Tagged: grass
Ticking Off a Few Streets in Bedminster
31 Oct 2021
There were only a few streets left to wander in the more residential bit of Bedminster, so I thought I should target those today. The streets themselves weren't that notable, though Balfour Road has a contrasting mix of old and new housing. I tried to snap a few more interesting things along the way there and back, snapping all three of the familiar bond warehouses, nipping onto North Street to find some new street art, and finding a few pumpkins for good measure. It is hallowe'en, after all...
I'd been looking at the map and wondering if I needed to walk down this, as it looked like a road. I'd say it's private, though.
It wasn't that long ago that there were trains running down here, and pedestrians enjoying the chocolate path to the right of the line. One day, hopefully, they'll both be back...
It's a much sought-after caravan park. In fact I passed a caravan trying to get to it on the way home down Avon Crescent, where—because of the temporary road closure on Cumberland Road—you often at the moment see arguing couples trying to reverse a caravan out of the no-through-way street to try to find the diversion they should have been using in the first place. It must be quite entertaining for the whole terrace.
Recreating a Loxton Drawing on a Lunchtime Jaunt
05 Nov 2021
I did do a much longer wander earlier in the week, but that'll take me some time to process (and cast a plethora of photos into the "out-takes" pile!) In the meantime, here's my lunchtime jaunt, taken to give myself a break from doing the company bookkeeping to send to my accountant so the taxman doesn't sling me in chokey.
I've recently bought a slightly creased secondhand copy of Redcliffe Press's 1992 collection of Samuel Loxton drawings, Loxton's Bristol: The city's Edwardian years in black and white. It's a nice selection of Bristol Library's collection of the drawings. I'd noticed a drawing of 25 Royal York Crescent, a house I pass quite often, so I thought I'd wander up the crescent on the way to pick up some lunch and try to reproduce it.
On the way back I took a few photos of Clifton Hill Bank as the crowdfunder to make quite a lot of it into a wildflower meadow has just hit its target, so I figured some "before" shots might be a good investment for the future...
Autumn's a busy season in Royal York Crescent Gardens.
(This is also the reason the photos of Royal York Crescent that come along in a minute look slightly hazy! It's not my lens, honest...)
There's a plan to cover this with wildflowers, and I just heard that it has achieved funding, so I figured I'd take a chance on taking a few "before" photos, even though I didn't know where the planting will take place!
As it turns out, having read the crowdfunder info, this is roughly the "westernmost third" where the wildflower meadow will be planted.
The crowdfunding effort has blown past its original £1400 target and stands at £1775 so far. The original target was to cover:
- £300 for wildflower seed to sow in the next few weeks
- £100 for non-plastic signage explaining what’s happening – crucial for public support
- £1,000 for plug plants to go in next spring
They also say that most of the existing popular daffodils will stay, which is nice, as that was my favourite spring feature of the bank.
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...
Or possibly a caravan-park-to-be. This is the old Police stables and kennels, and dog-training ground, I think. There are plans afoot for the Baltic Wharf caravan park, forced out of its home by the plan to redevelop the area as flats (which I imagine will be touted as "affordable" and then turn out to be luxury apartments with at most 5% barely-"affordable" apartments around the back), to this site.
A milestone, perhaps? And there looks to be a benchmark on the bigger bit.
Aha! A quick look at the historic OS maps on Know Your Place finds a marker right on this spot marked "B.S.", which the National Library of Scotland's helpful abbreviations page translates as "Boundary Stone". With that in mind I then had a look on the wonderful geograph site and there it is:
The front stone appears to be an old boundary stone, delineating the Administrative County, Parliamentary County and Rural District boundaries that were part of the Bristol limits in the twentieth century, possibly dated 1897? Behind it is a larger block of stones that may have been part of the Smyth estate further up the hill. On the latter is a partly hidden benchmark.
So I spotted the partly hidden benchmark correctly, too :) There is, of course, a benchmarks directory with an entry for the benchmark itself. What did people do before the internet?
EDIT TO ADD Nearly a year later, I watching a DVD Bristol Railway Stations by Mike Oakley and found out what the larger bit behind the milestone actually is: it's the last remnant of the Clifton Bridge Station buildings, which once faced out onto the road here.
View into the car park of the former stables/kennels. I just poked my camera through a big hole in the gate.
