Tagged: gas
Library, Bookshop, Coffee
03 Jul 2021
I was headed into town to return RA Gilbert's biography of AE Waite to the library and along the way I noticed that Dreadnought had finished their refurbishment, but wouldn't be open until midday. That left me some time to kill, so I bimbled around the old St Augustine's/Gaunt's area for a while, then headed up Park Street for a coffee and a snack to eat on Brandon Hill before heading home the way I'd came so I could pop in and buy a pamphlet on the Hot Well I'd been interested in for a while.
Something tells me that this side passage that leads through to the side door of the chapel has been here quite some time.
Speaking of Toni and Guy, I guess the salon used to be a Halifax. Given the glue remnants, it seems a newer plate has fallen off at some point, revealing a bit of history.
I was desperately looking for anything vaguely like a niche and ended up taking some improbable photos of very dull things. You'll be glad to know I binned the rest.
I wouldn't suggest following that link if you're at work, say, or if you don't know what OnlyFans is1. Maybe read the Wikipedia article instead.
1 If you type "onlyf" into my browser it autocompletes to the Only Fools and Horses wiki, which probably shows you how old and out of touch I am.
Shops, Hedgehogs and Cows
06 Jul 2021
I really only took the GPS and camera on a "just in case" basis, as I knew I was only going for a coffee in Greville Smyth Park along a well-trodden path this lunchtime. Still, I saw a few new things along the way, so I figured it was worth uploading the handful of photos I took...
A Cliftonwood Revisit with Lisa
10 Jul 2021
Lisa had a couple of hours to spare before going up in a hot air balloon (exciting!) so we went for a quick local walk, revisiting a bit of Cliftonwood we've seen before, exploring the secret garden I'd visited before that I thought she'd enjoy (I didn't take any new photos there) and then pushing on to another garden, Cherry Garden. Last time we passed this way, I'd noticed the gate, but we hadn't gone in as I'd assumed it was private. I'd since found it on CHIS's list of communal gardens in Clifton, so I wanted to have a look inside this time, and try to figure out whether it was private-communal or public, and possibly Council-owned, like several of the other gardens in Clifton.
"Managed by local people in conjunction with Bristol City Council", confirming its status as a public space, so I'm definitely not trespassing. Good.
Someone clearly put some good work in on the gate, but thirteen years of weather has taken its toll.
This is tacked up in the entrance to St Peter's House. This was once the location of St Peter's Church, demolished in 1938 to make way for the flats.
I imagine Woodwell Cottage and Avon Cottage might be quite hard to find for delivery drivers, so they've provided an extra hint.
Autonomous Vehicle
14 Jul 2021
As it turned out, I didn't manage to get a coffee on my lunchtime coffee trip, as Imagine That were briefly shut down by a Covid-19 exposure notification (false alarm, it seems.) On the plus side, my trip was made worthwhile by spotting a couple of people from the University of Bath Mechanical Engineering Department testing an autonomous body-finding catamaran, which isn't a phrase I was ever expecting to write...
Pastures New!
17 Jul 2021
Okay, not much in the way of actual pasture to be had in Bedminster these days, like most of Bristol, but I did take advantage of the current rather toasty weather in Bristol to go and sit under a tree in Greville Smyth Park to read a book for a while before firing up the GPS and taking a little detour around some back streets of Ashton and Bedminster rather than going straight to Coffee #1 for an espresso frappé. This is the first walk in a while where I've actually crossed off an entire new street (the frankly unexciting Carrington Road) as well as exploring a couple of back alleys, just because they were there, really. Along the way I spotted a few examples of graffiti of various qualities, including a live work-in-progress by SNUB23 on Ashton Road and the finished Six Sisters project on North Street.
Some street art in Bristol is a little more primitive. Still, at least it reminded me of Liza "with a Z" Minnelli's collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys... I think she might even have got a smile out of Chris at one point, but the quality of the VT makes it hard to tell.
This is the end-stop for the Brunel swing bridge. Looks like someone's been doing a bit of restoration. I didn't actually check to see if it still had "HERE LYETH I K BRUNEL" carved on the back by some wag; I did at some point in the past...
A Journey to the Far East
25 Jul 2021
The far east of the intersection of my one-mile radius and Bedminster, anyway. I was feeling a bit tired this morning, so I motivated myself to get out of the door by imagining one of Mokoko's almond croissants. That got me on my way, and I wandered across to Bedminster, through Greville Smyth Park, along most of the length of North Street (looking out for new Upfest 75-pieces-in-75-days artwork as I went) and then onto some new roads at the far end.
I only wanted to knock a few streets off my "to do" list, but by the time I'd diverted here and there to check out various bits of graffiti and other attractions and come back via the aforementioned purveyors of Bristol's finest croissants, I'd walked 7.4km. Not bad for someone who woke up tired, and at least I've done something with my day. I'm very glad the weather broke (we had tremendous thunderstorms yesterday), even if some of the pictures might've looked better with a blue sky. I was getting fed up with walking around in 29°C heat...
I had no idea this was part of the Monarch's Way, a modern route that tries to trace, as best it can, the path of King Charles II's escape following his defeat by Cromwell in 1651.
A Film Is Not Dead production, apparently. If I'd known I'd have brought one of my film cameras. This would probably look pretty good on the extremes of either Ektar or Lomo Metropolis.
It has many good reviews on Tripadvisor. Certainly looks well-kept. This area, especially Coronation Road, is quite well-known for its reasonably-priced bed-and-breakfasts.
Love a community noticeboard, me. This all seems very wholesome and inclusive.
Green Squares and Secret Gardens
31 Jul 2021
At the end of July I went to have a look around some of the private gardens opened up by the annual Green Squares and Secret Gardens event. Sadly it was compressed into a single day this year, for various Covid-related reasons, it seems, so I didn't get to poke around too many places. I went to:
- A talk by the oldest resident of Victoria Square
- The St Vincent's Rocks Hotel garden
- The Paragon garden
- Cornwallis Crescent gardens, both east and west
- The Polygon garden
And snapped a few things in between, too. It was a lovely day—a bit too hot, if anything—and it was interesting to get into a few places I'd only ever seen from the outside, especially The Paragon and Cornwallis gardens, which are the least visible to passing strangers of all of them.
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.
Here's a startling coincidence. When I came to Berkeley Square last time, to see if I could sense somehow where the Stella Matutina vault had been stored, I had no idea which house might have contained it. I did, however, joke that I was attracted to number 23 because of the number of the house and the colour of the door.
I've since found out that Donald Hughes lived in Berkeley Square, and was likely to have been the person who stored the vault after the temple became dormant in the 1950s (I think this may have been following his wife Hope's tragic death here in 1951.) And I also found out (in some communications of the Bristol-Hannover twinning committee, improbably) that he had a plaque to John Loudon McAdam fitted to his house when he lived there, in tribute to this illustrious former occupant.
And... What's that I see, just to the right of the door?
Yes. This was Donald Hughes's house, and likely the last resting place of the vault of the Bristol Hermes Temple.
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...
I was surprised to find that "thank-offering" is actually in Chambers' dictionary, and not at all surprised to find it means exactly what you'd expect.
The inscription is from Psalm 114:
Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob;
Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.
This is also St Vincent's Hill, but apparently it's just a dead-end private service road for these little residences built into the back of bigger places on Whiteladies Road. We didn't fancy it.
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...
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...
