Tagged: hotwells
There's a dearth of my favourite coffee places on a Monday and Tuesday at the moment. Both Twelve and Imagine That are closed on Monday and Tuesday, and Rich from Hopper Coffee doesn't seem to have come back from Christmas break. Today I pushed on a bit further than normal around the harbour and got to Little Victories, the always-reliable sister cafe to Small Street Espresso, based at Wapping Wharf. Along the way I saw graffiti, my second reference to one of Bristol's twin cities in two days, and a rather sleek little boat outside Rolt's Boat Yard.
Really just a quick loop of the Cumberland Basin. I was going to go further, and it was a nice early spring day, but I hadn't slept that well and I wasn't really in the mood. Ah well. Not every walk is great. At least I got out of the house for a bit.
I've not been able to find much detail on this one. It's marked as a public house for a long stretch in the old maps, and on the 1879-1888 town plans named as the York Hotel. I've also seen the names York House Hotel and New Inn associated with it.
I almost didn't bother bringing out my GPS today, but as it turned out I may have knocked off a tiny bit of Baltic Wharf, having been diverted through there on my way back from Imagine That café by finding Cumberland Road closed. Not sure whether it was just some kind of delivery to the roadworks there or if they're surfacing the increasingly-dodgy looking bit of the one lane that's left open...
I also snapped a picturesque view of Cliftonwood, hung out with a biker gang, and found a little something to nibble on growing on the Hotwell Road.
I'm all for the general efforts being made to cheer up the Cumberland Basin in general, but I feel like this particular experiment could have been called a failure.
Even if you didn't know what it was on sight, you'd probably be able to tell from the smell...
And just to confirm this is wild garlic, here's a stem. The Latin name is allium triquetrum, the three-cornered leek, because of its distinctive cross-section.
I'm glad my friend Lisa joined me today; she drove in from Shirehampton and told me that the Portway was looking rather lovely, so we set off that way. She's also braver than I am when it comes to doing urbex stuff, so this was just the opportunity to take a peek into the Portnalls Number One Railway Tunnel/Bridge Road Deep Valley Shelter whose entrance I'd found on a previous wander.
It was definitely dark and spooky and impressively big, with a side tunnel that Lisa explored that leads to a little door I don't think I've previously noticed on the side of the Portway. I didn't get many photos—even my astoundingly powerful little torch (£) didn't do much to light things up, and you're not going to get much joy hand-holding a camera in that darkness—but I did shoot a little video, which I might edit and add later.
After plumbing the bowels of the earth, we went up Bridge Valley Path to Clifton, explored some bits around the College and Pembroke Road, then came home via Foliage Cafe for coffee. Nice.
Normally I don't have enough time in my lunch hour to get all the way around the harbourside. This is a shame, as Wapping Wharf is a great place to get coffee and a snack, but it's pretty much diametrically (perimetrically?) opposite me on the harbour. Today I had the day off, so I decided to go and knock off a few streets around Anchor Road that I'd not covered, as well as visiting the site of the Read Dispensary (well, one of them) and dropping into Mokoko for one of their astounding almond croissants. From there I came back along the south side, checking out the views from as much of the Chocolate Path as you can venture down at the moment, and swapping from Cumberland Road to Coronation Road at Vauxhall Bridge.
There's a lot of meh photos on this walk—my chief output from this project could be politely described as "record shots"—but a few turned out well, especially those of Vauxhall Bridge from the Chocolate Path, which reminded me how much of a loss the current closure of the Chocolate Path is to walkers and cyclists in Bristol.
One day I'll get a decent picture of this mural without a sodding car parked in front of it.
EDIT: I never did, and now they've built flats in front of it instead!
I dream of a future like the past, where we just had one bin, but where everything from robots to enzymes at the recycling centre nevertheless manage to pull everything back apart.
I'm following the progress of this new building going up with a snap every time I pass this way. Last time it had the frame but not the scaffolding, I think.
Every time I pass this building on the way into town, it reminds me that I've never read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. But I was here for a different reason today.