I think it's mostly used for sport, but the only thing I've ever used it for is the Clifton Car Boot Sale.
They didn't seem to be footballers. I asked Rich at the coffee van and he said it was a Rugby match. I don't know much about sportsball.
Apparently the proprietor's other half loves tea and can't stand coffee. I hope very much this turns into a sitcom where she runs a rival tea stall on the other side of the park with a big A-board that disses coffee.
It's surprising how much I forget is packed into this little area. There's the old station, the vast allotments, the cricket ground, the former police horse and dog unit, all the other stuff... Looking at Google Maps there may also be a day nursery and an escape room. It's a busy little area.
The more I research it, the more I find that Hotwells had far better transport links back in Victorian and Edwardian times than it has today. Along with buses that went to more useful places than the City Centre, there were trams, the funicular up to Clifton, the landing stage for paddle steamer services and two railway stations all within easy walking distance of me.
Today I took a day off work as preparation for doing the bookkeeping for my tax return1, and took a wander along to the site of what would have been my nearest station, Hotwells (or Clifton, as it started out in life), nestled in the shadow of the suspension bridge, the Bristol terminus of the Bristol Port Railway and Pier.
From there I wandered down the Portway, following the original line, until I got to the area around Sneyd Park Junction, where the tunnel from the slightly later Clifton Extension Railway joined up with this originally-isolated BPR line. Then I headed up to Clifton through the "goat gully" at Walcombe Slade, seeing the few above-ground bits of evidence of the tunnel (which is still in regular use) along the way.
It was a lovely day, and a good walk, and it was interesting to daydream of the times when I could have walked a few minutes from my flat down to Dowry Parade, caught a short tram ride to Hotwells Stations, and then headed from there to Avonmouth, perhaps even to board a transatlantic passenger service. The completion of the Clifton Extension Railway that linked the Avonmouth station with Temple Meads made relatively direct transatlantic travel from London via Bristol possible, with passengers travelling up from Paddington to Temple Meads, on to Avonmouth on the Clifton Extension Railway and Port Railway and Pier line, then perhaps catching a Cambpell's paddle steamer—which sometimes acted as tenders for large steamers—to a larger ship that was headed out for Canada, say.
1 I've learned that the best approach is to take two days off and deliberately do something that's not my bookkeeping on the first day, as otherwise I just inevitably end up procrastinating and feeling guilty on the first day no matter what. I have an odd brain, but at least I'm learning strategies for dealing with its strange ways as I get older...
2 Information mostly gleaned from Colin Maggs' The Bristol Port Railway & Pier and the Clifton Extension Railway, The Oakwood Press, 1975.
I'm pretty sure from looking at some maps that this is the gate that would have led to Prince's Lane, if it were still passable.
But both unlocked, and standing open. I chanced it, on the basis that I wasn't going to do any harm to the place, and there weren't any signs telling me to keep out.
I don't know for sure if I was even trespassing, but for goodness' sake don't trespass on actual railways, kids. I'd carefully done my research and there haven't even been tracks here since 1921.
There are no signs of the railway to be found between the gate and the nearest tunnel entrance further north, as you'd expect, really.
It's actually an electric kettle. I doubt it's contemporary with the railway :) Looks a bit more 1970s than 1870s to me.
I can't achieve the high vantage point of the next photo, and the sun direction wasn't exactly favourable, but I think this at least proves I'm in the right spot :D
I'm fairly sure I'm standing about where the train tracks used to be, facing the entrance to the station at the south platform end. To the left would have been the turntable for rotating the train onto the run-around loop to go back the way it came, and behind that the little stationmaster's house.
Interesting little sign of earlier civilisation. I don't see railings in any of the photos I've seen of Hotwells Station, though, so I can't really connect it with the station.
Having done even more research and a bit of eBay browsing, though, I ordered a postcard that might explain where these came from...
A Door, a Square, a Few Night Shots
04 Dec 2021
I didn't take many pictures on this quite long wander, partly because Lisa and I wandered across to Bedminster via Bower Ashton, which I've snapped quite a lot of on the last couple of walks, and also because we lost the light fairly quickly, though spending a half-hour drinking mulled wine in the Ashton might have had a little to do with that...
Before we left Hotwells I wanted to visit a door I'd heard about on Cornwallis Crescent and also take a little look at a couple of houses in Dowry Square to consider the 1960s regeneration of Hotwells.
