Tagged: grass
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...
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.
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.
Can't resist a plaque. The original name of the organisation was "Guild of the Brave Poor Things", but that's Victorians for you.
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
From an Avon Gorge Geology Excursion Guide I dug up:
Just south of the Observatory, on the right of the path is a children’s playground [ST 5667 7325] in the remains of a limestone quarry. In the back wall is a bricked-up adit, presumably representing the entrance to a former iron ore or lead mine (Fig. 10C). The roof of the adit is fissured and sparry, crystalline calcite can be seen in fissures.
The playground itself is in one of the the quarries used for the Suspension Bridge materials.
One of our mutual friends had mentioned that there was a house on Burlington Road with metalwork animals in the garden around here somewhere. It took us a while to find, but find it we did.
The artist is Julian Warren.
Short and Sweet
06 Sep 2021
As if to prove that I don't have to go on giant rambles, here's a quick four-photo trip up to Clifton Village for a bit of cake. No new streets, just a tiny slice of life.
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.
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.
I like this little watery installation at Castle Park, so I try to cut through here if it's on my way.
There's a deeply disturbing reason that this rabbit has been crossed out, but I've written that up in a later Wander, so you'll have to wait for an upcoming photo in October.
It's bad enough that the terrace opposite was demolished, without some hurriedly-qualified HGV reversing into the new1 buildings on this side...
1 I suppose "new" is relative. But on most of the maps I've been looking at recently these flats don't exist yet. I think the earlier buildings included a smithy and at one stage what looks like a tap-room, the Stork Tap, for the larger Stork pub that used to occupy what's now Stork House on the main road below. You basically couldn't move in Hotwells without falling into a pub throughout most of its history. The modern-day suburb seems positively teetotal in comparison...
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...)
Site of the Rownham Ferry. Follow the link for a charming Loxton ink drawing on Know Your Place, also viewable at the Bristol Libraries Flickr collection.
This was a later site for the ferry, which earlier was a tad further out along the river. It would have been a key crossing point at this end of Bristol before the arrival of any bridges near here. Before the Ashton Swing Bridge and the Vauxhall footbridge arrived, the next-nearest crossing point would have been the Vauxhall ferry, which was where Vauxhaull Bridge stands now, I think.
Okay, so here's the reason that the earlier rabbit had a big red cross through him, and that this one has been painted out. Bristol's graffiti community is currently trying to erase these rabbits after a terrible revelation about the man who had been painting them.
Here's the Bristol Post, on Damian Lasota, aka "Eldey" or "FollowMyRabbits":
A pervert with a penchant for grannies tried to rape one elderly woman in her home and sexually targeted another.
Damian Lasota was described by a judge as the "stuff of nightmares" after preying on the two lone females in Twerton, Bath.
His campaign of terror was halted after police installed CCTV at the women's homes and he was caught in action and arrested.
Lasota, 27, of Parry Close in Southdown, Bath, pleaded guilty to attempted rape, two charges of trespass with intent to commit a sex offence and two charges of exposure.
He appeared in the dock at Bristol Crown Court with a grey jumper draped over his head.
Judge Julian Lambert handed him a 20-year sentence, comprising of a 13-and-a-half year jail term and six-and-a-half years extended licence.
So, that's pretty damn terrifying, and also the reason why there won't be any more rabbits in Bristol. There's a little more info in this Somerset Live article.
After carefully skirting the edges of the homeless people's camp that I accidentally found skirting the edges of the tall grass between the allotments and here, I came across my first destination: the footbridge from Clifton Bridge railway station. This is apparently the actual station footbridge, still in service for crossing the lines.
Many people in Bristol will know this as one of the chief ways people from this end of town used to get to Ashton Court, especially for the music festival or the balloon fiesta, before the shiny new Festival Way footpath was installed a decade or two back.
I've been across it before on my wanders, but I didn't know then that it was a remnant of a railway station, rather than just a standalone bridge.
You can just about make out the platform still, there on the left. There used to be a second line and an eastern platform, too.
Clifton Bridge Railway Station was also known as Rownham Station from 1891 to 1910.
It was part of the Port and Pier railyway (as was Hotwells/Clifton station on the north side, nearer my house), opened in 1867, and closed, inevitably, by Beeching, with passenger services stopping in 1964 and freight a year later.
Wikipedia says "Freight trains continued to pass through the station, but their number decreased over time, with the line falling out of regular use from 30 March 1981. The route however was kept intact by British Rail, with occasional freight trains, and in 2002 a single track was relaid to allow rail access to Royal Portbury Dock", so I suppose even the single line we see here is newish.
Adjacent to the station was the New Inn, Rownham, which you can see a bit of in this photo from the Tarring Collection on KYP (or in this Tweet.
People will know the station site as the place where the local police's mounted and dog sections had their headquarters/stables/kennels, though they moved out a couple of years ago, I think.
Although the line is scheduled to return to passenger service as part of MetroWest, the nearest station will still be Temple Meads, so even though there may be passenger trains heading out to Pill and Portishead through here, ten minutes' walk from my house, I'd have to get all the way into town to come back out again, so it would probably be quicker for me to drive. Shame.
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...
They're among the first to show autumn colour in Bristol, so by early October they're in full effect.
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...
This building is, or was, an electrical substation. I heard an unconfirmed rumour that the building itself is now actually empty, and that the entire substation guts are now in these boxes. I have no idea whether that's true or not.
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...
Makes a change from a doorbell. Foxcote road had quite a lot of these little boho touches; it's clearly one of those Bemmie streets that attracts the slightly eccentric type.
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.
One of several odd short-cuts and alternative routes I worked out to vary my commute to work, when work was at the top of Whiteladies Road.