Tagged: plant
Jacob's Well Wander
01 Feb 2021
I just wanted to get some exercise, really, so I set out to knock off the lower bit of Jacobs Wells Road that I'd not managed to walk up yet. I set the new signboard that the community association had had erected as my destination, after reading about it on their blog.
As it turned out, I couldn't even read it, as the building that houses the actual Jacob's Well had water flooding out onto the pavement. I wonder if it was actual Jacob's Well water? Have the soles of my walking shoes been mystically blessed now?
You can't see much of the flood in the photos I snapped, but I did shoot a little video, too. Ed on Twitter said:
I spoke to the seller at the time with a view to buying it - I mentioned an old friend who grew up nearby remembers it flooding regularly. He swore blind my friend was wrong.
It's a bit higgledy-piggledy, this little stretch that leads to the car park by the Grain Barge mooring. The Thai restaurant at the end was a fusion restaurant called Michael's with an excellent reputation when I first moved to Hotwells. The Thai is great, from what I remember, but I don't eat out very often, not even locally.
I'm guessing by local artist ©opy®ight, though I may be wrong, of course. Graff's not really my strong point.
This was quite hard to read in person and I only nipped out for a quick walk in my lunch hour, so I didn't have the time to spend checking it out.
This is what I actually came to see -- the signboard in front of the old Jacob's Well building. Recently refurbished for residential use and sold with a commercial licence for bottling the water. However, the signboard was behind the cordoning-off, because there was water flooding out of the building! Ooops...
I knew I'd taken a photo here before, but I couldn't remember for the life of me if I'd actually walked up it. Didn't have time to explore today.
Now home to a tax accountant. It's on the "local list" but without much in the way of detail.
Greville Smyth Path Completionism
02 Feb 2021
I needed to get away from my desk at lunchtime, and I saw a little segment of path in Greville Smyth Park that needed knocking off my "to walk down" list, so that gave me a target. Sadly Hopper Coffee's little Piaggio Ape wasn't there to sell me a coffee. I hope Rich is all right, not seen him so far this year.
Anyway, a fairly uneventful walk. They're putting new boundary fencing up around Hotwell Primary School (I wandered down Albermarle Row to see what the pneumatic drilling was about), the house on Granby Hill that's been covered in scaffolding and swaddled in protective sheeting has finally been revealed in its cleaned and refurbished form, and they were doing something to the flyover that leads up from the end of the Portway/Hotwell Road to the Plimsoll Bridge. Nothing much else to report.
Freshly refurbished, this is the first time I've seen it not covered in scaffolding, and it looks like they've done a sympathetic job. Historic England's listing says:
House. c1790. Stucco with limestone dressings, gable stacks and a pantile mansard roof. Double-depth plan. Late Georgian style. 2 storeys and attic; 3-window range. A symmetrical front has pilaster strips to a moulded coping; semicircular-arched doorway has a plate-glass fanlight and 6-panel door with flush lower panels. 2/2-pane ground-floor sashes with margin panes, 8/8-pane first-floor sashes, the middle one blocked and replaced with a small C20 casement; 2 small raking dormers.
Note the "middle one blocked and replaced with a small C20 casement". You can see it in the picture on the listing website, a weird small modern window in the bricked-up middle of the centre top-floor window. Here, now, it's been restored to match the other two windows and looks a lot better. Nice one.
You can't see what's going on at the top of the flyover, but you can certainly tell that there's a lot of work vehicles up there.
Easy to miss in the previous photo. I didn't have a camera with a zoom lens today. The Fujifilm X100T is a fantastic camera for many purposes, but zooming in on distant details is not one of them.
Sunshine and Coffee
05 Feb 2021
I did try to knock off one tiny bit of Baltic Wharf I've missed, but I don't know yet if I succeeded. Mostly this trip was just a reason to get out of the house and into the sunshine while it lasted. Spring is in the air.
In Between
06 Feb 2021
A lovely walk in the early spring sunshine with my friend Lisa. We headed directly for Jacobs Wells Road, to start off around the scene of one of our earlier walks, but this time took in Jacobs Wells from QEH upward, stopping to snap some photos of a Bear With Me, some interesting areas between Park Street and Brandon Hill including a peculiarly quiet enclave with a ruined old build I'd never found before, then crossed the Centre to grab take-away pies from Pieminister (I had the Heidi Pie) and head back to my place down the harbourside.
