Tagged: landscape
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.
I'm pretty sure from looking at some maps that this is the gate that would have led to Prince's Lane, if it were still passable.
It's a (glass-fibre reinforced, I think) concrete roof to keep falling rocks from blocking the road at this particularly friable bit of the cliff face.
But both unlocked, and standing open. I chanced it, on the basis that I wasn't going to do any harm to the place, and there weren't any signs telling me to keep out.
I don't know for sure if I was even trespassing, but for goodness' sake don't trespass on actual railways, kids. I'd carefully done my research and there haven't even been tracks here since 1921.
There are no signs of the railway to be found between the gate and the nearest tunnel entrance further north, as you'd expect, really.
It's actually an electric kettle. I doubt it's contemporary with the railway :) Looks a bit more 1970s than 1870s to me.
Bower Ashton is an interesting little area just south of the river from me—in fact, the Rownham Ferry used to take people over from Hotwells to Bower Ashton, operating from at least the twelfth century to around the 1930s.
It's a strangely contradictory little area, with a cluster of old and new houses sandwiched in between the busy A-roads and significantly more industrial area of Ashton and the bucolic country estate of Ashton court roughly east to west, and also between Somerset and Bristol, north to south.
I've been around here before, mostly poking around Bower Ashton's arguably most well-known bit, the Arts faculty campus of the University of the West of England, but I'd missed at least Parklands Road and Blackmoors Lane, so I initially planned just to nip across briefly and wander down each in turn. On a whim, though, I texted my friends Sarah and Vik in case they were out and about, and ended up diverting to the Tobacco Factory Sunday market first, to grab a quick flat white with them, extending my journey a fair bit.
To start with, though, I nipped to a much more local destination, to see something that you can't actually see at all, the Gridiron...
(I also used this wander as a test of the cameras in my new phone. I finally upgraded after a few years, and the new one has extra, separate wide and telephoto lenses compared to the paltry single lens on my old phone. Gawd. I remember when speed-dial was the latest innovation in phones...)
You can't actually see the Gridiron in this photo, but I believe it's still there, under that amazing buildup of silt.
The Gridiron—one of the few photos of it can be seen on the Maritime Mud and Miasma page of About Bristol—was a cheaper alternative to putting your boat in a dry dock. It was a 200-foot long grid (there seems to be some debate over whether the grid itself is actually metal, or in fact timber; I'll have to try to find out), 38 feet wide, nestled here between the north and south entrance locks. A ship captain could sail his vessel over here at high tide, then as the tide gradually receded, the ship—up to 250 feet, as overhanging a bit was apparently okay—would settle onto the gridiron.
At that point an inspection and repair crew could make their way down to the gridiron by ladder and do whatever work they could manage before the tide rose up again.
One last snap before we move on. I'm using the wide lens on the iPhone here, and have managed to include a silhouette selfie...
And here's the middling lens on the camera. Not bad, though on every shot I've taken on the iPhone so far where it's been able to see blue sky it's managed to oversaturate it for my tastes. Still, I guess they're aiming at the mass market, and the mass market does seem to like oversaturated colour and the sharpening turned up to eleven.
Not bad, and it's certainly better than not having a wide-angle lens in your pocket everywhere you go. I won't complain too much. "My iPhone oversaturates my photos. Also my wallet is too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are pinching..."
All of a sudden, everything's a bit quieter and there's open fields in front of me. And livestock, if you can spot the cow in the far distance, just to the right of the tree.
See? Livestock. Although the zoom on my phone camera really does show why people are still dragging big lenses and cameras with large sensors around with them.
I'm not sure if this is my nearest cow—there are some in Leigh Woods, too—but it's still quite reassuring to know that it only takes about a mile for me to be next to some livestock. This is far further than it would have been even a hundred years ago, when there were still cowsheds and a slaughterhouse behind the Pump House (as opposed to the Rownham Mead housing estate) and when the Cumberland Basin still had sheep pens along the side...
I was really just busking my route at this point, and finding a handy entrance to Ashton Court I figured that wandering back through the estate was a good plan.
No idea what's through here. Let's go take a look. Is there a way to get back to Parklands Road? I don't even know if you can get into Parklands Road from this end...
Presumably these are school playing fields, though there was no great barrier to entry. They seem to be school-adjacent, but maybe they're more public... I followed some people who looked like they knew where they were going, which I find is often an expedient way of getting lost.
On my last wander, to Bower Ashton, I was intending to knock Blackmoors Lane off my list "to-do" list, but got a bit diverted. I also took a little look into the history of the Gridiron, once a cheaper alternative to dry dock that was nestled just south of North Entrance Lock.
