-day British superheroes, willing to bring the fight back to British shores and to more progressive causes.
But I'd probably take issue with the experiment's claimed uniqueness, given that it sounds virtually the same concept as 1991's Temps. Still, I'll be interested to read it and I snapped this to remind myself that I might want to get a ticket for the launch.
New shoes secured. My Idler tote bag was apparently perfectly designed for a pair of Keen Targhee walking shoes.
It's a strange mix of shops. This rather high-end sounding deli is sandwiched between two mobile phone repair places.
I'm glad that you can tell from the other signs that this should say "Regal Amusements" and not "Illegal Amusements", as I'd originally assumed.
Fishing for Facebook "Like"s by the look of those thumbs-ups. Angus is a well-known Bristol-based artist. We've seen a large piece before.
In Which We Begin and End with Love
05 Mar 2022
I had a lot to get done around the house, so as soon as I heard there might be a shiny new piece of street art near me, under the Cumberland Basin flyovers, I immediately decided that was all the excuse I needed to set off on a round-the-harbour lunchtime walk to get some fresh air and see if I could spot it. So, here's a circular wander that takes in graffiti, boats, wildlife and graffiti again...
A brand new piece by AcerONE and SEPR, replacing their earlier collaboration.
It's nice to have someone brightening up the space under the flyovers regularly.
There's a few more shots of this one when we return here at the end of the walk.
Leigh Woods Purple Path
12 Mar 2022
There's a few tracks in Leigh Woods that lie within my mile and show up on my map but that I've not walked yet, so I decided to take one of my traditional big long walks through the woods on this nice crisp sunny morning.
For years—decades, even—I've been doing a similar route from my place, along the towpath to the far woods entrance, up the hill for a varied walk on one of the marked tracks and then across the Suspension Bridge to Clifton Village for a coffee-based reward. It's my default "long walk", really, and I almost always enjoy it. Today, at last, spring actually seemed to be springing, which made for some extra positivity...
"Swing bridge machinery by Sir William Arrol & Co. Ltd": Sir William was knighted for his commitment to his work on both the Forth Bridge and the replacement Tay Bridge, erected following the loss of the previous bridge in the great Tay Bridge Disaster. He was also responsible for knocking up some other little bridges around the country, like london's Tower Bridge, to pick an example...
My friend Sarah made a podcast episode about Sylvia Crowe (credited bottom right on the plaque) and her development of the landscape in this area, with Wendy Tippett, a local landscape architect. It's a great listen if you're familiar with the area, and explains all sorts of things, including the PPILA after Sylvia Crowe's name on the plaque: Past President, Institute of Landscape Artists.
Waterstones Clifton Village there presumably doing their best to sell books that help give context to the current Russian aggression.
I mostly went out to hang out with my friends Sarah and Vik in Bedminster, but along the way I thought I'd take a closer look at something a little nearer home: the last crossing point of the Rownham Ferry.
Thought I'd grab a close-up of one of the Six Sisters. This one's Oodles of Poodles by "Lucas Antics", aka Alex Lucas & Paul Fearnside, apparently.
Much as I admire Sylvia Crowe's ambitious vision of her landscaping of the area the more I hear of it, I'm firmly in the camp who thinks the concrete now just looks grim and virtually anything improves it. I mean, it's not my cup of tea, but at least it brightens the dinginess up a bit.
Looks like the stones at the bottom corner were replaced with some simple poured concrete with grip lines drawn across it at some point.
A Coffee and a Curve
27 Mar 2022
I wanted to have a wander along to the Tobacco Factory Market for some shopping, and checking the map for any leftover nearby streets I noticed a tiny curve of road on the way into the modern flats at Paxton Drive that it didn't look like I'd walked down before. I wouldn't take me too far out of my way, so I decided to head there first and then across to North Street to get my groceries and a coffee...
Looks more like a naughty-lus to me! We've seen another artistic nautilus before, on Park Row, by Lucas Antics, but this doesn't look like their style to my (entirely untrained!) eye.
Well, I hope he's bringing the sign he nicked from this end of Paxton Drive with him.
I noticed I had a few things on my "potential wanders" list that could all be done relatively close to home, and in a fairly straight line, so I set off at lunchtime to recreate a photo of a now-defunct pub, wander behind a Spar (which turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, but I admit it's a low bar) and spend some time browsing in Dreadnought Books before coming home via a coffee from Spoke & Stringer, a little diversion up Gasworks Lane and a tiny bit of the Rownham Mead estate I'd somehow previously skipped.
