Tagged: home-fencing
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.
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.
I have no idea how anyone managed to smack this street furniture so hard, or what direction they came from to do it. It's a pretty straight 30mph road right there, and this is only one side of the dual carriageway. Never seen so much as a near-miss there.
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.
I did a loop around this block. There probably aren't many people who cross this bit of grass that aren't very local indeed.
I'm in the habit of going over to the Tobacco Factory Market on a Sunday. I think I've walked all the routes around that way, but as a Plimsoll Bridge swing let me cross the road to the far side of Brunel Way on my return journey and I took a couple of photos of the brownfield development at the old Ashton Gate Depot site I thought I'd call it a Wander and pop some photos up.
A Quick Swing Past Ashton Court
05 Jun 2022
Another day not dissimilar to my last wander: I'm feeling a bit tired and rather than just moping around the house I thought I'd find some tiny bit of somewhere that I'd not yet walked and get outdoors. This time I headed for the Tobacco Factory Market in Bedminster, as I often do, but went the long way around via Ashton Court Mansion as I knew there were some footpaths and a small section of road I'd not ticked off up there. Finishing all the Ashton Court footpaths will be quite a long job, but you've got to start somewhere...
I did feel rather better by the time I got home, and, pretty much astoundingly given the weather forecast, managed to avoid the rain completely.
Looks like work has finally started on the new flats on the site of the former railway depot/concrete factory/Bristol International Exhibition site.
Ticking Off a Pocket of Paths in Leigh Woods
03 Jun 2022
I managed to go for a wander a while ago that was meant to finish off a little tangle of paths in Leigh Woods, or at the very least finish off my wandering of the Purple Path there. And I managed to miss doing either of those things through some kind of navigational incompetence.
Today I woke up with a bit of a headache, feeling a bit knackered as soon as I dragged myself out of bed, but at least with the energy to realise that I'd be better off (a) going for a walk in what looked likely to be the last of the Jubilee weekend sunshine than (b) moping around the flat until it started raining, at which point I could mope more thoroughly.
I had a look at my map, considered going to Ashton Court, but remembered that there was a music festival there today, and instead found these little leftovers of Leigh Woods and decided to have one more try at walking them.
Possibly fenced off to stop people trying to clamber or mountain bike over it and cause more damage before it can be rebuilt?
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.
Though this isn't the allegedly main-ish road I was trying to find, so I didn't pop through it.
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...)
The Babcock International Group do... things. According to their website, they're a "leading provider of critical, complex engineering services which support national defence, save lives and protect communities." That sounded a little euphemistic to me, and Wikipedia is a bit more revealing, calling them an "aerospace, defence and nuclear engineering services company". I have no idea what they get up to in Bower Ashton.
That's quite some hefty kit. I presume the nearer thing is a heat exchanger for the transformer. Certainly a different look from the last substation I remember snapping.
Can't find out much about this place. Not sure I've ever seen any activity there, but I probably only pass by outside normal Monday to Friday working hours. Looking back on a post-War OS map, it's marked as a concrete works, back in the day. There's a tiler and a mason registered at the address, so it certainly still has some connection with stone.
It's certainly not very decorative, with its razor-topped fencing. I suppose the gabions full of rip-rap are at least in keeping with a stone yard...
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...
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...
