Tagged: road-surface
I headed to Bedminster to do a crossword with my support bubble today. On the way I delved into a couple of bits of Hotwells history, first of all snapping a "now" shot to go with a historical photo of Holy Trinity I happened across recently, and second of all to snap the Britannia Buildings.
The Britannia Buildings are a little strip of offices on a corner of the Hotwell Road. They've mostly been the headquarters of a cleaning company for years, but I've often wondered what this distinctive curve of offices, its ground floor standing proudly out from the upper floors, used to be. Well, after my last wander, where I poked about the landing stage just down the road, I found out! Researching the paddleboat company P&A Campbell I came across this nugget in The A-Z of Curious Bristol, by Maurice Fells (£):
The firm of P & A Campbell was the main steamer operator in the Bristol Channel, with its local headquarters in offices close to the Hotwells pier and overlooking the harbour at the Cumberland Basin. Campbell's named their offices Britannia Buildings, after one of the ships in their White Funnel Fleet.
So! Turns out the Britannia Buildings were named after a paddle steamer—you can see some pictures of Britannia here.
In related news, I've now bought three of Maurice Fells' local history books, and they were hand-delivered by the author on Sunday, a half-hour after I ordered them online (through a message exchange on Nextdoor!) Not even Amazon Prime has managed to deliver me anything that quickly...
The Britannia Buildings were named for a paddle steamer in the P&A Campbell fleet, who used to have thier headquarters here.
There's some pictures of the Britannia, built in 1896, on the paddlesteamers.org site
Once the Imperial Tobacco building, now a part of Ashton Gate Primary School. A change for the better, I think.
Stewy's stencil of Robert Wyatt. Robert Wyatt is a prolific musician who seems to have passed me by completely. I'm currently listening to Shipbuilding to try to catch up a bit.
Hard to get a handle on this terrace; it's not easy for any mount to look pleasant when it's covered with scaffolding, skips and portaloos.
Since setting up a search for Hotwells on eBay I've mostly managed to restrain myself from buying much (or in one case, was outbid, luckily for my finances.) However, I couldn't resist a 1902 flyer for a singalong at the Terrett Memorial Hall, which would have stood five minutes' walk from my flat, overlooking Howard's Lock.
I've found out a fair bit about this non-denominational seaman's mission, including tracking down both a Loxton drawing and an aerial photo of it. The main thing that's eluded me, ironically enough, is finding out who Terrett was, so as a Memorial Hall it didn't do a very good job 😀.
EDIT: Ah! Did a little more digging and found that the Bristol Archives has a Bristol Dock Company document on file called "William Terrett, Esq.; corresp. etc. re proposed erection of a Mission Hall at Cumberland Basin, 1892", so that might be worth a look once the Archives are properly open again. Given that:
Sarah Terrett died suddenly on 25 November 1889, aged 53, after speaking at a meeting of the White Ribbon Army, the temperance organization she had founded in 1878. Following her death many people sent letters of sympathy to her bereaved husband, William. One of these, from the Rev. W. F. James, a minister of the Bible Christians, makes for especially interesting reading. The Bible Christian denomination, to which Sarah and William belonged, was one of the smaller Methodist connexions, and had its heartland in rural Devon, the area where she had grown up. James recalled the hospitality he enjoyed when visiting the Terretts’ home, Church House, in Bedminster, south Bristol...
...I wonder if William Terrett built the hall in memory of his late wife. They were clearly just the kind of temperance movement people who would've founded a seaman's mission to get people together to have a nice non-alcoholic singsong rather than a night out on the tiles.
Anyway. This walk to grab a coffee from Hopper Coffee in Greville Smyth Park was mostly an excuse to post the leaflet, a few other things I found related to it, and some pictures of how the site looks now. I would suggest that the present day is not an improvement.
If the Terrett Memorial Hall were still there, its frontage would be roughly where those boulders are between the curve of railing in the middle of the picture and the flyover up to the Plimsoll Bridge a little further back, facing towards the lock gate you can just see on the other side of the road.
Here we'd be facing Terrett Hall square on. Crouching at work in the middle of the picture is one of the tireless people who are constantly found sprucing up Cumberland Piazza (or at least trying their best to make it look a little less awful.)
Given the coned-off line of civil engineering vehicles on the bridge, I think it's likely that the inspection I saw the other day has identified something that needs fixing...
Which sounds imposing, but apparently it wasn't that secure, at least as far as a place to store the golden regalia of Bristol's mayor and mayoress goes, anyway. Oops.
I was browsing some historical photos the other day, and came across "Rear of Unspecified House" in the Bristol Archives' John Trelawny Ross collection, and immediately recognised it as being the back of 1 Albermarle Row, just around the corner from me. I've not had much time to research the history of this odd little addition to Albermarle Row, or what happened to 1-4 Cumberland Place, number 4 of which used to be attached to the side of 1 Albermarle Row, but it was interesting to look at old maps for a few minutes and work out what used to be where.
