Tagged: land-lot
Desultory Coffee Wander
16 Apr 2021
Another day, another quick dash out for a coffee. I did at least try to take a different route from normal, especially on the way back, where I yet again got a bit lost in the strange paths, flyovers and underpasses that make up the odd maze of pedestrian "infrastructure" among the concrete jungle between the west of Greville Smyth and my neck of the woods in Hotwells. I swear one day I'll take a turn I've not tried before and end up being gored by a Bristolian minotaur.
Man on a Mission
17 Apr 2021
I went rather outside my area today, as I went to pick something up from the Warhammer shop on Wine Street (Games Workshop as-was, and before that I think perhaps a rare retail outlet for Her Majesty's Stationery Office? I may be mis-remembering...) Anyway, a friend of mine wanted something picking up and posting to him, so I figured I'd knock some streets off my list along the way.
I first headed for the St George's Road area, walking down the narrow Brandon Steps and finding some strange wall art on Brandon Steep, then headed to the Old City via Zed Alley. The Warhammer shop visit was friendly and efficient, and, mission accomplished, I treated myself to a sausage roll and a flat white from Spicer + Cole, to take away and eat in Queen Square with its current decoration of hearts. I finished off with a detour up Park Street, looking out for St John's Conduit markers, before finally crossing Brandon Hill on the way home.
Quite a long wander, all told, and I'm a bit knackered today...
Recently decorated with hearts to kick off the #LoveBristol campaign. It looks amazing from above in this drone footage.
I may have trod some new paths on Brandon Hill. I wasn't sure, as the network of routes is quite complicated and I was too eager to get home to muck around checking my map.
The Mall Gardens
19 Apr 2021
Just a quick errand to the Post Office to send off Mollog's Mob, but afterwards I bought a flat white and a new plant from Foliage Cafe and headed for The Mall Gardens to enjoy sitting in the sun and reading a book on the first day this year that's been properly warm enough for it. Nice.
The Mall Gardens does actually have some signs up letting people know it's a public garden, but I think it was only my researches for this project that brought the number of public gardens there are in Clifton to my attention, and reminded me that I could make use of this space in Clifton Village, a little closer to the coffee shops and a little more sheltered than Clifton Down.
With the neoclassical frontage of The Clifton Club (originally an assembly rooms) looking posh at the back.
Howard's Lock
27 Apr 2021
Bits of Entrance Lock have been coned off for ages, mostly the area with the lockkeepers' house on it. My friends Sarah and Vik mentioned at the weekend that it had recently been un-coned, so I wandered that way to cross the outermost lockgates for the first time this year. I don't know whether it's just my mood today or the weather, but it seemed a day for pushing a couple of photos in a more experimental direction in the post-processing...
Leftovers with Lisa
01 May 2021
I didn't get to all the little leftover streets around the northeastern part of my area in today's wander, but I definitely knocked a few off the list, plus Lisa and I enjoyed the walk, and didn't get rained on too badly. We spotted the hotting-up of Wisteria season, checked out Birdcage Walk (both old and new), ventured onto the wrong side of the tracks1 and generally enjoyed the architecture.
1 Well, technically we probably shouldn't have been on the grounds of those retirement flats, but nobody started chasing us around the garden with a Zimmer frame
I have The Portable Emerson on my "incoming" bookshelf, I think, but I'm not getting through them very quickly at the moment.
These feel like retirement flats, so I guess the swing might be for younger visitors...
I've been here before, but thought Lisa might want to see this off-the-beaten-track public garden.
It's a cute little summerhouse/shed but I wonder if the sign was obtained by entirely legal means...
Victoria Square Underpass
06 May 2021
I'm meant to be taking a little break from this project, but in my Victoria Square researches after my last walk I noticed a curiosity I wanted to investigate. The community layer on Know Your Place has a single photograph captioned, "The remains of an 'underpass' in Victoria Square".
Looking back through the maps, I could see that there really did used to be an underpass across what used to be Birdcage Walk. I can only guess that it was there to join the two halves of the square's private garden that used to be separated by tall railings that were taken away during WWII. Maybe it was a landscaping curiosity, maybe it was just to save them having to un-lock and re-lock two gates and risk mixing with the hoi polloi on the public path in the middle...
Anyway. Intrigued, I popped up to Clifton Village this lunchtime for a post-voting coffee, and on the way examined the remains of the underpass—still there, but only if you know what you're looking for, I'd say—and also visited a tiny little road with a cottage and a townhouse I'd never seen before, just off Clifton Hill, and got distracted by wandering the little garden with the war memorial in St Andrew's churchyard just because the gate happened to be open.