Need to head up a few of these. There's another street back there somewhere, plus the paths I've not walked on Brandon Hill
A wander to knock off a couple of bits around Clifton Park that I'd missed out on previous excursions. This one took in the drinking fountain near Sion Hill and explained a little of how the Seven Years War, which ended in 1763, still has some history on display near Manilla Road.
Lots of information at Memorial Drinking Fountains, which starts with a general overview:
Located on Sion Hill at the junction of Gloucester Row and Observatory Road this drinking fountain was erected in 1866. It can be found on the south side of Clifton down near the suspension bridge.
Seated on a two tiered square granite plinth, drinking fountain number 8 from Walter Macfarlane & Co.’s catalogue was manufactured at the Saracen Foundry at Possilpark in Glasgow, the most prolific architectural iron founders in the world. The structure is 9 feet 6 inches high and consists of four columns, from the capitals of which consoles with griffin terminals unite with arches formed of decorated mouldings.
I'm sure I've written in more depth on this obelisk to William Pitt the Elder, which used to stand in the grounds of Manilla Hall, which itself used to stand just off to the right of this photo, in a space itself commemorated by the name of Manilla Road.
This sarcophagus surmounted by an urn is a 1767 memorial to the dead of the Seven Years War.
Leading off the far side of the roundabout in the background is Manilla Road, former site of Manilla Hall, built by General Sir William Draper, whose victories include capture of Manilla City in 1762. This cenotaph and the adjoining obelisk to Pitt used to stand in the grounds there.
...looking toward Vyvyan Terrace. On the left, a man was doing what looked like some re-pointing work.
(Photographic Lack of) Worcester Terrace
09 Feb 2021
A nice walk, but something of a failure, photographically. I went to knock Worcester Terrace off my list, a not dissimilar terrace to Vyvyan Terrace, but one street further away from me. Like yesterday, it was very chilly but this time I went prepared with an extra layer and a winter coat. I think this may have been my downfall, as it may have been the X100T's control wheel brushing against the coat that put it in aperture priority mode at f/16, which I didn't notice at the time, and made most of my photos a little too blurry to use. Apparently in this mode, the X100 doesn't bump up the ISO if it can tell things might be a little too wobbly. Ah well.
So, a nice enough walk, and technically I did Worcester Terrace, but if you didn't take a photograph, were you really there? I'll have to go back...
Can't find out much about the history of the name, as there's pages of Google results in the way about a World of Warcraft zone with the same name!
From the listing:
Pair of attached houses. 1846. Limestone ashlar with external and party wall stacks, roof not visible. Double-depth plan. Tudor Gothic Revival style. Each of 2 storeys, basement and attic; 2-window range. A detailed, symmetrical front has projecting wings with small gables and octagonal, panelled buttress-turrets with octagonal finials; weathered sill bands, a moulded parapet, paired buttresses to the party wall linked by a raised parapet, and side entrances.
I don't know much about architecture, but I understand that if your porch has a dormer, you're probably quite well-off.
I was hoping to cut through to the back of the Cathedral, but perhaps this only leads to the Presbytery. Didn't want to get chased off by a bishop, anyway.
The posh place on the end of Worcester Terrace seems to be the only bit with Ionic columns. They're all over Vyvyan Terrace, behind.
Arlington Villas and WH Smith Destruction
10 Feb 2021
I actually dashed up to Clifton to take a look at Arlington Villas, just around the back of St Paul's Road, one of those slightly odd little enclaves of overlooked housing that you know is there, but you never have a reason to visit or travel down. As it turned out, interesting though the (public) garden is, I actually took far more pictures of the now-completely-demolished site bounded by King's Road, Boyce's Avenue and Clifton Down Road where WH Smith and other places used to stand.
It's interesting to imagine how nice this little area would be if turned into a permanent public square, but of course the developers already have their planning permission to build it right back up again.
