Tagged: gate
On the down side, I got to Bedminster and found long enough queues at both Mark's Bread and Hopper Coffee that I gave up on the idea of buying a drink and a pasty (from the former) or a mince pie flapjack (from the latter.) On the up side, I got to take some pictures of Cumberland Basin being drained and sluiced out, part of its regular maintenance cycle.
A long meander around bits of Bedminster, from the river to the north to Winterstoke Road to the south, taking a few roads I've seen before, and a few I haven't. The Christmas decorations were an extra bonus.
Of course, what this means is that at some time in the past someone tried to cut a child in half by slamming the gate while a group was going through it...
A quick jaunt to Clifton Village to grab a birthday coffee and cake (courgette, lime & pistachio, thanks for asking) from Twelve, and rubberneck at the demolition of the block that used to house the WH Smith, among other things. I remember the Havana Cafe, Mail Boxes Etc (for those who wanted a Clifton postcode without living there?) and others.
I wonder if the bit about it being closed for one day a year is a non-sequitur, or whether there's actually some legal requirement to close the garden every now and again to maintain its private status.
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.
I went out simply wanting to knock off the very last little unwalked section of Clanage Road, over by Bower Ashton, which has been annoying me for a while as it's quite close by and I've walked the other bits of it several times. So, my plan was to nip over to Greville Smyth Park via a slightly unusual route to wander Clanage Road and tick it off.
Along the way, though, I inevitably got a bit distracted. I took a few photos of Stork House, a grand Hotwell Road building that's recently been done up a bit (I imagine it's student lets, though I'm not sure) and which I found a reference to in a book about the Port Railway and Pier the other week, and also tried to match up a historical photo of Hotwells before the Cumberland Basin Flyover System laid it waste, which included some interesting markers I'll have to do a bit more digging into...
Because yes, we have just had a little excursion into Somerset, technically. So welcome back to Bristol, home of traffic jams.