That all connects with the little local bit of land at Granby Green, too, as it used to be numbers 1-3 Cumberland Place. There was something of a planning battle over Granby Green, and I've included an old edition of Hotwells & Cliftonwood News that I found online, a copy of which would have been popped through my letterbox at the time.
I was also inspired by some old pictures of Hotwell Road to try to put a few more people in my pictures, though I set my pre-focus a couple of extra metres out from normal to make sure I didn't get too close to anyone!
There was a suggestion that the new green space below Wallace Place be called "Gromit Green" :D
This was a hard-won green by all accounts. I remember the brilliantly-acronymed Friends of Granby Green popping leaflets through our doors to drum up local support for having it declared a Town Green to stop more development. See the next picture from some background, and a tiny picture of what it looked like before it was turned into this little green space.
It's the school in the back of the council photo that relly confirms that the picture is of Albermarle Row.
I wanted a nice simple lunch-hour walk that took me past a cafe today, and I managed to find the perfect road to knock off my list of targets to do it. Situated just off Jacobs Wells Road, right next to Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, John Carr's Terrace, and Rosebery terrace above it, which I'd completely forgotten existed, are a little cul-de-sac that many Bristolians will have wandered past a thousand times without ever seeing.
There's a reason it's next to QEH:
Known traditionally as "The City School", Queen Elizabeth's Hospital was founded by the will of affluent merchant John Carr in 1586, gaining its first royal charter in 1590.
John Carr's terrace itself isn't much to write home about, architecturally, but I like the secluded feel of it, and I really liked Rosebery Terrace with its little houses, commanding position and friendly, slightly tumbledown feel.
On the way home I popped into Foliage Cafe for a coffee and a very pleasant nutella and banana pastry, then walked home past the refurbishment of the old Thali Cafe into a new and interesting clinic...
Just adjacent to QEH, John Carr's terrace is named for the 16th-century English merchant and founder of the school next door.
At the end of John Carr's Terrace. Apparently it's a 5 bedroom semi and is ranked as the most expensive property in BS8 1DW, with a valuation of nearly two million quid. I couldn't see much of it. I wonder if it's owned by QEH's headmaster, or something...
The other day I realised (hello, Maggie!) that my next walk would be my hundredth, and that I'd done 393.4km so far. I figured it would be nice to get to 100 walks and 400km on the same walk, so I went for a nice long harbourside wander after work, rather than dashing out at lunchtime. As it turned out, we're just coming up to the time of year where I can leave the house at 5:30 in the evening and there's still just enough light to take photos by the time I've made it around the harbourside. Though only just, and mostly because I've got a full-frame camera that's not bad in low light...
Still, the evening light made a lovely change, and some of the photos turned out to be pretty good photos per se, rather than just record shots of my walk. I'm looking forward to more evening walks like this as summer approaches.
On the way around this evening I wandered through one of the oldest bits of the city to extend my walk and snapped some interesting bits of architecture, including an NCP car park(!) and a nighttime shot of one of my favourite subjects, the clock tower at the Albion dockyard.
The idea here is that the development still leaves a clear line of sight from the harbour to the cathedral, along Cathedral Walk.
Cheeky. I also run a Cafe Signs Tumblr so I'm always on the lookout for good signage.
This is actually a Banksy work, not as well-known as many. Oddly, it seems like this loading bay may have been added after the graffiti was put there, and the graffit carefully transferred. I'll have to find out whether that's what actually happened...
The Cathedral of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, in fact. An Augustinian abbey, given cathedral rank by Henry VIII in 1542. And also explaining why the row of shops on the Centre nearby is St Augustine's Parade, I imagine.
Augustinians follow the Rule of St Augustine:
The Rule of Saint Augustine, written about the year 400, is a brief document divided into eight chapters and serves as an outline for religious life lived in community.[1] It is the oldest monastic rule in the Western Church.[2]
The Rule, developed by Augustine of Hippo (354-430), governs chastity, poverty, obedience, detachment from the world, the apportionment of labour, the inferiors, fraternal charity, prayer in common, fasting and abstinence proportionate to the strength of the individual, care of the sick, silence and reading during meals. It came into use on a wide scale from the twelfth century onwards and continues to be employed today by many orders, including the Dominicans, Servites, Mercederians, Norbertines, and Augustinians.
My friend Lisa was meeting another friend for a walk near the suspension bridge, so we fitted in a quick harbourside loop from my place first. We discussed gardening (we're both envious of the gardening skills of the Pooles Wharf residents; we can just about keep herbs alive, whereas they're growing heartily-fruiting lemon trees outdoors in England along with everything from bonsai to magnolias), cafes, work and architecture, among other things.
Something smelled very nice when we wandered past here. Maybe I'll have to give them a try for lunch one day this week.
I wasn't going to take a very long walk on this nice spring evening; it just happened. I was going to knock off a path or two on Brandon Hill, home over centuries to hermits and windmills, cannons and Chartists, and then just wander home, stopping only to fill up my milk bottle at the vending machine in the Pump House car park.