Uncredited apart from "from our archives" and undated, this photo appeared in this article on Hotwells in the Evening Post and made me want to re-create the same view today.
The pub had a few changes of name over time—in the Bristol Then and Now Facebook group people recall this being the Spring Gardens in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Someone remembers it turning into Durty Nelly's in 1995, but I swear it was back to being the Spring Gardens again by the time I moved to the area in 1999. Then it spent some time as La Demi Lune, which you can see on Street View in 2008, and then by 2009 it's back to The Spring Garden (without the "s").
So, from what I can work out, this snap was probably taken in the 1990s, most likely between 1995 and 1999.
This pub—which did good food, and had an extensive garden at the back, from what I remember, when it was the Spring Gardens in the early 2000s—is rather more bland in looks today, as we'll see in the next picture.
On Know Your Place you can check out old maps of Bristol. Sadly there doesn't seem to be an easy way of linking to a particular map/location. Still, here's a little screenshot of the 1898-1939 layer. These tracks are still there on the later 1949 map, so at least this section survived the war, I think.
Having checked Wikipedia I think this section, which ran from Canons Marsh to Ashton Avenue Bridge and then on to the south was created in 1906, and closed in 1965.
This map fragment will be © Ordnance Survey.
Here's the entrance to Pembroke Place on the Hotwell Road. Looking at old maps, before it was Pembroke Place it was Blackhorse Lane.
On my way home I popped through Rownham Mead estate and snapped a few things, starting with this house number that I've always enjoyed. This used to be my regular cut-through to the commuter ferry service back when I used to get the boat to work, so I'm very familiar with this little area.
As usual, the somewhat bland housing estate is elevating itself by means of the horticulture—I really do like the job their landscapers do in general, but most of the houses also seem to take a lot of pride in the individual gardens, too.
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...)
The bench at the top of Clifton Vale doesn't really have a view, and it's squeezed into an awkward little corner in the tight dogleg turn up to Goldney Avenue. On the plus side, Clifton Vale is very steep and many people are grateful for the opportunity it provides for a breather.
I last used it when showing my friend Heather the way back to her hotel in Berkeley Square after a meal in the Pump House. It's a fairly direct route to take, but even a local like me who's used to the hills around here can feel the need for a short rest here before pressing on to the heights of Clifton.
There's been some commotion on Nextdoor about the recent appearance of this sign. Lots of people who have been letting their dogs off their leads in the churchyard for decades have been rather up in arms. I'm not sure there's actually much danger of the rozzers issuing ASBOs or fines to the locals for that kind of infraction, though.
They're never open on Easter Monday, are they? Answer in two pic's time. Don't hold your breath.
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.
They were not open, gentle reader, despite their A board down the road. Ah well.
With a special Platinum Jubilee celebration on offer, too. I imagine The Mall Gardens will do that rather well.
The "Brigstowe Village Band" is a whimsical name. Brigstow—the bridge at the meeting point—is the origin of the modern "Bristol". Apparently they're "modelled on the village bands of Thomas Hardy’s day when local musicians played for all the local gatherings and celebrations."
A Swing of the Plimsoll Bridge
24 Apr 2022
I was originally going to head over to the Ashton area to see if I'd missed any bits around the football stadium—and also to grab some lunch from the Tobacco Factory Market—but in the end I got a little distracted by having accidentally chosen exactly the right time to see the Plimsoll Bridge swing on one of the first busy days of Spring, where a lot of pleasure trips tend to head out down the Avon (and possibly the New Cut) from Hotwells.
In the end I mostly snapped that, and just a couple of photos from the Ashton area where I grabbed some lunch but didn't do any new exploring.
Ticking Off a Pocket of Paths in Leigh Woods
03 Jun 2022
I managed to go for a wander a while ago that was meant to finish off a little tangle of paths in Leigh Woods, or at the very least finish off my wandering of the Purple Path there. And I managed to miss doing either of those things through some kind of navigational incompetence.
Today I woke up with a bit of a headache, feeling a bit knackered as soon as I dragged myself out of bed, but at least with the energy to realise that I'd be better off (a) going for a walk in what looked likely to be the last of the Jubilee weekend sunshine than (b) moping around the flat until it started raining, at which point I could mope more thoroughly.
I had a look at my map, considered going to Ashton Court, but remembered that there was a music festival there today, and instead found these little leftovers of Leigh Woods and decided to have one more try at walking them.
It's quite the commentary. But then if someone believes they can have their life turned around by a fly-posting stranger, perhaps a warning is a reasonable addendum.
This is a sentiment that I've often shared, I confess, but never been motivated to express in the form of paint.