Tagged: infrastructure
Fresh Fields
17 Oct 2021
For the first time in a while, I had the time and energy to go further afield and knock off some new roads from my "to do" list. I headed through the first Hotwells Festival to Ashton and Bedminster to cross off a few of the suburban roads south of North Street.
First, though, I decided to try to reproduce an old photo of the now-demolished Rownham Hotel just around the corner from where I live...
Here's my version. I couldn't get to the exact original viewpoint without the railings on the far left being in the way of the picture, but this is pretty close.
So, presumably the house (or possibly two?) on the end of Freeland Place, which looks to my eye just as Georgian as the rest of the terrace, must've been built after the Rownham Hotel was demolished for the road widening in 1969...
I've taken a few photos of the similar place around the corner, but I hadn't noticed there's another one of these odd mansion-mansard-bungalow-what-the-hell places here, too.
Here we're clearly starting to head uphill towards North Street. I've taken some nice photos looking down streets like this from the far end; the sun sets pointing this way down them so you can get some nice backlit shots.
A Wide Angle View
30 Oct 2021
I had an unsuccessful wander last week, on Tuesday afternoon: my GPS died within about five minutes of leaving the house, and I didn't notice, plus I found hardly anything I'd been looking for. On the plus side, as I was wandering around Park Street I decided to nip into London Camera Exchange on the offchance they had a secondhand Canon 17-40mm lens. I've been thinking of buying one for around a year, I think.
Long story short: not only did they have one, but due to a mistake with their price labelling which they kindly honoured, I now have a shiny new (to me) wide-angle lens and it cost me less than £300, which is a very good price for one of these in good condition (and including a lens hood.)
So, rather than try to salvage Tuesday's walk, here's a walk where I basically just bimbled up to Clifton Village for a coffee and wandered around taking photos of as many wide views as I could find. I took a lot more photos than these seventeen, but as you might expect, a new lens takes some practice getting used to, so most of them ended up in the "outtakes" pile.
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...
One of the three roads I needed to knock off my list. Just a fairly average slice of suburbia, really.
There were quite a few signs that Frobisher Road is a sanctuary for hedgehogs. We've actually seen a similar sign at the far end, on an earlier wander that went past the end of the road.
I like a lot of things about the streets of Bedminster. The view across to the rolling hills is one of them.
Just as well there wasn't a steam train running over it when half the path fell into the river, I suppose.
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...
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...
I found this image on Pinterest and as usual for that site it was annoyingly uncredited, but it seems to be from the book Hotwells, Spa to Pantomime, which I've just ordered direct from Bristol Books. Hopefully I'll be able to update the credit a bit when it arrives.
There's quite a lot in here that I didn't know about and will be researching a bit more, especially the Spa Assembly Rooms, which I think later turned into a school before being demolished for the flyover system, and also Anderson's workshop, a last vestige of the figurehead-carving industry.
That historical photo seems to have been taken from a higher vantage point. The most likely place seems to be the B Bond, perhaps from that fire escape, or maybe the roof? Something tells me it's unlikely they'd let me up there, but you never know, maybe one day I'll ask an archivist; I think that area's part of the Bristol Archives stores...
Because yes, we have just had a little excursion into Somerset, technically. So welcome back to Bristol, home of traffic jams.
So that's why all the cars are there—not for the Open Day, it turned out; it's the other signs that are the giveaway. Somewhere, some people are committing a sport.
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.
From the other angle. It was a single short platform, squeezed in to this little inset in the cliff face. Here you'd have been looking at the station wall, with the entrance and office at the far end. In this photo on Pinterest you can see the three tracks—the main platform track, a run-around loop so the engine could make its way around the carriages and onto the other end of the train, and a siding. At the far end is the station master's house, just behind a turntable that would have been used to turn the engine fully around for the return journey.
Here we see the Portway road, presumably fairly shiny and new, after many, many things, including the railway line from Hotwells to Sea Mills, were removed to make way for it. As you can see, they've done a splendid job of redeveloping the space where the station was into a little mini-park area, back in the day when the traffic wasn't a constant rush of noise and fumes and you didn't have to scamper across like you were playing a game of Frogger. It might well have been a pleasant place to sit. It certainly wouldn't be now.
