Tagged: room
A Long Wander Of Miscellany and Magick
08 Aug 2021
This was a wide-ranging wander. I started off crossing the river to Bedminster, to walk a single little cul-de-sac, Hardy Avenue, that I'd managed to miss on at least one previous walk. Then, pausing only to explore a few back alleyways, I headed for a few destinations related mostly by the Hughes family, who I've been researching a little as part of background for a possible novel, as several of them were involved in the Stella Matutina.
However, mostly it's the artistic side of the family I wanted to explore today, as that's where most of their public history lies (as you might expect, there's often not much in the public record about the workings of an occult organisation.) First I visited College Green, where the façade of the Catch 22 Fish & Chip shop still bears the work of Catherine Edith Hughes. Then I wandered up to the top of Park Street to pop into the Clifton Arts Club's annual exhibition, as Catherine, her half-brother Donald, his wife Hope and at least two other Hugheses were members. Donald was chairman for 40 solid years; Hope was Secretary for eight, and Ellard and Margaret Hughes, two more Hughes siblings, were members along with Catherine.
Finally I walked home with a small diversion to Berkeley Square, to confirm the location of Donald Hughes's house by checking for a particular plaque by the front door.
I must admit I'm not entirely sure where all this research is really leading me, but I'm finding it quite interesting to bump across the faint lines of history that link the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, to modern, quotidian Bristol.
Museum of the Moon, and a Bit of Redland
21 Aug 2021
Lisa and I mostly went out to have a look at Luke Jerram's Museum of the Moon as its tour hit Bristol Cathedral—I missed it when it was previously in town, at Wills Hall, I think—but we also took a trek up to Redland. Lisa's kind enough to indulge my strange current fascination with the Edwardian eccentrics that made up the Stella Matutina, so we swung by a couple of places with a vague connection to the Bristol branch of the organisation. Well, it was good walking, anyway...
As a stunning bonus, one of the picture's descriptions has more information than you'd probably want on the Bristol Port Railway and Pier's Clifton Extension Railway line, but I did happen to coincidentally write up this wander after reading about the extension line during my lunch hour at work today. It's a thrilling life, I tell you...
Docks Heritage Weekend Day One
09 Oct 2021
I could spend a lot of time at the Docks Heritage Weekend, poking my nose into industrial places along the harbourside that are usually closed off, but throw open their doors once a year to show off a bit of the backstage area of Bristol's floating harbour. In fact, I warn you: the next wander is a long one, and will have quite a few photos.
However, for today's wander, on the Saturday, my friend Lisa needed a shorter walk than our usual long rambles, as she's recovering from an operation and still a little under the weather, so we just wandered into town for some food and back, with me making mental notes of the places I wanted to come back to on the Sunday... We walked through Underfall Yard, along to the L Shed (this is the warehouse next to the M Shed museum, where they still have the kind of fun old industrial stuff that used to be crammed into the M Shed's predecessor, the old Industrial Museum), through the street food market in town to Ahh Toots for cake and then back home. So, still quite a walk, but no hills and not so much of Lisa having to hang around waiting for me to fool around taking photos as usual, at least...
I thought it was a real Concorde nose at first, because I'm sure they used to have one in the Industrial Museum that was replaced by the M Shed. Lisa quickly pointed out the plywood shell. Apparently it was used for prototyping cockpit layouts. One day I may pop along to Aerospace Bristol to have a (big, white, pointy) nose around the real thing.
I'm afraid that this is a bit of a badly-curated wander, where I mostly just popped out to find out a little of the history of Underfall Yard and poke around the various open workshops, and, in hindsight, really didn't take pictures in any kind of coherent order. So there's a lot of pictures, but they don't really tell the story that, in hindsight, I seem to have been trying to tell, of the unusual electrical substation in Avon Crescent, the Bristol Electricity that predates the National Grid but is still in use, the history of the hydraulic power house... It's a bit of a mess.
But I suppose sometimes these wanders—always chronologically presented in the order I walked and took photos—simply will sometimes be a bit of a mess. Let's hope you still get something out of it, anyway...
You can't see much. If you want some photos of the current sorry state of the interior, have a look at this Tweet from Pete Insole,
Historic Environment Officer at Bristol City Council, and founder of Know Your Place.
It must take quite some engineering skill to keep that going. I didn't think any of them had survived the 1980s. By the looks of things it's correctly tuned to Heart FM, which is compulsory for all workshops in Bristol.
I have now moved buildings, to the Power House. This was the hydraulic cornerstone of the power for many of the key docks systems in Bristol. The hydraulic system powered from these electric (formerly steam) pumps was responsible for opening lock gates, moving sluices, operating cranes, and turning or raising some of the heftiest swing bridges in Bristol.
Here I've finally found my target, according to the nice man giving the demonstrations. The electrical control system used to control the hydraulic system's pumps, along with the pumps themselves, would have been too complicated and time-consuming to re-engineer to modern electrical standards when the National Grid came along, to say nothing of having to close down this cornerstone of many of the important mechanisms of a busy working dock while it was done, so some arrangement was come to with the electricity company to simply keep supplying the old, non-standard 360V electricity, which is why it still comes that way from the Avon Crescent substation.
There are a couple of tanks used to feed the water that gets pumped by the power house. One of them, the "settling tank", apparenlty isn't really needed these days, but served a certain rather crucial purpose when the harbour was more like an open sewer. I'm sure you can figure it out. The other, the header tank, is above the visititor centre in the room behind the wall there.