EDIT: Aha! Found this snippet when I was researching something completely different, of course. From the ever-helpful CHIS website:
When there were railings all round the garden and down the central path, in order that the children could play together in either garden there was a tunnel for them to go through. This was filled in during the 1970s but almost at the south east end of the path if one looks over the low wall the top of the arches can still be seen.
I wander on impulse down a little side-street I'd never really noticed before and find a curious cottage (Prospect Cottage, right) and a big 18th century listed house I've never seen before (Clifton Retreat, hidden behind the wisteria and other foliage ahead/left.)
If you'd shown me this photo before today, of a place I've been within spitting distance of thousands of times, I'd have not had a clue where it was. Bristol's fractal nature never ceases to amaze me.
I'm going to call this the memorial garden. Don't know if it has an official name, but it's a railinged-off area with the war memorial in it...
Up until WWII, anyway. The outline of the church remains around this square of land; the stones you can see bottom left are one of its walls. Among the many interesting images accompanying Bristol 24/7's story about the Bristol Blitz you can see an image of St Andrew's Church after the bombing raid of November 1940. I'd call it an interior shot, but most of the interior had become the exterior by that point...
It was parish church up until the Luftwaffe bombed it in 1940; the remains were demolished in 1956 and after that Christ Church became the Clifton parish church.
Until that point there had been a church on or very near this site since at least 1154, from what I can see on ChurchDB and ChurchCrawler...
Here's a snap of what the last building that stood here used to look like from the Bristol Archives, and here's an earlier one.
Sequel Injection
07 May 2021
I saw this tweet the other day and started thinking of my second Covid-19 vaccination as my "Sequel Injection" (to a geek, it's funny. You'll have to take my word for it.) Whatever you call it, this morning I went and got it.
It was in the same place I got my initial injection—my left arm! No, okay, it was at the Clifton College Prep School. I didn't take any photos of the event itself; the NHS production line is so efficient you barely have time to do anything else, even if the privacy of other patients wasn't a factor.
Along the way I mused at all the road resurfacing going on in Clifton, and also discovered a secret (okay, not-well-known and possibly slightly trespassey) way into Canynge Square, and on the way back I knocked off a few streets from my "leftovers list" of north-east Clifton. I've got much of Clifton done now, with the only obvious "to dos" on the east side of Whiteladies Road...
It was quite a long walk, and I'm feeling pretty tired now, though that might be the effects of the jab too, I suppose. Anyway. Tomorrow and Monday I'm walking outside Bristol, I think, and I imagine my feet will need some recovery time on Sunday, so it might be a while before I post another Wander.
I tried to figure out what this used to be—didn't have a lot of luck, but the next snap is taken from an old OS map showing that this area has been a stand for public transport since long before the modern bus stop here.
There were a lot of closed roads in Clifton this morning. I watched the white van at the end make its way carefully around the ROAD CLOSED signs at the village end of Observatory Road, drive past me, and get to where you can see it in the distance here before the driver was sent back with a flea in his ear from the workman on "stop the idiots driving through the newly-laid tarmac" duty.
I'd spotted in my Canynge Square researches that there might be a cut-through from a gate I'd seen in previous excursions to the side of the Regrave Theatre.
This is where I got the "ohhh, I know where we are..." moment: this is the other side of the weird bit around the back of Clifton Down shops, overlooking the oddly-placed private car park, adjacent to the little path with steps that people use to cut through to the shops from Alma Vale Road.
I'm thinking of choosing the dullest picture of the thousands of One Mile Matt images and awarding it a prize. This has got to be a contender.
Whistle Stop Tour Via a Hansom
12 May 2021
I wanted to take another snap of an interesting Gothic Revival place in Clifton, having found out a bit more about the owner. On the way I walked through the Clifton Vale Close estate, idly wondering again whether it might've been the site of Bristol's Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (I've not researched further yet.) On the way back I knocked off the last remaining bit of Queens Road I had yet to walk and tried to find the bit of communal land that Sarah Guppy bought so as not to have her view built on...
Coffee, Coronation and Clift House Road
28 May 2021
Another dash to Greville Smyth Park for a coffee from Rich at Hopper, but at least this time I managed to divert a bit and knock off a small section of Cumberland Road I'd managed to miss on previous excursions. Along the way I muse on a strange residence in between a warehouse and a tannery, and wonder if the Mayor might be deliberately letting the Cumberland Road Flyover area go to seed...
Another Day, Another 50 Metres
29 May 2021
I met my friends Sarah and Vik at Riverside Garden Centre today; I needed to buy some compost for repotting my wildly-overgrowing aloe vera, and I went a little bit out of my way to knock off a stretch of Ashton Road. It was a pleasant enough walk in the surprisingly warm (and surprising-not-tipping-it-down-on-a-Bank-Holiday-weekend) weather.