Also, guess what there is fencing in the park area? Yes, some nice iron railings. I have no idea whether these are same ones I found—today's seem in surprisingly good nick considering this photo would have likely been taken almost a hundred years ago, and also how many railings were torn up during WWII.
This photo was taken before the war, as you can see a tram still running in the background—a Luftwaffe bomb took the tram system down in 1941 and it was never replaced. It also was obviously taken after 1926, as the Portway opened to traffic on 2 July 1926, having cost £800,000 to build, about £47m in today's money. So, that fixes it to a 15-year period, I think, but I'm not enough of a historian to be able to pin it down further.
We'll be over there in a bit, at the entrance to the Gully. Before that, though, we'll just head to the other side of the quarry on the left.
I have, however, spent an evening in there. They do a good Old Fashioned and an excellent Manhattan, from (somewhat hazy) memory.
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, too: the home of Humphry Davy, but here it again for context, as it's currently on the market for £1,200,000...
And here, at the other end of the terrace, is Peter Ware's old house. According to Hotwells - Spa to Pantomime, during the area's regeneration:
One house in Freeland Place was bought for £250 and Peter Ware, a charismatic local architect, bought a stunning corner house in Dowry Square for £200 including bed bugs!
Night fell fairly fast on our way from our mulled wine at The Ashton to North Street to have a poke around the stock of Storysmith bookshop in their new location—they've just moved here from much further east along the road.
The last Bedminster shot of our walk. There wasn't much light for photography by this time.
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...
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.
I've walked down this alley once before, but in the other direction, so I don't think I've ever noticed this before. This is a car park, but ...
...but you can't tell that it's not a house from the Hotwell Road. I wonder how many times I've walked past the windows and front door and not realised that they're just the frontage of the car park?
As recently as September this building site was just a big flat block of mud.
This was McArthur's warehouse; it will become McArthur's Yard
Built in the 19th century as a malt house, the McArthur’s Yard site includes several warehouse buildings and structures which have been empty for 20 years. Originally the headquarters of Bristol-based metal merchant McArthur’s Group, the site is in a prominent position surrounding Bristol’s floating harbour, adjacent to the SS Great Britain.
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.
As my plan was to knock off the remaining section of Burwalls Road, my first photo is the small segment of Burwalls itself that you can see from near my house. Burwalls is the mansion on the hilltop, peeping out about halfway from the left edge of the photo and the Suspension Bridge.
Most every time I cross the bridge, I remember one of the first times I walked over it, back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when some wag—possibly even Banksy, who knows?—had painted a sign on the footway about here: a rectangle of yellow caution stripes containing the words "WARNING. CONCEALED TRAPDOORS IN OPERATION".
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.
This may be somewhere around my actual destination today, though perhaps a little too much toward the east.
The buildings and green space on the hill in the background are the Knowle West Health Park. I'm pleased to have figured this out by using an OS map and a ruler and projecting a line from where I'm standing through the Tobacco Factory flag that you can just see poking up from Bedminster (you can see it on the corner of the building in this earlier pic](https://omm.gothick.org.uk/image/7175), then looking for densely-packed contour lines further out of town. Very old-school, but it worked!
I'm probably heading in more of a Bedminster Down direction. It's a similarly elevated green space further west, which is hidden behind the bond warehouse on the right in this pic.
This area continues to be blighted with ugly and neglected-looking infrastructure. We're just on the edges of Ashton Vale, which is among the 30% most deprived areas in the country. At the north of my one-mile radius we have Clifton, among the least 20% deprived. Source: UK indices of deprivation.
Redpoint climbing centre. Used to be an art deco cinema, apparently. At the far end you can see a sop to that in the style of the CAFE BAR sign. It looks rather swanky and modern inside from the pics on their website.
At this end of the building is a giant digital advertising board. I'm with Adblock Bristol on this one, but then I've never been a fan of public advertising.