Tagged: road
The Gridiron and Bower Ashton Part Two
03 Dec 2021
On my last wander, to Bower Ashton, I was intending to knock Blackmoors Lane off my list "to-do" list, but got a bit diverted. I also took a little look into the history of the Gridiron, once a cheaper alternative to dry dock that was nestled just south of North Entrance Lock.
Today I had to go to send a parcel off somewhere, so I decided on going to the North Street Post Office via Blackmoors Lane. I didn't have much intention of anything else, but as luck would have it I walked out both at low tide and also as some lockkeepers seemed to be having a bit of a training session, and one of the more senior people was (a) happy to answer a few random questions on the Gridiron and (b) actually knew a lot about it, as Gridiron maintenance had been one of his jobs, more than twenty years ago...
If you look at the lock wall, about halfway between the lock gates and the inset ladder, you'll see a little square hole. I had no idea what it was for until today, and I had no idea I was going to find out...
There were various people on the other side, I got the impression it was some kind of training session, perhaps. Later I'll have a quick chat with the man in the high-vis jacket over there.
In the meantime, I do always enjoy seeing the giant gridded lock gates uncovered by a low tide.
This used to be a view of the Gridiron, the structure I mentioned on yesterday's wander.
I got curious and went back to ask one of the lockkeepers about it. As it turned out, he knew lots about it as he'd previously been responsible for cleaning it! More about that when I come back (including a historical photo of a boat on the Gridiron for some context) as some of the things he told me needed me to retrace my steps for some more photos.
First, though, we'll nip over to Bower Ashton and North Streeet for a quick bit of shopping and to knock Blackmoors Lane of my "to do" list.
As usual around here, I want to go that way but there's no crossing and no pavement, so we'll head back through this little green and head for that bridge you can see that spans the left-hand lane here.
I am actually getting better at finding my way around this concrete tangle of roads and underpasses. This way avoids having to dash across Winterstoke Road or walk quite a long way down to the first pedestrian crossing.
The road up above is the A3029, also known at this point as Brunel Way. It replaced the earlier Ashton Avenue, which as you'd expect headed from here and crossed Ashton Avenue Bridge. This parevenu diverts from the original route at about this point and has its own bridge a little further downstream.
My friend Lisa texted me to see if I wanted to pop down and take a photo or two of the event she was taking part in: Santa SUP. SUP Bristol organise stand-up paddleboarding on the floating harbour, and their annual Santas-on-paddlboards event is quite the sight.
On the way there, I grabbed a historical photo I'd been wanting to recreate for a while of the shiny and new Cumberland Basin flyovers back in 1965, because I reckoned I could fit finding the same viewpoint into my outbound journey. Also, after having only used it on a wander for the very first time yesterday, I managed two crossings in the cross-harbour ferry today to get to the best locations for snapping the paddleboarders...
So, then, this wander is mostly a bunch of photos of paddleboarding Santas. Tis the season... Enjoy!
So, mostly this wander will be a panoply of photos of my friend Lisa and her paddleboarding friends making their way around the harbour dressed in Christmas outfits. But, on the way, I figured I'd try to reproduce another historical photo.
This one's from the Bristol Archives' collection of council Public Relations photos. Its title is "The northern side of the Cumberland Basin Bridges Scheme: Completed and landscaped, 1965".
I find that this actually looks quite nice, all clean and shiny and new. It probably looks very similar to the architect's drawing and scale models and what-have-you that they produce for these sorts of things.
Via Bristol Archives/Know Your Place.
And here's the site today. The weathered concrete and tagging doesn't really improve things, but at least it looks like one of the original trees has thrived.
It's less so much the look of the road system, perhaps, and more that on a busy day it's just an urban hellscape of traffic and noise. On a Sunday like this you could actually believe that children could play here (there was originally a playground to go with the fountain and other features I'm mentioned in the past...)
However, most of the time, just like with the Portway, the sheer weight and (acoustic) volume of the traffic and its accompanying fumes and danger has clearly increased beyond anything the original planners ever envisaged.
I noticed I had a few things on my "potential wanders" list that could all be done relatively close to home, and in a fairly straight line, so I set off at lunchtime to recreate a photo of a now-defunct pub, wander behind a Spar (which turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, but I admit it's a low bar) and spend some time browsing in Dreadnought Books before coming home via a coffee from Spoke & Stringer, a little diversion up Gasworks Lane and a tiny bit of the Rownham Mead estate I'd somehow previously skipped.
Uncredited apart from "from our archives" and undated, this photo appeared in this article on Hotwells in the Evening Post and made me want to re-create the same view today.
The pub had a few changes of name over time—in the Bristol Then and Now Facebook group people recall this being the Spring Gardens in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Someone remembers it turning into Durty Nelly's in 1995, but I swear it was back to being the Spring Gardens again by the time I moved to the area in 1999. Then it spent some time as La Demi Lune, which you can see on Street View in 2008, and then by 2009 it's back to The Spring Garden (without the "s").
So, from what I can work out, this snap was probably taken in the 1990s, most likely between 1995 and 1999.
This pub—which did good food, and had an extensive garden at the back, from what I remember, when it was the Spring Gardens in the early 2000s—is rather more bland in looks today, as we'll see in the next picture.
Not much to be seen in this direction except the crane on the site where they're busily filling a gap with new flats. We'll see the front in a little while.
Here's the entrance to Pembroke Place on the Hotwell Road. Looking at old maps, before it was Pembroke Place it was Blackhorse Lane.
On St George's Road. This is where I ended up spending most of my stopping time on the walk. I managed to resist most temptations and came away having only spent £2 on a paperback of The Mill on the Floss. I read Silas Marner a while back and really liked it, so I've been wanting to try some more Eliot.
I shall add it to my tsundoku collection.
While we're on a theme of things to find down alleyways...
We've had a wander around the old gas works site before but I wanted briefly to focus on one tiny detail, which is to be found in this alleyway called Gasworks Lane.
And here's the detail of Gasworks Lane I find interesting.
Part of my preferred walk to work is over the cobbles below Redcliffe Parade. It's not one of my favourite bits, because the going is treacherous and you have to look down at your feet all the time to make sure you don't come a cropper on the old and very uneven cobbles.
Here in Gasworks Lane things are different. Apparently the council used an interesting new technique that, according to Bristol247, they've experimented with in a few places across town.
The idea is to keep the classic look of the cobblestones but smooth out the ride for pedestrians and cyclists by taking the existing stones, cutting them in half to give a nice flat edge, then re-laying them lumpy-side down.
I'd not noticed it until I read the article, but I appreciate this technique now, and it'll be interesting to see how much more it gets used around the city.
