Tagged: onemilematt
Coffee, Pirates and a Spitfire
15 Apr 2021
Just a quick trip to Imagine That for a flat white and a date ball (they're really nice), snapping the general sights along the way. No new roads, as has rapidly become the default on my lunchtime wanders, but as I'm in the routine of this project it almost seems strange not to pop my wanders up on the site.
...swan of those things.
I bought some duck food from Amazon a while back and now carry around a zip-lock bag of the stuff on my more waterside wanders.
Apparenlty it's owned by the same man who owns the Mustang I've snapped here before. I was told this by a lady who I imagine was his long-suffering wife. "At least it started this morning. He spends all his money on these, you know; none on the house..."
I've not had one yet this year. It's still a bit chilly for me to indulge in iced drinks.
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.
From up here it's easier to see the curving path that the end of Brunel's swing bridge would make along its little steel track, until it hit the wooden buffer on the left-hand side, with the other end pivoting out over Howard's Lock. You can see the turtable it balances on just underneath the temporary roof there.
I decided to make my way across the water to Greville Smyth Park via a more cicuitous route than normal.
Some of the Cumberland Basin Flyover System's pedestrian pathways really do feel like you're making your way through a post-apocalyptic computer game.
I'd heard there was going to be something of a wild party in Greville Smyth to mark the end of lockdown. It seems it may be the start of a regular thing, with a dance festival bringing 8,000 people to the park. I imagine I'll be able to hear it from my place, and therefore safely avoid it.
Even on a quieter day, the roar of the traffic is pretty amazing. I was listening to a podcast about electric cars on noise-cancelling headphones, while wishing there were already a few more on the roads...
I think I should have gone back down into the park to come back up my normal path, that leads to a place where you can walk under the flyover and get back on the bridge to Hotwells. As it is I just tried heading north and ended up having to cross four lanes of busy traffic.
That seems to be the failure of the pedestrian paths around here: if you know where you're going really well, the best you can hope for is not to make a wrong turn, and then you can end up going all the way around the houses, including quite often back the way you came, and might manage to use some of the provided underpasses and crossings and avoid the most dangerous traffic. But if you don't know them like the back of your hand and just try heading for the place you want to get to, that you can actually see, you'll be led entirely astray and end up in a variety of dead-ends.
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...
When you think you're a free spirit who needs a convertible when actually you'd have been better off with the Volvo estate.
Who was it that decided that petrol stations had to be ugly? It's not like oil companies don't have money...
Apparently they're a "Cloud and Cyber Security Specialist". Let's not let them near this website, please; I wrote a lot of the code in a hurry when I was tired...
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.
Hard to capture how nice this big magnolia in the Cornwallis Crescent back garden is on camera.
With the neoclassical frontage of The Clifton Club (originally an assembly rooms) looking posh at the back.
I've been reading Adam Hall's books for many, many years. It's mostly his Quiller books, but I do have Bury Him Among Kings, about a World War I soldier, on my "incoming" shelf at the moment...
A New Wander, a New Cafe
21 Apr 2021
Obviously, I was trying to connect to the industrial history of the Canon's Marsh area, to the old gasworks, the docks railway, the warehouses they blew up to make way for all the rather soulless modern stuff (though I do like the Lloyds building, at least.) But what I mostly got out of today's walk is a new cafe to go to for my lunchtime outings. It's perhaps a little closer than both Imagine That and Hopper Coffee; not quite as close as Foliage and Twelve up in Clifton Village, but also not at the top of a steep hill.
No, not the mediocre Costa, but only a little way away from there: Rod and Ruby's, which opened in 2018 and which I've seen in passing several times but never popped into until today. What can I say? I was foolish. Great flat white, lovely interior, astoundingly good cannoli.
Sometimes you just have to get your head out of history and enjoy a pastry.
I know very little about the history of these buildings. There's a removals firm called Robinsons with some links to Bristol, and a building in Brimingham with an old sign saying "Robinsons Furniture Depositories", so I suppose it's possible this is a long-defunct furinture repository for a removals firm. Last planning application I can find is from 1998, before I even moved to Hotwells, granting permission to demolish "two storey office building and single storey store", which very much sounds like these two buildings.
