26 Feb 2022
I needed to buy new walking shoes—my old ones were squeaking and it was driving me up the wall—so I ordered some for collection from Taunton Leisure on East Street in Bedminster, and decided to make picking them up an official wander.
I didn't cover any new ground within my mile, but I did take advantage of the trip to take in a few interesting things just outside my normal radius, mostly New Gaol-related. Along the way there are a couple of sanitation-related diversions, including a visit to a rare manhole cover. You can hardly wait, I can tell!
I think this is likely part of the development of the old brewery site into modern flats. Last I saw it was at least planned to be 100% affordable new homes, at least.
01 Jan 2022
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.
Time for a quick (decaf) latte for the road. Coffee #1 open every day of the year except Christmas Day, apparently. As the only coffee shop open on North Street, they were quite busy. Apparently I was the tail-end of a constant stream of customers that had been going for an hour or more.
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.
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.
Speaking of gentrification, I doubt you've have seen an arts & crafts cafe on North Street twenty years go.
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.
The Tobacco Factory, Bedminster's will-known theatre and bar, bought a farm in 2018 and now has a farm shop attached. always trying to be innovative, bought a farm in 2018 and now has a farm shop attached. I sometimes pop in on a Sunday, though it's the Sunday market that pops up in the back yard that actually lures me over there.
Thought I'd grab a close-up of one of the Six Sisters. This one's Oodles of Poodles by "Lucas Antics", aka Alex Lucas & Paul Fearnside, apparently.