I've snapped this before, but I wanted to give it a bit of context. Peter Ware very much helped to save Dowry Square, as one of a group of "Newcomers" to the Hotwells area in the 1960s and 70s. Hotwells was basically a slum before then, with many of the buildings in a terrible state, including Dowry Square and Hope Square.
As I've recently been reading in Hotwells - Spa to Pantomime, these newcomers took their chances on a very dodgy area and decided to buy and do up a lot of the grand old houses that were almost ruins in some cases.
This early gentrification was important enough that John Boorman, of Excalibur fame made a BBC documentary about it called The Newcomers.)
Site of a manor house since the 11th Century. Last time I was in there it was also with Lisa, my companion for this walk, as a team of storytellers from Red Rope Theatre read us ghost stories just before Halloween. It was excellent.
They should form a pub. This is just over the road from The Ashton, so there's perhaps a little too much local competition. Lisa and I popped in for a mulled wine.
This is arguably better than the last time I tried to snap a cow in this field, but it's still terrible. Maybe next time I'll have a longer lens, or the cow will be closer...
This field is called St John's Chapel. On the oldest map I can find, from somewhere between 1844 and 1888 it's marked as the "Site of St John's Chapel" but with no sign of the chapel, so it must be very long-gone. "The Chapel was dedicated as St. John or St. James depending on the source consulted, and it presumably fell into decay after the village was deserted, in the 13th or 14th century. No trace remains above ground level today, and the site is just a field" says The Churches of Britain and Ireland.
I can see on the same map that there's clearly been a pub where The Ashton is for a very long time. It was called The Smyth Arms back then.
A Water-Based Wander
11 Dec 2021
I woke up on this Saturday with a headache, feeling like I'd not slept at all. As well as that, I'm still in some pain from the wisdom tooth extraction I had a few weeks ago. I moped about the flat for a while and then decided that the best thing to do was to force myself out on at least a small walk to get some fresh air and coffee.
Was there anywhere I could walk locally that I'd never been? Actually, yes! Although it's not a road, and I didn't walk it, there is actually one route that I've not travelled so far in my wanders. And it even had coffee near its far end...
Built on the site of Champions Dock, 1982, it says on the sign.
I walked through this little estate every weekday for years, on my way to catch the commuter ferry into town when I used to work on Victoria Street (in the days before the ripples of the global financial crash finally swept away the council subsidy for the beloved early-morning boat service.)
The Society of Merchant Venturers did, of course, own this dock, like most of the rest of Bristol. Perhaps the most curiosity-inducing document in the Bristol Archives for Champions Dock is "Papers re the Quays & Nuisances, 1751 - 1784", including "Proposals to cleanse the quays to take on Champions Dock and to deal with nuisances in the river". Well, I'm sure there are fewer nuisances now they've filled it in and built an estate on it, but it took them a while...
It took me some time to realise that it's the well-planned and well-cared-for plants around this estate that really improves it as a place. It's less of a fairly bland 1980s housing estate, and more of a rampant shrubbery that just happens to have a fairly bland 1980s housing estate inside it. There's a huge variety of greenery, a lot of shrubs and trees and some lovely well-kept individual gardens to boot.
It's also been quite cleverly thought out with a view to defending against such dangers as tagging—much of the ample wall-space is protected by cubic yard upon cubic yard of dense and often prickly planting.
So I guess that's staying there. Good. I'd like to think that when the building work is finished, this narrow little alley will have been replaced with a nicer, more accessible path alongside the shiny new flats. I still miss the derelict McArthur's warehouse that was knocked down here, and the humming of the bees that thronged among its thick coating of ivy.
My friend Lisa texted me to see if I wanted to pop down and take a photo or two of the event she was taking part in: Santa SUP. SUP Bristol organise stand-up paddleboarding on the floating harbour, and their annual Santas-on-paddlboards event is quite the sight.
On the way there, I grabbed a historical photo I'd been wanting to recreate for a while of the shiny and new Cumberland Basin flyovers back in 1965, because I reckoned I could fit finding the same viewpoint into my outbound journey. Also, after having only used it on a wander for the very first time yesterday, I managed two crossings in the cross-harbour ferry today to get to the best locations for snapping the paddleboarders...
So, then, this wander is mostly a bunch of photos of paddleboarding Santas. Tis the season... Enjoy!
