Tagged: grass-family
Rabbits, bad pedestrian signage and good coffee
13 Nov 2020
A quick trip with the aim of finding a better way to Greville Smyth park and a good coffee. Sadly I was stymied yet again with the former—it turns out that you do apparently have to take a strange loop around the houses (or at least around the roads) to get to Greville Smyth any way other than my normal route, unless you're prepared to vault some railings. It may be that the disused steps from where the skater kids hang out to the flyover above might once have led to a shorter route, but it's hard to tell. The geography in the area has always confused me.
On the plus side, Rich, who runs Hopper Coffee from a Piaggio Ape does a great flat white and often has a good sign. (I collect cafe signs...)
This has now become one of my favourite little shortcuts for getting from this side of the road over to Greville Smyth.
Misty Walk
30 Oct 2020
Something of a misty start took me around the viewpoint at the end of Spike Island and then on to try to find a new way into Greville Smyth Park. I got lost.
Hotwells and Clifton/Clifton Village
14 Nov 2020
A local walk with my friend Lisa in tow, including a coffee from the cafe in the Clifton Observatory, where I have fond memories of experiencing my first camera obscura, and cake from Twelve in Clifton Village, one of my favourite recent finds for both food and flat whites.
Outside the Zone
01 Nov 2020
This started as a little local walk with my friend Lisa, but when we randomly met my friends Sarah and Vik at Ashton Court, turned into joining them for a very long wander out to Abbots Leigh Pool. Most of this was well outside my one-mile radius but it was a lovely walk.
Sunday Morning
15 Nov 2020
My friend Sarah mentioned the high tide and I managed to drag myself out early, though still a little late. We nearly drowned in torrential rain, but the weather changed quickly and we ended up walking over to Bedminster in sunshine.
Jaunt to a Closed Coffee Shop
17 Nov 2020
A fruitless wander, as Spoke and Stringer (who I thought might do a decent flat white) were closed, and the only other harbourside inlet offering were a bit too busy to wait at, especially as I'd spent some time wandering some of the convolutions of Rownham Mead. This last congeries of dull alleyways and brown-painted garages was at least somewhere I've never been before, in parts.
In which our intrepid hero levels up.
Bedmo and Ashton Court
21 Nov 2020
A rather more wide-ranging weekend wander with Sarah and Vik, taking in some mock Tudor bits of Bedmo (I should note that I've subsequently been corrected to "Bemmie", but I'm an outsider and have been calling it "Bedmo" for short for decades...), a chunk of Ashton, a path up Rownham Hill called Dead Badger's Bottom(!), The Ashton Court estate, a bit of the UWE campus at Bower Ashton, and some of the Festival Way path.
I guess someone's living on this patch of ground. I think this used to be where the police horses were stabled. Not sure, though.
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...
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.
According to the lockkeeper, the last time a boat was on the gridiron was around the year 2000. He thought it might have been either the PS Waverley—a still-running paddle steamer I'm dying to have a go on at some point!—or the MV Balmoral, another vintage excursion ship. He had a recollection of the Balmoral needing to free something that had got tangled around its propeller.
Before then, he remembered the ship Samuel Plimsoll being on the gridiron in 1998.
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 was really just busking my route at this point, and finding a handy entrance to Ashton Court I figured that wandering back through the estate was a good plan.
There's not much to see here. However, trying to find out what was here has been quite fascinating.
By the looks of it, this was part of the site of the Bristol International Exhibition, and I also found a photo of "Bristol's Own B Company" geotagged here—apparently the Glosters were stationed on the site of the exhibition after its early closure, so that might tie up, especially as the photo is dated 1914-1919 and the Glosters were here until 1919.
Aha! Yes, as you can see from this other postcard, that building was indeed part of the exhibition. Gosh. I hadn't really realised just how grand the exhibition ground was—you can certainly see why they called it the White City.
So, this would definitely have been part of the exhibition ground—around where the grandstand was—as would almost all of the surrounding area. Wow. Must've been quite something. They had everything from a rifle range to a replica of Bristol Castle.
As for this particular derelict bit of fenced-off ground, I give it five years before we see some architectural drawings of luxury flats with the bare minimum of affordable housing hidden around the back. Will it be as well-built as the plasterboard and gypsum White City? Who knows...
Later edit: Ah! On a later wander I found the key piece of information about this strip of land that let me search for it properly: its name. This strip of land, from the Stone Yard we just saw to here is the Ashton Gate Depot, a former railway sidings, and apparently I may have been overly cynical about the luxury flats, though there are definitely plans to turn it into flats, according to the Evening Post:
The proposed redevelopment of the site would include 99 one-bed apartments, 138 two-bed apartments, two three-bed apartments and 14 four-bed townhouses.
According to plans submitted to the council, all the new housing will be affordable because it will either be shared ownership or socially rented.
The development will span across five buildings between four and nine stories high.
There's more info and a detailed map on this planning document.
From all the old maps I can see, the actual railway sidings were in between this strip of land and the new development at Paxton Drive, around where the dedicated Metrobus line now runs. Perhaps this strip to the west of them was used for general railway storage, or maintenance buildings, or what-have-you. Now I've found out a bit more it should be easier to dig into the history; knowing railway enthusiasts there's probably a quaint little three-volume hardback set on The History of the Ashton Railway Depot...