Tagged: real-estate
This started as a little local walk with my friend Lisa, but when we randomly met my friends Sarah and Vik at Ashton Court, turned into joining them for a very long wander out to Abbots Leigh Pool. Most of this was well outside my one-mile radius but it was a lovely walk.
My friend Sarah mentioned the high tide and I managed to drag myself out early, though still a little late. We nearly drowned in torrential rain, but the weather changed quickly and we ended up walking over to Bedminster in sunshine.
Does it say "Tremlethoe"? If it does, I have no idea what it means, and neither does Google. Sounds like a Cornish fishing village. It was the odd balustrade that caught my attention.
A walk back from Bedminster to my place, mostly down Duckmoor Road, which I found a little dull—probably because it reminded me a little of the suburbs I grew up in on the outskirts of London—then held up slightly by some filming on Ashton Avenue Bridge. They were trying not to let the crowds build up too much in between takes, it seems, so it wasn't a long delay.
A quick lunchtime jaunt to Dowry Square, which is very close to me but, being effectively a cul-de-sac as well as a square, I've probably only circumnavigated a couple of times in the last couple of decades.
A fruitless wander, as Spoke and Stringer (who I thought might do a decent flat white) were closed, and the only other harbourside inlet offering were a bit too busy to wait at, especially as I'd spent some time wandering some of the convolutions of Rownham Mead. This last congeries of dull alleyways and brown-painted garages was at least somewhere I've never been before, in parts.
I don't spend a lot of time in pubs, but if I had to choose a "local", this is the one I would choose. Welcoming, interesting, and often to be found with a nice fire burning in the winter. After the last time some fool drove their car through the front wall (this bend on the Hotwell Road appears to be a magnet for bad drivers), the boarding up was decorated with the bonnet badge of the offending vehicle, a Toyota, if I remember correctly.
I've walked along the Hotwell Road on the other side of this wall a thousand times—possibly ten thousand. Never seen this side of it before.
A lot of folks aren't fans of the architecture at Poole's Wharf, but I'd love to live in one of these houses.
I hope Romany and Chaz are doing okay. I had cakes here as part of my 40th birthday celebrations, followed by a cruise in the Bristol Packet boat Bagheera.
This year there's been a little contoversy about the bells at Holy Trinity. They used to ring on the hour, every hour. I think the general stress of lockdown led to people suffering greater levels of insomnia, though, and people complained and the church bells were silenced. The church consulted and just this week (I write this on 10 December 2020) the bells were reinstated with a timing mechanism that switched them off during the small hours. Hopefully this compromise will satisfy everyone, because personally I really missed the tolling of the bell over Hotwells. I sent a small donation to help with the cost of the timing mechanism and to generally say "thanks" for the bell over the years.
In which our intrepid hero levels up.
A sunny day, and though I should have probably headed for less well-travelled territory I just headed over to the Marina to grab a flat white from Imagine That's horsebox café.
What, should I keep clear from this side? I'm assuming that this doesn't actually affect anything on dry land...
Just a quick wander up the hill to get a flat white from Twelve. I really enjoyed the spooky mannequin (?) in the window.
A little retirement housing block sitting at the end of a private road at the end of the Fossway. I've never wandered up and seen it before, though I've walked past it a thousand times.
From what I can work out, this terrace that starts in the road called Richmond Terrace itself continues around the corners to Clifton Road and here, Queens Road, while still being called Richmond Terrace.
A rather more wide-ranging weekend wander with Sarah and Vik, taking in some mock Tudor bits of Bedmo (I should note that I've subsequently been corrected to "Bemmie", but I'm an outsider and have been calling it "Bedmo" for short for decades...), a chunk of Ashton, a path up Rownham Hill called Dead Badger's Bottom(!), The Ashton Court estate, a bit of the UWE campus at Bower Ashton, and some of the Festival Way path.
I often walk through Greville Smyth park, and there's many other things in Bristol bearing the Smyth name. John Henry Greville Smyth was...
...an English naturalist and collector of natural history specimens. He is best known for his large private collection of mammals, birds, and insects kept at his stately home of Ashton Court in Bristol. On his death his wife, Lady Emily Greville Smyth, donated the bulk of the collection to the Bristol Natural History Museum, now known as Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
But the Smyth name in general is all over this bit of Bristol, from Greviille Smyth Park outwards, which is hardly surprising given that the Smyth family home was Ashton Court, where four hundred years' worth of Smyths resided after Sir Thomas Arundel sold the place to a John Smyth in 1545, a few years after being gifted it by Henry VIII.
A quick lunchtime jaunt for coffee. I've often wondered about the dots on the wall of the underpass. Apparently they're not intelligible Braille. Maybe it's Marain :D
Must be going through some hard times at the moment. I've been in a few times since I used to live at Baltic Wharf in the mid-nineties, and it's always been a slightly edgy-but-nice local pub that's reasonably welcoming of strangers, too. Plus it's a well-worn stop off for people on the way home from the footy.