And here's the site today. The weathered concrete and tagging doesn't really improve things, but at least it looks like one of the original trees has thrived.
It's less so much the look of the road system, perhaps, and more that on a busy day it's just an urban hellscape of traffic and noise. On a Sunday like this you could actually believe that children could play here (there was originally a playground to go with the fountain and other features I'm mentioned in the past...)
However, most of the time, just like with the Portway, the sheer weight and (acoustic) volume of the traffic and its accompanying fumes and danger has clearly increased beyond anything the original planners ever envisaged.
At this point they'd left me behind heading east up the harbour, so I decided to jump on the cross-harbour ferry to the inlet, grab a coffee and a pasty at Spoke and Stringer (their sign definitely worked on me!) and wait on the that side for their return, as knew they were heading widdershins around the harbour.
I took a moment to snap this little fella in the artificial reed bed between the inlet and Hannover Quay.
A Constitutional to Burwalls and Back
21 Dec 2021
The recent lack of posts here is mostly due to my feeling very run down following having a couple of wisdom teeth extracted. Having had an emergency appointment yesterday1, hopefully I'll be on the mend now, though it does mean I'm on the kind of antibiotics where you can't touch alcohol for the whole of the Christmas period. I have tried to keep myself a little distracted from the pain by working on the nuts and bolts of this website—you should notice that the front page loads rather faster now than it used to, and that there's a shiny new statistics page that I'll probably be continuing to work on. Oh, and you should find that the tags below the photos are now clickable and will take you to a page of all other wanders that have photos with the same tag.
Today I felt like I needed to drag myself out of the house, but I didn't want to go too far, and I needed to get to the Post Office up in Clifton Village to post a Christmas card (spoiler for my parents: it's going to be late. Sorry.) As luck would have it, idly looking at the map I spotted that I'd missed off a section of Burwalls Road in the past, and that's basically one of the long-ways-round to Clifton Village, crossing the river to Rownham and walking up the hill on the Somerset side before coming back across the Suspension Bridge.
As I was heading for Burwalls Road I decided to make Burwalls itself the focal point of the walk, but unfortunately the mansion grounds are private and the place is hard to snap. Still, at least it gave me a destination. Burwalls was the mansion built by Bristol press magnate Joseph Leech, who I've mentioned before after buying a vintage book he wrote on a previous wander. There's a good article about the house on House and Heritage which has some photos from angles I couldn't ever get to. (Well, maybe with a drone, but it seems like the kind of area where they may be kitted out for clay pigeon shooting, so I probably wouldn't risk it.)
1 My dentist admitted that she probably needed to keep her internal monologue a bit more internal after we started the appointment with her staring into my mouth and immediately saying, "oh, that's weird." These are words one doesn't want to hear from a medical professional.
There was a notice of seeking possession on the gate when I got around to the far side. Looks like it's definitely going to be the replacement for the caravan park at Baltic Wharf. Shame for the caravan folk, really; this is sandwiched between major roads and not anything like as close to the pubs and other tourist-friendly places around the harbourside.
A delightful little return to the road, which peters out in a disconcerting rough slope in between two blind bends on a busy road with no pavement. It's not spectacularly pedestrian-friendly over here. This might explain why I never walked down the bit of Burwalls Road opposite. The forest path up Dead Badger's Bottom1 on the far side of the road skips the first section.
1 No, I will never get tired of saying that.
Maybe if I'd got interested in this project before the university sold the place, I'd have been able to pop in and have a look around. Still, I can't blame them; when the estate was on the market in 2012 it was Bristol's most expensive house, valued at £5m, according to the Daily Mail.
That was for the main house and the old stables and lodge, which have been converted to the housing we're looking at. Given that by 2017, just a single one of the five aforementioned lateral apartments in the main manor house was on the market for £1.5, I think the developers probably did quite well...
I was just about starting to feel better—the antibiotics seemed to have kicked in for my dental issues, and it had been some days since I'd left the house, and I was at last starting to get itchy feet. So, a wander. But where? Well, there were a few industrial bits near Winterstoke Road in the Ashton/Ashton Vale areas of Bristol that needed walking. I knew they were likely to be quite, well, unattractive, frankly. So why not do them while I wasn't feeling exactly 100% myself? Maybe it would fit my mood. Hopefully you're also in the mood for a bit of post-industrial wasteland, for that's what some of this feels like...
