Tagged: landscape
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.
Avoiding the Accounts
26 Nov 2020
I took the day off my day job to do my accounts—or at least do enough bookkeeping to send them to my accountant. I hate doing the books. I woke up late, tired and with a headache and decided to bunk off for a walk around Cliftonwood, Clifton Village and Clifton instead, taking in a couple of good coffees along the way. Thanks, Foliage Café, and Twelve for the flat whites.
I don't know who named Canynge Square, but I respectfully suggest they attend a remedial geometry class. (image courtesy Google)
Like several Clifton gardens that feel private, Canynge Square garden is actually owned and maintained by the city council, and is a public garden. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, if you're a casual passer-by, you wouldn't necessarily be able to work this out other than from the lack of the usual "RESIDENTS ONLY" signs that adorn other Clifton gardens.
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.
In my defence, this little alleyway/service road looked more like a road on the map. Still, seeing as I'm here...
They've not made much progress on repairing the Chocolate Path, sadly, but it seems they've at least got a budget and a green light now.
The entire New Cut only took five years to dig out, but on the other hand they had literally a thousand men on the job and I imagine several of them died. Probably have to be a bit more careful these days.
This is the end-stop for the Brunel swing bridge. Looks like someone's been doing a bit of restoration. I didn't actually check to see if it still had "HERE LYETH I K BRUNEL" carved on the back by some wag; I did at some point in the past...
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...
When climbing the Zig Zag it's helpful only to focus on where you are, rather than how far you've got left to go.
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.
Using boots and shoes as flowerpots is a bit of a Cliftonwood signature, it seems.
I'm assuming it doesn't get opened much, or there'd be a little more pruning going on. Still, very pretty for a garage...
We've also seen Sydney Row, Upper Sydney Street and Sydney Garages on previous wanders.
This was today's mildly underwhelming destination: I only realised after walking past the gates on an earlier walk and then seeing it later on the CHIS Clifton's Communal Gardens page that this was a public garden, so popped it on my list to take a second look. As Clifton communal gardens go it's small and fairly dark on a day like this, but I don't imagine many people know about it or use it, so it's appealing to me, as a generally quite introverted person, especially one who prefers shade to sun on bright days...
Someone clearly put some good work in on the gate, but thirteen years of weather has taken its toll.
Next to the Cathedral. Which I've still never set foot inside. I should probably put that on the list...
Photo taken from the book Bygone Bristol: Hotwells and the City Docks, by Janet and Derek Fisher.
You can see the gate from the previous photo at the start of Narrow Quay. Plenty of other changes in the area, too: the statue of Neptune stands at the head of the water; there are no Cascade Steps yet; cranes still stand on Broad Quay, and you can just about tell that there's still a main road running right across the middle of Queen Square in the distance.
The gate stands half-closed; presumably before the E and W sheds were converted into the cinemas, bars and restaurants of the Watershed and other publically-accessible attractions there was still some need to keep the (working) dockside a little more secure, and I'm guessing it might have been locked at night.
The gates are listed and have apparently been there since 1894.
Shops, Hedgehogs and Cows
06 Jul 2021
I really only took the GPS and camera on a "just in case" basis, as I knew I was only going for a coffee in Greville Smyth Park along a well-trodden path this lunchtime. Still, I saw a few new things along the way, so I figured it was worth uploading the handful of photos I took...
When I passed the (then-empty) fencing back in March I wondered what this would turn out to be. I had no idea it would be a miniature nature reserve...
According to the Friends Of Greville Smyth (FROGS!) Facebook page it's a hedgehog oasis, which is rather sweet.
I see from the Facebook group that it was Rich from Hopper Coffee—the little coffee van I was visiting today—who first started the building of the pond, after finding dehydrated hedgehogs suffering in the park. It looks like it then became a group effort with several volunteers and donations of materials. Nice.
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...
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.
The Fujifilm X100T that I mostly use for these trips is a great camera, but it's also a fixed lens, approximately that of a 35mm focal length on a full-frame camera. So I quite often can't fit in whole buildings, whole terraces, or whole suspension bridges :D
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.
I wonder if this is the stage door to the Redgrave? And how it came to be connected to the corner of Canynge Square? Either way, I love finding these little cut-throughs that are normally only known by locals.
I successfully attained the square. Of course, people might not believe me when I say there's a way out of Canynge Square, if they've previously been burned by the fictional Lye Close...
I always imagined they just made this stuff by mixing Blue Nun with Black Tower at the industrial complex that surely manufactures all three of 'em.
This is my normal view of South Parade, so it's unsurprising I'd never really noticed the little terrace before.
Shop Fronts of Regent Street
22 May 2021
I didn't even think I'd manage to get out today, such was the weather forecast. As it turned out, it's been quite a nice day, and I managed to nip up to Clifton Village to pop to the Post Office. As with my last outing, I decided after snapping one shop-front on Regent Street that I might as well snap the whole row, and muse on a few of them, the only service I really offer over and above Google Street View for a lot of my pictures 😀
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
She was a gifted and prolific inventor, by all accounts, though apparently the news stories from a year or two back about her having had significant design input into the Clifton Suspension Bridge were due to an erroneous entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, oddly.
I have The Portable Emerson on my "incoming" bookshelf, I think, but I'm not getting through them very quickly at the moment.
It's nice to see one of Bristol's defunct fountains being put to some kind of purpose.
I'm now a member of the Cliftonwood and Hotwells Improvement Society. I kept on coming across things they'd done that I approved of, so it seemed like a good idea.
There's some fascinating stuff on Victoria Square here, including a lot of jumping-off points for deeper research. The description of the bombings during the war is amazing.
This is the path that used to be known as Birdcage Walk—up until the war it was lined with tall railings—but most people now use that name for the corridor made by the pleached lime trees in St Andrew's Churchyard, just a stone's throw away. I suppose that's the one that most resembles a bird cage today. Here's a Vaughan Collection photo of what it looked like before the war.
Adjacent on the left (Merchant's Road) side would have been the church of St James the Apostle, which survived the war but was demolished for flats in the seventies.
These feel like retirement flats, so I guess the swing might be for younger visitors...