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.
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.
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.
Sunday Afternoon
15 Nov 2020
A walk back from Bedminster to my place, mostly down Duckmoor Road, which I found a little dull—probably because it reminded me a little of the suburbs I grew up in on the outskirts of London—then held up slightly by some filming on Ashton Avenue Bridge. They were trying not to let the crowds build up too much in between takes, it seems, so it wasn't a long delay.
Dowry Square Jaunt
16 Nov 2020
A quick lunchtime jaunt to Dowry Square, which is very close to me but, being effectively a cul-de-sac as well as a square, I've probably only circumnavigated a couple of times in the last couple of decades.
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 we may now know where the bloke with this sign on his gate from earlier bought his signage.
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.
More Cliftonwood
05 Dec 2020
Back to Cliftonwood for a wander that included some of the belle views of Bellevue Crescent and other bits of the easternmost part. Highlights included watching someone bump-starting an elderly Nissan Micra in the narrow confines of Bellevue Crescent.
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...