Tagged: mode-of-transport
Coffee and Graff
22 Jan 2021
Took myself around the harbour to Imagine That's horsebox cafe and treated myself to a flat white and a sourdough cheese toastie. On the way there and back I encountered some local flooding and various bit of graffiti, from some ugly tagging on someone's front windows to a large new piece being added to Cumberland Piazza in the ongoing attempts to cheer the place up.
Nothing New
02 Dec 2020
This may be the very first time I've gone for a One Mile Matt wander and not actually gone down any new roads, trod any new steps. I just wanted a coffee, frankly, so I went the same old way to Imagine That in the marina and back again.
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.
As well as confused van-drivers, the buses weren't having a great time of it, either, having to squeeze down narrow streets like Canynge Road rather than their usual broad avenues. Never seen a traffic jam here before.
I vaguely remembered having "get better picture of Worcester Terrace" on my "to-do" list, so of course it's got scaffolding up now.
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
Lisa and I walked past the other end of this little street on an earlier walk. We didn't miss much, apparently.
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...
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.
One of the many problems with the Hotwell Road and Portway is the complete dearth of places to safely cross this road, with a varying number of lanes and a speed limit that hits 50mph for stretches.
You can stand for a very long time looking both ways before taking your life into your hands and scurrying across. It took me quite some time to dash to the other pavement at the point where this one runs out and your only choice is to head up the Zig Zag or cross.
The acoustics are quite something. This is the traditional point on the Bristol Half Marathon where someone inevitably shouts "Oggy oggy oggy!" thus starting the familiar back-and-forth. Of course, it's closed to traffic on that morning, so you can actually hear yourselves shout.
It doesn't look like much, because it isn't much any more. However, this used to be the site of Hotwells Station (formely Clifton Station, before the opening of Clifton Down and the continued existence of Clifton Bridge meant the proliferation of stations with "Clifton" in the name warranted some disambiguation.)
Nestled in this little nook underneath the suspension bridge, it was the Bristol terminus of the Port Railway and Pier, whose aim was to avoid increasingly big ships having to wait for the right tides to come into Bristol and unload. They ran a line from Hotwells Station, here, to a deep-water pier at Avonmouth so the ships could moor there regardless of the tide, and transport cargo and/or passengers to and from Bristol, with this being the Bristol terminus. Work started at Shirehampton in 1863.
Originally this was an isolated line, but it was later hooked up to the rest of the rail network by the Clifton Extension Railway, and a tunnel under Clifton. That's a connection we'll be exploring a bit today, at least with a few of its visible above-ground bits.
The line saw its biggest use during the First World War, as dockers, munition workers, hospital trains and so forth ran back and forth between Bristol and the port. They even added an entire extra platform, Hotwells Halt, just down the road, to cope with the increase in traffic, platform space being at something of a premium in this unexpandable little nook, which runs from the bridge to the first of two tunnels in the cliff face to head onward to Sea Mills.
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.
And here's the reason I just went for a fairly pointless wander around the station—I thought I'd kill a little time so I could snap a train actually using the Clifton Extension Railway's tunnel as my last picture of the wander.
A quick google of the number suggests this is a Great Western Railway Class 166, whatever that means. I quite like trains, but I'm no trainspotter.
That concludes our rather random 9km wander around the above-ground bits of a tunnel. Please disembark safely, minding the gap between this website and the rest of the internet.
The Gridiron and Bower Ashton Part Two
03 Dec 2021
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...
The delights of the Bower Ashton roundabout. Here's a picture of it under construction in the 1960s from the Bristol Archives. Don't tell me I don't know how to show you a good time.
Considering I didn't know there was a historical photo to copy when I shot this, it's not too far off the same viewpoint.
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!
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 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.
I did know this existed at some point, I think, but I'd completely forgotten that there was a level crossing within my mile. We need to wander over it, too, as this road, Ashton Vale Road, is one of the roads within my mile that I've not ventured down yet.
Partly that's because no bugger wants to walk down roads like this with me, as it's basically just industrial wasteland, especially in this interregnum period, where there's not even the buzz of industry to keep things interesting, but seeing as we're here...
I mostly went out to hang out with my friends Sarah and Vik in Bedminster, but along the way I thought I'd take a closer look at something a little nearer home: the last crossing point of the Rownham Ferry.
In the distance is EE's temporary cell tower, which I've mentioned before, put up in November 2020.
Inflating in the field behind Ashton Court mansion, by the looks of it, the usual venue for the Balloon Fiesta.