Tagged: house
A Cliftonwood Revisit with Lisa
10 Jul 2021
Lisa had a couple of hours to spare before going up in a hot air balloon (exciting!) so we went for a quick local walk, revisiting a bit of Cliftonwood we've seen before, exploring the secret garden I'd visited before that I thought she'd enjoy (I didn't take any new photos there) and then pushing on to another garden, Cherry Garden. Last time we passed this way, I'd noticed the gate, but we hadn't gone in as I'd assumed it was private. I'd since found it on CHIS's list of communal gardens in Clifton, so I wanted to have a look inside this time, and try to figure out whether it was private-communal or public, and possibly Council-owned, like several of the other gardens in Clifton.
Next to the Cathedral. Which I've still never set foot inside. I should probably put that on the list...
...with the end of "Jacobethan" Transit Shed "E". The end facing and baroque tower were apparently created to make looking this way from the centre a bit more pleasant; it's fairly plain further down. This is a smidge outside my one mile, but I was interested in the gates, having spotted them in a historic photo in one of my research books—see next pic.
There are some other pics from earlier times on the Watershed's web site, including one from 1981, not long before the E and W sheds were transformed into the complex that houses the excellent Watershed Cinema, their Cafe Bar, the Pervasive Media Studio and other modern features.
The boatyard seems quite quiet at the moment, but there's definitely work still going on—as you'll see from Mike Taylor's little Instagram video here, where you can see them lifting his boat out with the 50-ton capacity travel lift, ready for a lot of work to be done, just a few weeks ago.
Lunchtime Zig Zag Climb
13 Jul 2021
A snappy little trip up the Zig Zag to the shops. It's a steep old route, the Zig Zag, going from just over river level to about the height of the suspension bridge (101 metres) in a compact switchback of a footpath.
I was too busy struggling to breathe to take many snaps of the actual Zig Zag (I've been trying to make it up all the way without stopping the last few times, but I've not quite managed it yet). I did at least take a few snaps either side on this quick lunchtime jaunt to fetch coffee (Coffee #1) and a sarnie (Parsons) from Clifton Village...
I will always enjoy the fact that Brunel looks out from this window. Have I ever noticed the smaller figure in the lower-left corner? Maybe it's new...
Autonomous Vehicle
14 Jul 2021
As it turned out, I didn't manage to get a coffee on my lunchtime coffee trip, as Imagine That were briefly shut down by a Covid-19 exposure notification (false alarm, it seems.) On the plus side, my trip was made worthwhile by spotting a couple of people from the University of Bath Mechanical Engineering Department testing an autonomous body-finding catamaran, which isn't a phrase I was ever expecting to write...
Pastures New!
17 Jul 2021
Okay, not much in the way of actual pasture to be had in Bedminster these days, like most of Bristol, but I did take advantage of the current rather toasty weather in Bristol to go and sit under a tree in Greville Smyth Park to read a book for a while before firing up the GPS and taking a little detour around some back streets of Ashton and Bedminster rather than going straight to Coffee #1 for an espresso frappé. This is the first walk in a while where I've actually crossed off an entire new street (the frankly unexciting Carrington Road) as well as exploring a couple of back alleys, just because they were there, really. Along the way I spotted a few examples of graffiti of various qualities, including a live work-in-progress by SNUB23 on Ashton Road and the finished Six Sisters project on North Street.
It was actually the sound of Six Underground, the astoundingly good Sneaker Pimps number, coming from this direction that caught my ear before the in-progress mural caught my eye, but they both had the same source, as it turned out...
With bonus transom. I thought I might have snapped the transom before, but I think I was thinking of this one.
The little balcony there seems to have had increasing numbers of home comforts added over the last year or two. It's astroturfed, too... I suppose lockdowns make you try to use as much available space as possible, even if you are right next to the A4, and all the noise and traffic fumes that entails.
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...
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.