A trip to Imagine That coffee, so no fresh roads knocked off my list, but I stopped off to snap a couple of the engineering-related bits of the docks: the Campbell Buoy (used by P&A Campbell for mooring their paddle steamers) and Brunel's "other" bridge, the foot/horse swing bridge that now sits sadly disused in the shadow of the Plimsoll Bridge at Howard's Lock.
This is the pivot point for the Plimsoll Bridge. I don't think I've ever been down right here when it's swung.
Brunel's Other Bridge ("Bob") was originally made to carry traffic over the South Entrance lock.
As part of the redesign/replacement of the North Entrance lock by Docks Engineer Thomas Howard, it was shortened and moved here, to the lock now known as Howard's Lock.
It was decommissioned in 1968 after the giant Plimsoll swing bridge that dwarfs it in the picture was put in as part of the Cumberland Road Flyover system.
A team of dedicated volunteers have been restoring it and documenting the process, and the bridge itself.
From here it's easier to see the pivot point for Brunel's Other Bridge, and the wheels at this end which would have helped it roll. It weighs about 68 tons, and was originally turned by a hand crank before being converted to hydraulic power like much of the rest of the docks equipment.
You can see an aerial photo of it in place in its "swung" position on the Brunel's Other Bridge website.
I headed to Bedminster to do a crossword with my support bubble today. On the way I delved into a couple of bits of Hotwells history, first of all snapping a "now" shot to go with a historical photo of Holy Trinity I happened across recently, and second of all to snap the Britannia Buildings.
The Britannia Buildings are a little strip of offices on a corner of the Hotwell Road. They've mostly been the headquarters of a cleaning company for years, but I've often wondered what this distinctive curve of offices, its ground floor standing proudly out from the upper floors, used to be. Well, after my last wander, where I poked about the landing stage just down the road, I found out! Researching the paddleboat company P&A Campbell I came across this nugget in The A-Z of Curious Bristol, by Maurice Fells (£):
The firm of P & A Campbell was the main steamer operator in the Bristol Channel, with its local headquarters in offices close to the Hotwells pier and overlooking the harbour at the Cumberland Basin. Campbell's named their offices Britannia Buildings, after one of the ships in their White Funnel Fleet.
So! Turns out the Britannia Buildings were named after a paddle steamer—you can see some pictures of Britannia here.
In related news, I've now bought three of Maurice Fells' local history books, and they were hand-delivered by the author on Sunday, a half-hour after I ordered them online (through a message exchange on Nextdoor!) Not even Amazon Prime has managed to deliver me anything that quickly...
Noticed this interesting roof feature on 14 Oldfield Place as I was crossing the road to get a longer view of the Britannia Buildings.
The Britannia Buildings were named for a paddle steamer in the P&A Campbell fleet, who used to have thier headquarters here.
There's some pictures of the Britannia, built in 1896, on the paddlesteamers.org site
I wanted a nice simple lunch-hour walk that took me past a cafe today, and I managed to find the perfect road to knock off my list of targets to do it. Situated just off Jacobs Wells Road, right next to Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, John Carr's Terrace, and Rosebery terrace above it, which I'd completely forgotten existed, are a little cul-de-sac that many Bristolians will have wandered past a thousand times without ever seeing.
There's a reason it's next to QEH:
Known traditionally as "The City School", Queen Elizabeth's Hospital was founded by the will of affluent merchant John Carr in 1586, gaining its first royal charter in 1590.
John Carr's terrace itself isn't much to write home about, architecturally, but I like the secluded feel of it, and I really liked Rosebery Terrace with its little houses, commanding position and friendly, slightly tumbledown feel.
On the way home I popped into Foliage Cafe for a coffee and a very pleasant nutella and banana pastry, then walked home past the refurbishment of the old Thali Cafe into a new and interesting clinic...