The powerful electric pumps in this room then use the water to raise the weight of a hydraulic accumulator (I don't know if the one inside the tower in this building is still used, but there's one outside that you can see being raised by the pumping—we'll see it in a bit.)
A Door, a Square, a Few Night Shots
04 Dec 2021
I didn't take many pictures on this quite long wander, partly because Lisa and I wandered across to Bedminster via Bower Ashton, which I've snapped quite a lot of on the last couple of walks, and also because we lost the light fairly quickly, though spending a half-hour drinking mulled wine in the Ashton might have had a little to do with that...
Before we left Hotwells I wanted to visit a door I'd heard about on Cornwallis Crescent and also take a little look at a couple of houses in Dowry Square to consider the 1960s regeneration of Hotwells.
It's possible I had a bit too much alcohol—Lisa and I stopped off for another mulled wine at Corks on Wapping Wharf (best mulled wine in Bristol; they use ruby port), then had one in the Rose of Denmark and one for the road (in Lisa's case, the bus down the Portway back to Shirehampton) in the Merchant's Arms, which I must visit more often. They had the fire going and were as welcoming as ever.
Anyway. After waving Lisa off I tried to buy fish & chips but was stymied by the Hotwells Fish Bar not being open, so ended up in RED, which certainly has some of the strongest branding on the Hotwell Road.
I seem to remember something about rats being driven mad by an experiment that saw them locked in a bright red room, but the staff here seemed calm enough. A quotidian shot to end on, but a genuine slice of everyday life, I suppose.
A Water-Based Wander
11 Dec 2021
I woke up on this Saturday with a headache, feeling like I'd not slept at all. As well as that, I'm still in some pain from the wisdom tooth extraction I had a few weeks ago. I moped about the flat for a while and then decided that the best thing to do was to force myself out on at least a small walk to get some fresh air and coffee.
Was there anywhere I could walk locally that I'd never been? Actually, yes! Although it's not a road, and I didn't walk it, there is actually one route that I've not travelled so far in my wanders. And it even had coffee near its far end...
I was just about starting to feel better—the antibiotics seemed to have kicked in for my dental issues, and it had been some days since I'd left the house, and I was at last starting to get itchy feet. So, a wander. But where? Well, there were a few industrial bits near Winterstoke Road in the Ashton/Ashton Vale areas of Bristol that needed walking. I knew they were likely to be quite, well, unattractive, frankly. So why not do them while I wasn't feeling exactly 100% myself? Maybe it would fit my mood. Hopefully you're also in the mood for a bit of post-industrial wasteland, for that's what some of this feels like...
Then, at the last minute, I thought again about the Bristol International Exhibition—I've got a book about it on the way now—and that gave me another goal, which could just about be said to be in the same direction, and I decided to walk significantly further than my normal 1-mile limit and try recreating another historical photo...
Sadly I don't know much about the Ashton area; it's just on the edges of my mile and I rarely have cause to go there. It's brimming with history, I'm sure: the whole South Bristol area rapidly developed from farmland to coal mines to factories to its current interesting mixture of suburbs and industrial work over the last few hundred years. As a more working class area less attention was paid to it by historians, at least historically-speaking, than the Georgian heights of Clifton, and much of it has been knocked down and reinvented rather than listed and preserved. I see here and there some of this lack is being addressed, but I'm afraid I'll be very light on the history myself on this wander, as most of my usual sources aren't throwing up their normal reams of information as when I point them at Clifton, Hotwells or the old city.
A Random New Year's Day Wander
01 Jan 2022
I picked a fairly arbitrary reason for a wander today. Really, I just wanted to do a New Year's Day wander just to get out of the house and to set a precedent for the year to come.
My ostensible reason was to investigate what looked like a road on my map that quartered the lawn in front of the Ashton Court mansion. As it turned out, this is just a muddy footpath/desire line similar to a half-dozen other tracks nearby, and must be some kind of bug or misclassification with the mapping system I'm using, but that's not important. What's important is that I went for a little walk on the first day of the year. As a bonus, I did happen to wander down a couple of sections of new footpath, so technically I broke some new ground too, which is nice.
It didn't take long for someone to scrawl the sentiments of the season on a bus shelter.
Bedminster Trip for New Walking Shoes
26 Feb 2022
I needed to buy new walking shoes—my old ones were squeaking and it was driving me up the wall—so I ordered some for collection from Taunton Leisure on East Street in Bedminster, and decided to make picking them up an official wander.
I didn't cover any new ground within my mile, but I did take advantage of the trip to take in a few interesting things just outside my normal radius, mostly New Gaol-related. Along the way there are a couple of sanitation-related diversions, including a visit to a rare manhole cover. You can hardly wait, I can tell!
Easter Monday Gardens and Flowers
18 Apr 2022
I didn't really set out with a theme of flowers and gardens in mind for this walk. I just fancied heading up to Clifton Village to get lunch. As it turned out, though, Spring was springing, so a minor theme emerged as I started off with the graveyard flowers of Hope Chapel and wandered up to see the beginnings of the new wildflower garden at Clifton Hill Meadow.
I first heard of Clerihews in the Times crossword: The Clerihew is:
a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
The reason it's relevant to this plaque on a house just around the corner from mine is that the very first Clerihew was written about Sir Humphry Davy:
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
(Sir Humphry is indeed credited with having been the first to isolate sodium, six years after moving out of this house...)