Yes, I'm back on the magical research. According to RA Gilbert's Golden Dawn Companion, this was one of the meeting places of the Hermes Temple of the Stella Matutina. I'm guessing one of the members lived there, but I'm not sure who. I'd probably need to cross-check the census records with the membership rolls, and the latter are quite patchy, anyway.
There's actually a Hotwells connection here, fairly literally. This section of track, from Ashley Hill, Montpellier, Redland, this bit right here, then Clifton Down and through a tunnel under the Downs to Sneyd Park Junction and Sea Mills station, was built as the Bristol Port Railway extension line, the Clifton Extension Railway.
The original Bristol Port Railway and Pier connected Hotwells to a deep-water pier at Avonmouth (with a few stations along the way) avoiding the need to have ships wait for the right tide to come into Bristol to unload. We've previously been inside one of its tunnels.
It was also used by plenty of passengers—during WWI an extra platform was added in Hotwells to cope with the sheer number of Bristolians commuting to the docks and munitions factories daily as part of the war effort, as well as troop movements and incoming wounded on hospital trains.
Later on this isolated Bristol Port track needed to join up to the existing railway network to survive, so this extension line was added to connect it with Ashley Hill with help from the Great Western and Midland railways. Only later did the section to Hotwells fall into disuse and close in favour of the Portway road.
(Information mostly courtesy Colin Maggs' The Bristol Port Railway & Pier, Oakwood Press, 1975.)
This little crop of cottages is on a little road called St Vincent's Hill. I was interested because I'm trying to track down Catherine Hughes's house, where the first Hermes Temple meetings were held. This was apparently "St Vincent's Studio, Grove Road, Redland", and I imagine it was very close to these cottages, if not actually one of them.
Apparently there is still something around here called The Studio, but I couldn't spot it. Maybe I'll come back at some point and have more of a look around.
There were a lovely little set of cottages, and very well-kept. According to Historic England, they're mid-18th century, but "Much restored c1990".
This is also St Vincent's Hill, but apparently it's just a dead-end private service road for these little residences built into the back of bigger places on Whiteladies Road. We didn't fancy it.
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...
Since I found out that Angela Carter used to live around here, I've read The Bloody Chamber, and it was bloody brilliant.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
I'd broadly planned to figure out the vantage point Loxton had used for his drawing by lining up Windsor Terrace with The Paragon, so I started taking bearings fairly early.
I think this was about my best attempt to match the Loxton angle. The fact that my photo still has the edge of Entrance Lock in it suggests that Loxton's drawing was taken from a little further downstream, but there are trees there now, obscuring the view.
Much of the buildings further back are unchanged, as you can see, especially Windsor Terrace to the left and The Paragon middle top. The diagonal rise of Freeland Place is still there, too. What's mostly changed is the closer road, where a chunk of Hotwells, including the houses and Cumberland Hall you can see in the Loxton drawing, was swept away for the Cumberland Road flyover system. This probably also explains why there aren't so many pedestrians just enjoying the scenery—it's much noisier there now.
Here's a similar angle to my earlier attempt at recreating the Loxton view, only with a framing that gives a bit more detail of the buildings.
I don't actually know what "we cap £" means. I do know that it always seemed irritating that the Metrobus worked by having to buy a ticket in advance at fiddly little machines next to the stops, and that being able to just buy a ticket by tapping a card once you were on the bus would seem wildly futuristic if I hadn't had a Oyster card decades ago in London...
Having just tried to read the 2,500-ish word explanation of Tap & Cap, I'm still not sure exactly how to use it, but hopefully it at least means that Bristol bus drivers will no longer swear at you if you don't happen to have exactly the right change sorted out in advance...
This, on the higher level, is the garages around the back of the houses on Cumberland Road.
So, this must be where everyone from the harbourside flats parks their cars. I never really thought to wonder where the parking was before.
So, now, when I pass this little staircase on my morning commute, I will no longer think, "I wonder where that goes?" and instead I'll know exactly where it comes out. Nice.
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...
The Patent Slip is actually a grade II listed building. Personally I live in a II*-graded building myself; not sure I'd want to slum it down here.