The bit on the right still has a sign up saying it's Gnodal and Bioinduction—the firms whose car park is around the back—though Gnodal is defunct and Bioinduction sadly don't have any pictures from the Bristol office on the one-page website.
I really must poke my nose in and see if there's anything more than the apparently-tiny couryard back there.
I actually quite like this one, especially the pointed fronts of the living spaces. Decent size balconies, too.
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...
Canons Marsh Coffee Trip
29 Apr 2021
Another quick excursion to Canon's Marsh, tempted back by Rod & Ruby's cannoli and flat white. This time I poked around some bits of the modern flats I'd not really experienced before, mused on the old gasworks, and headed back down the Hotwell Road, spotting a re-opening gallery and finishing off at the Adam & Eve, for which some locals are currently rushing to launch a bid to turn it into a community business rather than have a developer turn it into yet-more flats.
I was in a bouncy, positive mood, helped out by Life Without Buildings' Live at the Annandale Hotel album1. Note to self, though: the album is nearly an hour long, so if you hear the encore starting and you're still halfway down the Hotwell Road, you'll probably be late back from lunch...
1 That review's well worth a read. Music journalists tend to go extra-dreamy when trying to describe Sue Tompkins. See what I mean:
She circles her limber tongue-twisters, feints, and attacks from unexpected angles, dicing and rearranging them with the superhuman brio of an anime ninja and a telegraphic sense of lexical rhythm.
This is the stern of MV Balmoral, previously owned by P&A Campbell, the steamship operators, who I've mentioned once or twice before.
So new it doesn't seem to be on Google or Bing Maps yet, at least on the actual map bit, this is the one new build that stands alongside the two historic-building-conversion jobs (Purifier House and Engine House) at Brandon Yard, basically the site of the old gasworks.
They were one of the last sites to be regenerated, after some failed attempts to turn them into offices, including by the Soil Association. I don't know much about what they do in a gasworks, but I heard that the ground was highly polluted and needed a lot of remedial work before anything new could be put there.
Another of the old gasworks buildings (or at least the shell of it.) The modern flat conversion stands on Lime Kiln Road—before this site was flats, it was a gasworks, before it was gasworks it was a timber yard, and before it was a timber yard, starting in the 17th century, it was a lime kiln glassworks, demolished 1838.
I suppose it's possible that purifier house was the reason for the ground pollution I heard about that made the site hard to redevelop, but I'm only guessing, based on the idea that if you remove the impurities from the gas at your gasworks, you probably end up with a whole lot impure stuff you've got to put somewhere...
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
This seemed to augur well, given that we were heading for Lime Walk. This is, oddly, not the first piece of random fruit I've come across unexpectedly on my wanders.
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.
This basement club will be more student flats soon, by the looks of it. Though I actually took this photo to remind myself of a possible plot point for a story I'm writing...
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.
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.
At some point, the local polling station stopped being at Holy Trinity and moved here.
Speaking of elections, one of the four elections happening today is the Bristol mayoral election; current enumbent Marvin Rees, an Evangelical of some variety, met church leaders here on the first day of his first term: “We prayed, and we invited the spirit of God into the city."
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.
And opposite Prospect Cottage, as if to give some direct contrast, the modern and anything-but-quaint goods entrance to the Nuffield Hospital.
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...
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.
Looking at the old OS maps, it seems this must have been where all the local cabbies hung out. The Cabmen's Rest has a urinal, drinking fountain, and horse trough, all on this little corner. Perhaps the little wall marks the edge of an old shelter; there's a box on the map there but it doesn't give much away.
Ther's a little shelter/bandstand-looking thing in the background of a few historic photos from the area like this one of a horsedrawn omnibus but it's hard to tell what's where.
Map source: 1894-1903 OS 25” 2nd Edition, Know Your Place Bristol
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.
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'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.