However, when I heard a distant gas burner I stayed on the hill long enough to see if I could get a decent photo of both the hot air balloon drifting over with Cabot Tower in the same frame (spoiler: I couldn't. And only having the fixed-focal-length Fuji with me didn't help) and then, on the way home, bumped into my "support bubble", Sarah and Vik, and extended my walk even further do creep carefully down the slipway next to the old paddle steamer landing stage and get some photos from its furthest extreme during a very low tide...
I've bought many things from Marcuss over the years. A pair of secondhand German para boots got me started, I think, and I've bought snowboarding gear, camping gear, winter coats and sundry other things like the Opinel No. 06 knife I use for hunting and skinning the geek's natural prey: Amazon parcels.
I got interested in Bristol's medieval water supplies after poking around near Jacobs Wells Road and Brandon Hill. It was during that research I found out about a pipe that's still there today, and, as far as I know, still actually functioning, that was originally commissioned by Carmelite monks in the 13th century. They wanted a supply of spring water from Brandon Hill to their priory on the site of what's now the Bristol Beacon—Colston Hall, as-was. It was created around 1267, and later, in 1376, extended generously with an extra "feather" pipe to St John's On The Wall, giving the pipework its modern name of "St John's Conduit".
St John's on the Wall is still there, guarding the remaining city gate at the end of Broad Street, and the outlet tap area was recently refurbished. It doesn't run continuously now, like it did when I first moved to Bristol and worked at the end of Broad Street, in the Everard Building, but I believe the pipe still functions. One day I'd like to see that tap running...
There are a few links on the web about the pipe, but by far the best thing to do is to watch this short and fascinating 1970s TV documentary called The Hidden Source, which has some footage of the actual pipe and also lots of fantastic general footage of Bristol in the seventies.
On my walk today I was actually just going to the building society in town, but I decided to trace some of the route of the Carmelite pipe, including visiting streets it runs under, like Park Street, Christmas Street, and, of course, Pipe Lane. I also went a bit out of my way to check out St James' Priory, the oldest building in Bristol, seeing as it was just around the corner from the building society.
There are far too many pictures from this walk, and my feet are now quite sore, because it was a long one. But I enjoyed it.
Looks like something's getting spruced up ready for opening. Good. This bit of the Hotwell Road needs some nice new shops, of any and all varieties.
This place was joined up with the shop to the left as a hot tub sales showroom, and before that it was the View art gallery. Before that it was a brothel for a while, oddly, but I think the general community reaction was a bit too hostile for it to survive. Looks like it's now been separated from the next door shop.
I didn't know it at the time I took this photo, but this is the former site of the Bethesda Chapel, destroyed during World War II. There's a picture of it on the Community Layer of the Know Your Place site.
I found out when I was doing some research on this later photo—Alma Church in Clifton was originally a daughter church of Bethesda Chapel, and has "Clifton Bethesda" engraved in the pediment.
Bethesda Chapel was founded by George Müller, one of the founders of the Plymouth Brethren, and director of Ashley Down orphanage, looking after more than ten thousand orphans in his lifetime.
It's a museum in the form of a well-preseved Georgian house with appropriate fixtures and fittings. Well worth a visit, and when we can go back, I plan to. The thing I remember most is the grandfather clock, and the rest of my memory of the place is fairly scant, because it's been a long time.
In the background, two tower blocks, Irving House and Terry House, that hardly anyone notices, as they're mostly hidden when you're on the busiest streets that surround them, Park Street and Park Row. The entrance to their little estate is next to the Esso station on Park Row.
I'm planning on going and having a closer look at them tomorrow.
As I was reminded on my travels today, virtually any street in Bristol could wear the tag "hill street", but this one really is just called Hill Street.
I bumped into my friend Lisa in town during yesterday's wander, and we decided to have a wander today, too. We managed quite a long ramble, starting up through Clifton and nipping down Park Row to investigate the two tower blocks I'd noticed popping up behind Park Street yesterday, then took in a few roads I'd not managed to get to before, including cutting through the grounds of Bristol Grammar School.
I've mentioned before how this apparently continuous road contains York Place, Tottenham Place, Dover Place, Meridian Place, Bruton Place and Park Place—unsurprisingly it's confusing the delivery drivers. Some of the terraces re-start the numbering, so it can't be easy to figure out where you're meant to drop the pizzas off.
One of the world's largest archives of British Theatre History. I had no idea it was there.
Apparently you pay somewhere around a thousand pounds a month for a place here. Given that each flat has two double-bedrooms and that there's off-street car parking, that seems about right for the location.
A lot going on here. The little orange thing that looks like a cross between a litter bin and a buoy is the heat vent for the electrical substation that's below the double metal doors in the pavement to its left. Then in the middle is an Edwardian toilet converted to a cafe, though the last time I was in there it was hosting an art exhibition. Finally on the right is a mural that I completely missed when taking this photo because I was concentrating so much on the old lavvy!
It's the little details that stand out for me on Woodland Road. I imagine it's prettier when it's not bin day, mind.
Just a little potter around Hotwells with Sarah and Vik. I didn't visit any new streets, but I liked a couple of the photos a lot.