Today I had to go to send a parcel off somewhere, so I decided on going to the North Street Post Office via Blackmoors Lane. I didn't have much intention of anything else, but as luck would have it I walked out both at low tide and also as some lockkeepers seemed to be having a bit of a training session, and one of the more senior people was (a) happy to answer a few random questions on the Gridiron and (b) actually knew a lot about it, as Gridiron maintenance had been one of his jobs, more than twenty years ago...
Interesting to see a flatscreen TV left out in the traditional "please take this away for free" place, even if it is only a little Alba.
Although we're heading towards the trafficky roar of the A370, it's still more of a subdued hum from here, and you could almost convince yourself that you were on the outskirts of a little town in the country.
I am actually getting better at finding my way around this concrete tangle of roads and underpasses. This way avoids having to dash across Winterstoke Road or walk quite a long way down to the first pedestrian crossing.
The road up above is the A3029, also known at this point as Brunel Way. It replaced the earlier Ashton Avenue, which as you'd expect headed from here and crossed Ashton Avenue Bridge. This parevenu diverts from the original route at about this point and has its own bridge a little further downstream.
I skipped the photography for the part of the wander where I went to the Post Office on North Street to send my old phone back to Apple for some trade-in, so here we are back at the end of Spike Island, heading back toward Hotwells.
If you recall, before I left this area on the outbound leg of the wander, I had a chat with one of the more senior lockkeepers. He told me that the gridiron was definitely still there, and, look—there at the far left-hand side. What's that poking out of the silt?
The lockkeeper told me that the gridiron was in use as recently as 2000, and that it used to be his job to wash the silt build-up away, using a sluicing system we'll get to in a moment.
I didn't realise I'd buggered up the focus on this shot until I got home and saw it on the big screen. They can't all be winners...
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, but I wanted to give it a bit of context. Peter Ware very much helped to save Dowry Square, as one of a group of "Newcomers" to the Hotwells area in the 1960s and 70s. Hotwells was basically a slum before then, with many of the buildings in a terrible state, including Dowry Square and Hope Square.
As I've recently been reading in Hotwells - Spa to Pantomime, these newcomers took their chances on a very dodgy area and decided to buy and do up a lot of the grand old houses that were almost ruins in some cases.
This early gentrification was important enough that John Boorman, of Excalibur fame made a BBC documentary about it called The Newcomers.)
Site of a manor house since the 11th Century. Last time I was in there it was also with Lisa, my companion for this walk, as a team of storytellers from Red Rope Theatre read us ghost stories just before Halloween. It was excellent.
They should form a pub. This is just over the road from The Ashton, so there's perhaps a little too much local competition. Lisa and I popped in for a mulled wine.
This is arguably better than the last time I tried to snap a cow in this field, but it's still terrible. Maybe next time I'll have a longer lens, or the cow will be closer...
This field is called St John's Chapel. On the oldest map I can find, from somewhere between 1844 and 1888 it's marked as the "Site of St John's Chapel" but with no sign of the chapel, so it must be very long-gone. "The Chapel was dedicated as St. John or St. James depending on the source consulted, and it presumably fell into decay after the village was deserted, in the 13th or 14th century. No trace remains above ground level today, and the site is just a field" says The Churches of Britain and Ireland.
I can see on the same map that there's clearly been a pub where The Ashton is for a very long time. It was called The Smyth Arms back then.
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...
I love the way Spoke & Stringer's deli window with it predictably-hipster type choices and logo are somewhat put into perspective by their wonky big-arse OSB sign with PASTIES daubed on it.
There is a time for fancy marketing, and a time to just shout "GET YER PASTIES 'ERE" at the top of your signage.
My friend Lisa texted me to see if I wanted to pop down and take a photo or two of the event she was taking part in: Santa SUP. SUP Bristol organise stand-up paddleboarding on the floating harbour, and their annual Santas-on-paddlboards event is quite the sight.
On the way there, I grabbed a historical photo I'd been wanting to recreate for a while of the shiny and new Cumberland Basin flyovers back in 1965, because I reckoned I could fit finding the same viewpoint into my outbound journey. Also, after having only used it on a wander for the very first time yesterday, I managed two crossings in the cross-harbour ferry today to get to the best locations for snapping the paddleboarders...
So, then, this wander is mostly a bunch of photos of paddleboarding Santas. Tis the season... Enjoy!
And here's the site today. The weathered concrete and tagging doesn't really improve things, but at least it looks like one of the original trees has thrived.
It's less so much the look of the road system, perhaps, and more that on a busy day it's just an urban hellscape of traffic and noise. On a Sunday like this you could actually believe that children could play here (there was originally a playground to go with the fountain and other features I'm mentioned in the past...)
However, most of the time, just like with the Portway, the sheer weight and (acoustic) volume of the traffic and its accompanying fumes and danger has clearly increased beyond anything the original planners ever envisaged.
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.