Are these balconies? Or is it technically a loggia? Oh, according to the listing, it's:
Recessed first-floors behind a stone colonnade with paired, panelled columns to an entablature.
I'll never get the hang of what's what in architecture.
There's a strip of hotels on St Paul's Road; they make the most of the available space by converting as much basement as possible to rooms.
Another day, another coffee. I think I may have knocked a tiny footpath in Baltic Wharf from my list of leftover paths in the area, but mostly this walk was about getting out into the crisp February cold and enjoying the walk. On the way I posted a letter at 13 Dowry Parade (home of a surgeon called Willam Falls back 1830, according to Pigot's Directory of Gloucestershire...) and pondered the strange duality of Dowry Parade and Hotwell Road, then wandered through the Dowry Parade end of Cumberland Piazza, enjoying the clean lines of the glyph graff, before taking the causeway route past a Cumberland Basin empty of water but full of seagulls, to make my way south of the harbour.
There was a smell of unpleasant fire—more the acrid, plasticky smell of some kind of accidental fire than the pleasant harbourside aroma of wood-burners on narrowboats. I think the source was on the south side of the river, but I didn't have the time to find out.
There was, coincidentally, a burning BMW outside the Counts Louse today, apparently, but that would have been too far away to smell.
Brief Jaunt to the not-so-Hot Well
13 Feb 2021
It's been very cold the last few days, so seeing as it was low tide at a convenient afternoon hour, I just wandered out to see if I could see the hot well steaming. I've been told that you sometimes can, on a cold day, but today, as with every other day I've tried, there was nothing in evidence.
It may be that the emergent spring has already filtered through too much cold river silt by the time it hits the surface these days, or even that it's running cooler than it used to. But perhaps I've just been unlucky.
According to the estate agent's brochure I just found, including the cellars this place has 567 square metres of space to offer. There was not a price in the brochure, but back in 2017 they were asking for "offers over £1,995,000".
Clifton Village, including Oxford Place
15 Feb 2021
I've noticed Oxford Place as a tiny little side/back road I've overlooked on my wanders a few times. Today I decided to pop down and have a look, as well as taking a few general snaps of Princess Victoria Street, which I thought deserved more pictures, as it's basically my closest decent shops, and in the Beforetimes I'd visit the Co-Op up there all the time, as well as the cafes (you'll be missed, Clifton Village branch of Boston Tea Party, recently closed in favour of Eat a Pitta.)
I'm definitely becoming more familiar with the area through the One Mile Matt jaunts and associated reading. Today I didn't just think, "oh, I'll head home down that weird alleyway with the electrical substation in it"—no, I thought, "I'll head home down Hanover Lane", because I actually knew its name. And on the way back from there I nodded sagely to myself as I passed St Vincent's Road, knowing now which St Vincent it's likely to be (St Vincent of Saragossa) and also eyed up the modern flats on Clifton Vale and wondered if they might have been built on the site of the former Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens... I don't know all the answers, but at least I have some idea of the historical questions I'm interested in.
It seems to be a small replica of a Paddington Station clock. Strange thing to go to the effort of sticking on a wall in a side-street.
Never been in in its current incarnation. Can't remember what it was called before, but it's the only place I've eaten posh enough that I had to pick a bit of shot out of the partridge. As Wallfish it's had a lot of good press, including from Jay Rayner ("a kitchen skilled in all the right departments".)
Edit: having checked, it seems it's just shut, and will be consolidating with a restaurant called Wellbourne on the Mall, around the corner. Ah well. I probably won't eat there, either.
Their coffee is pretty reliable, but the last few times I've been in one member of staff or another has had ther nose poking out over their face mask, and it's not exactly well-ventilated in there. I think I'll steer clear until the pandemic's over. Spicer+Cole, Foliage and Twelve are all better bets at the moment, for excellent coffee and for not dying of an infectious disease.
My guess would be that the paint shop and the two kitchen places are doing better than the travel agency at the moment.
Not sure why they're digging up the road this time. Last time there was a burst water main at the corner of Merchants Road.
Tempting to put a tiny sign up in between to claim a name for the 20cm of road in between the signs.
This time I walked down the access road here rather than along the road. I still rather like the inset first floors with their rectangular columns.