The other day I realised (hello, Maggie!) that my next walk would be my hundredth, and that I'd done 393.4km so far. I figured it would be nice to get to 100 walks and 400km on the same walk, so I went for a nice long harbourside wander after work, rather than dashing out at lunchtime. As it turned out, we're just coming up to the time of year where I can leave the house at 5:30 in the evening and there's still just enough light to take photos by the time I've made it around the harbourside. Though only just, and mostly because I've got a full-frame camera that's not bad in low light...
Still, the evening light made a lovely change, and some of the photos turned out to be pretty good photos per se, rather than just record shots of my walk. I'm looking forward to more evening walks like this as summer approaches.
On the way around this evening I wandered through one of the oldest bits of the city to extend my walk and snapped some interesting bits of architecture, including an NCP car park(!) and a nighttime shot of one of my favourite subjects, the clock tower at the Albion dockyard.
Spoke & Stringer were a long indoor cafe in the Beforetimes. Now there's three separate vending areas: fish & chips, brunch & tacos; coffee & shakes.
Reproducing historical photos seems to be a developing interest for me. On today's wander I just went for my normal coffee at Imagine That, but along the way I stopped at Baltic Wharf (the modern housing estate; historically-speaking, I was probably in between Canada Wharf and Gefle Wharf—about here, in fact) to reproduce a 1930s photo of the Mardyke area from the Tarring collection.
Mardyke, from what I can work out, means "a ditch along the margins". Before my researches, I only really knew the name from the Mardyke pub, a big place on the Hotwell Road. Everyone knows the Mardyke, partly because of its size and signage, but I've only been in once or twice, too long ago to remember much of what it was like. However, the wharf there used to be known as Mardyke Wharf, and the area in general as Mardyke. (I just found an 1826 painting by Thomas Leeson Rowbotham of "Mardyke seen from near Hilhouse's Dock, showing the 'Clifton Ark' floating chapel" that shows the area before much development had happened, incidentally, and now I feel like I need to find out a bit more about the floating chapel...)
I enjoyed snapping the "after" photo; the process involved moving a group of swans out of the place I needed to stand to get the photo; luckily I've started carrying waterfowl food along with my on my harbourside jaunts, so I could use bribery rather than a more confrontational approach. Not sure I'd fancy my chances against a swan, though I did once team up with another passerby to shoo a recalcitrant one off the Redcliffe bascule bridge so a busful of commuters could continue their journey to work...
Via Know Your Place Bristol/the Tarring Collection.
The Mardyke area—apparently Mardyke means a dyke on the margins, which would make sense for the location—in the 1930s. That's got to be a Campbell paddle steamer from their White Funnel fleet, but I don't know which one. Looks to be a similar configuration to the Princess May, though the paddles look a bit different. In the background, the Mardyke Pub still stands today, but the three largest buildings do not. They are:
Top right: the Clifton National School (there's a Loxton sketch uploaded to this Wander where you can see the name on the front.)
Directly in front and below the Clfiton National School, on the main Hotwell Road: The Clifton Industrial School, Mardyke building.
Standing halfway up the hill, more towards the middle of the picture: the Clifton Industrial School, Church Path Steps building.
Lots of info to be found on the Industrial Schools here:
In addition to their classroom lessons, the boys were employed in tailoring, shoemaking and brush-making, with basket making later added. The boys also assisted with the kitchen, laundry, and house work. In 1870, some additional rooms were rented in the locality for use as an infirmary if required. A School band was established.
I can't find so much on the National School (though apparently the Bristol Archives have some of their records) but the Clifton & Hotwells
Character Appraisal suggest it was built in 1835 and, along with the Industrial School buildings, destroyed during WWII:
A bomb also largely destroyed the Clifton National School and Mardyke House School. The lack of bomb- proof shelters in Clifton led to the Clifton Rocks Railway to be used as shelter, which was prepared for occupation in 1940.
The colourful modern flats stand on School Road, presumably the last hint that the Clifton National Schools building was there before. It's nice to see both the Mardyke Pub and some of the ordinary houses from the terrace dead centre still there and looking much the same.
Showing both the Clifton Industrial School on the Hotwell Road, and the Clifton National Schools building on the hill above.
(via the Loxton Collection from Bristol Libraries on Flickr.)