There was a notice of seeking possession on the gate when I got around to the far side. Looks like it's definitely going to be the replacement for the caravan park at Baltic Wharf. Shame for the caravan folk, really; this is sandwiched between major roads and not anything like as close to the pubs and other tourist-friendly places around the harbourside.
Maybe if I'd got interested in this project before the university sold the place, I'd have been able to pop in and have a look around. Still, I can't blame them; when the estate was on the market in 2012 it was Bristol's most expensive house, valued at £5m, according to the Daily Mail.
That was for the main house and the old stables and lodge, which have been converted to the housing we're looking at. Given that by 2017, just a single one of the five aforementioned lateral apartments in the main manor house was on the market for £1.5, I think the developers probably did quite well...
It's lovely backing paper, but a bit bare. Not so much to advertise in the current climate, I suppose.
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.
Interesting sign up on the left there. This isn't talking about the Metrobus line, which as you can see rises above the crossing, but about the MetroWest train plans, I think, which would see a revivial of the old Portishead line. That's not happening until at least 2024, but clearly the business park is fearful of the impact.
As if to prove that you can find beauty in the most unexpected of places, this is what happens when you turn around at the arse end of nowhere.
I thought from the map there might be a way across the line here, too, but it looks like it's all locked up.
Well out of my one-mile radius now, here's a view from the railway bridge at Bedminster Down Road, looking back to the east.
This is Parson Street Junction, originally called Portishead Junction, where the Bristol to Exeter line, straight on, branches off into the Portishead Railway line, curving away there on the right. Parson Street Station in Bedminster is directly behind us on the other side of the bridge.
Phase One of MetroWest should see the currently-frieght-only Portishead line re-open to passenger traffic, though I wouldn't hold your breath. It seems "Metro-" is an old Roman prefix meaning "multiply all your time and budget estimates by ten".
This is near the view I'm trying to recreate. Here are the fringes of Bedminster Down.
I did take a lot of slightly different angles, clambering around on the slippery slopes of Bedminster Down and having the occasional entanglement with trees. I think this shows pretty much the same view as the historical photo, or at least as close as you can get by wandering around on the ground in about the right place today.
It was nice to be able to find it, and I've never walked to Bedminster Down before. And it's a nice palate cleanser after all that rather dreary industrial stuff, anyway...
And that's the note I'll leave things on, as it was already getting a bit dark for photography, so I mostly plodded my weary way home without any further snapping. At more than 9km it's not my longest wander ever, but it's about twice as long as the average, so I may have overdone it...
Source: Bristol Archives, Vaughan Collection.
Here we look, apparently from Bedminster Down, towards the "white city", the Bristol International Exhibition buildings of 1914.
This is the photo I've trooped all this way to reproduce. Have I managed to find the right spot?
I picked a fairly arbitrary reason for a wander today. Really, I just wanted to do a New Year's Day wander just to get out of the house and to set a precedent for the year to come.
My ostensible reason was to investigate what looked like a road on my map that quartered the lawn in front of the Ashton Court mansion. As it turned out, this is just a muddy footpath/desire line similar to a half-dozen other tracks nearby, and must be some kind of bug or misclassification with the mapping system I'm using, but that's not important. What's important is that I went for a little walk on the first day of the year. As a bonus, I did happen to wander down a couple of sections of new footpath, so technically I broke some new ground too, which is nice.
Strange to think that there was once, briefly, a castle here. More on that on some future wander, when I try to recreate another historical photo of the Bristol International Exhibition.
Though this isn't the allegedly main-ish road I was trying to find, so I didn't pop through it.
This bit that's marked on my map in the same style as a normal, tarmac road. Clearly it's not. I think perhaps I need to figure out what's going on with the mapping on this website, as the main openstreetmap site, which is where I'm getting my data from, does seem to have it as a simple track.
A small challenge for the new year, I suppose... Perhaps a refresh of the way the map looks on the site would be a nice start to the year anyway!
There were quite a lot of people about; I think a New Year's Day walk is still quite the tradition. Good.
I took advantage of a rare recent day where it wasn't tipping down with rain to get away from my desk on a lunchtime workday and head up to Clifton Village. I'd hoped to snap a reproduction of historical photo which I'd worked out had been taken from the Suspension Bridge, but the gods were not smiling on me. Still, taking only a nice long lens with me worked out very well as the lovely haze of the day made more distant views quite dramatic...
This is almost the photo I wanted to take, but the historical photo I want to reproduce was definitely taken from further to my right, on the bridge, and you should still be able to see the remains of Clifton Bridge Station (hidden from here by the trees on the right) and the last bit of slipway of the Rownham Ferry (hidden by the prominent house in the foreground.) This snap is also a bit marred by the temporary safety fencing I had to shoot through.
Ah well, another day, I suppose.