Then, at the last minute, I thought again about the Bristol International Exhibition—I've got a book about it on the way now—and that gave me another goal, which could just about be said to be in the same direction, and I decided to walk significantly further than my normal 1-mile limit and try recreating another historical photo...
Sadly I don't know much about the Ashton area; it's just on the edges of my mile and I rarely have cause to go there. It's brimming with history, I'm sure: the whole South Bristol area rapidly developed from farmland to coal mines to factories to its current interesting mixture of suburbs and industrial work over the last few hundred years. As a more working class area less attention was paid to it by historians, at least historically-speaking, than the Georgian heights of Clifton, and much of it has been knocked down and reinvented rather than listed and preserved. I see here and there some of this lack is being addressed, but I'm afraid I'll be very light on the history myself on this wander, as most of my usual sources aren't throwing up their normal reams of information as when I point them at Clifton, Hotwells or the old city.
These are some hills I'm not heading for today, but I love the distant view of Dundry from Hotwells. The silhouetted church towards the left is St MIchael's Church, Dundry, whose tower was built in 1481.
The other towers around Dundry have more recent heritage. I believe Dundry East transmitter still sends out the analogue signal for BBC Radio 4, and lets me listen to The Archers on an old Roberts radio when I'm doing my cleaning on a Sunday morning. Some bits of my life are still quite old-fashioned.
A better view of the ex-railway depot and part of the former Bristol International Exhibition site that I've mused about before. That's why we're on this wander, in fact: curiosity about an old photo of the site. But not a photo from round here: one taken from quite a ways beyond my normal mile radius. It's going to be a bit of a hike.
There will also be some terrifyingly industrial bits of south Bristol along the way, so be prepared for a bit of urban decay and industrial scenes.
Raised section of the Metrobus route. I've been this way before on a Wander, but also, on a day when there weren't any buses, actually walked that ramp. It was fairly underwhelming.
The plethora of advertising billboards in this area is depressingly predictable, but at least this advertising is both local and well-thought-out. Local heroes Aardman Animation are advertising their new feature Robin Robin on the left, but have a related Christmas message to the "Robins", whose stadium is just around the corner. Bristol City apparently earned the nickname by playing in a strip with a red top and white shorts.
I may have been speaking too soon when I said that earlier picture was the arse-end of nowhere. This is the delightful end of East Court, which I think is actually a public road and therefore on my list of roads to walk. Rarely have I been so unexcited to see the end of a cul-de-sac.
Okay, it's not very well-hidden, and it's not particularly treasure-y, either. I think, in hindsight, this was the most excruciatingly boring bit of the walk.
I thought from the map there might be a way across the line here, too, but it looks like it's all locked up.
A Random New Year's Day Wander
01 Jan 2022
I picked a fairly arbitrary reason for a wander today. Really, I just wanted to do a New Year's Day wander just to get out of the house and to set a precedent for the year to come.
My ostensible reason was to investigate what looked like a road on my map that quartered the lawn in front of the Ashton Court mansion. As it turned out, this is just a muddy footpath/desire line similar to a half-dozen other tracks nearby, and must be some kind of bug or misclassification with the mapping system I'm using, but that's not important. What's important is that I went for a little walk on the first day of the year. As a bonus, I did happen to wander down a couple of sections of new footpath, so technically I broke some new ground too, which is nice.
Strange to think that there was once, briefly, a castle here. More on that on some future wander, when I try to recreate another historical photo of the Bristol International Exhibition.
I still have no really clear idea what this place is, and their website's not much enlightenment, either. They seem to think this is ten minutes' walk from the city centre; I'd love to know what kind of space/time warp technology they're using. Seven-league boots, perhaps?
Which seems a bit odd, given that it's not in Hotwells wouldn't really lead there in either direction. Looks like a fairly modern development; maybe it's just one of those roads where the developers picked a roughly local name of out a hat.
Though this isn't the allegedly main-ish road I was trying to find, so I didn't pop through it.
This bit that's marked on my map in the same style as a normal, tarmac road. Clearly it's not. I think perhaps I need to figure out what's going on with the mapping on this website, as the main openstreetmap site, which is where I'm getting my data from, does seem to have it as a simple track.
A small challenge for the new year, I suppose... Perhaps a refresh of the way the map looks on the site would be a nice start to the year anyway!