Tagged: sky
Coffee, Pirates and a Spitfire
15 Apr 2021
Just a quick trip to Imagine That for a flat white and a date ball (they're really nice), snapping the general sights along the way. No new roads, as has rapidly become the default on my lunchtime wanders, but as I'm in the routine of this project it almost seems strange not to pop my wanders up on the site.
Very Brief Hotwells Wander
18 Feb 2021
Really just a quick loop of the Cumberland Basin. I was going to go further, and it was a nice early spring day, but I hadn't slept that well and I wasn't really in the mood. Ah well. Not every walk is great. At least I got out of the house for a bit.
Clifton Village Lunchtime Coffee
07 Apr 2021
Unusually for my recent lunchtime coffee trips, I managed to find a new road to walk down: Caledonia Mews, which has a little entrance off Princess Victoria Street and runs between it and Caledonia Place. I've noticed it before a couple of times—if you look up from Princess Victoria Street you can see some of it, standing tall above the low buildings on the street itself—but until last night I'd not set foot in it, I think.
As well as focusing on this charming little mews, I looked in on the demolished site of the old WH Smith, and spotted what I think is part of the now-private-houses St Vincent Rocks Hotel that I'd not really noticed before, tucked away between Sion Lane and Sion Hill.
The entrance is on Princess Victoria Street, but I imagine based on the name that it was built as a mews for Caledonia Place, which lies on the other side, forming, with West Mall, the surrounding streets of the Mall garden.
For some reason I always think of Princess Victoria Street as running north-to-south, but that's because of my terrible sense of direction, I suppose, as it's really more east-north-east.
It's a lovely little mews, and looks very well-kept. I like the way that despite being fairly uniform in size and height that things are a bit more mismatched and higgledy-piggledy once you look a little closer.
I'm glad I added a search feature to the site recently, as it let me find this earlier photo when the name rang a vague bell. Morsa clearly gets about a bit.
I think the corridor you can see running from the back of the building on Sion Hill to the building on the right, on Sion Lane, is part of the old Saint Vincent Rocks Hotel. It was converted into houses, and the front bit, just the main building on Sion Hill, called Trafalgar House now, was on the market for £1,550,000 back in 2019.
The listing mentions:
To the rear a late C19 long brick extension raised on open arches
...anyway. I think it's likely the Sion Lane building was a hotel annex, though I think it's separate flats now. I wonder which of the two sides owns the corridor between them, assuming it really is a corridor? Or maybe even that's flats now...
Next time maybe I'll wander across the green bit and see what I can see over the wall. I think the area just used to be the hotel car park, but there might be more interesting things to see.
Alma Vale
06 Dec 2020
I wasn't really feeling it when I set out today, on my first car-assisted wander. By the time I'd parked on Alma Vale Road in Clifton it was just starting to rain and I picked my way about in quite a desultory way. It felt strange, as I was very familiar with the area because I'd walked through it hundreds of times when I worked at the top of Whiteladies Road, and used to walk up the hill from Hotwells and through Clifton to get there, and back again, every day.
Then a complete coincidence seemed to make the change I'd been hoping for. I was standing taking a photo of Christ in the front garden of All Saints church when a couple of people walked out of the front door. I got talking with a lady I took to be part of the ministerial team, who invited me to come in and look around—something I'd always wanted to do on the morning commute. (I think we connected a bit when I recognised the name John Piper, who did the amazing windows—I learned about him while I was at Warwick, through his connections to Coventry Cathedral.
I left with much more of a spring in my step, wandered around the area a bit more, finally working out that the tennis courts I used to pass every morning are those of Clifton Lawn Tennis Club, and finally grabbing an excellent Hungarian sausage hot dog from the Budapest Cafe. I feel a lot better now than I did before I went out.
Harbourside Milestone
17 Mar 2021
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.
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...
Spoke & Stringer were a long indoor cafe in the Beforetimes. Now there's three separate vending areas: fish & chips, brunch & tacos; coffee & shakes.
The idea here is that the development still leaves a clear line of sight from the harbour to the cathedral, along Cathedral Walk.
No, it's not a massively distorting wide-angle lens I'm using, that's just not ninety degrees!
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.
First it was a house, though a strange small one, from what I recall, then it was a ruin, then it was a gap, and now it's a structure and I imagine it will soon be a house again.
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
Unlike the other day, there at least wasn't water flooding out of the well house today.
Pastures New!
17 Jul 2021
Okay, not much in the way of actual pasture to be had in Bedminster these days, like most of Bristol, but I did take advantage of the current rather toasty weather in Bristol to go and sit under a tree in Greville Smyth Park to read a book for a while before firing up the GPS and taking a little detour around some back streets of Ashton and Bedminster rather than going straight to Coffee #1 for an espresso frappé. This is the first walk in a while where I've actually crossed off an entire new street (the frankly unexciting Carrington Road) as well as exploring a couple of back alleys, just because they were there, really. Along the way I spotted a few examples of graffiti of various qualities, including a live work-in-progress by SNUB23 on Ashton Road and the finished Six Sisters project on North Street.
It was actually the sound of Six Underground, the astoundingly good Sneaker Pimps number, coming from this direction that caught my ear before the in-progress mural caught my eye, but they both had the same source, as it turned out...
I think I'm right in saying that that's snub_23 popping up a new piece, but I'm only really basing that off some quick Instagram research and some assumptions; I'm not exactly plugged into the Bristol graff scene and I didn't want to interrupt the conversation.
I'd noticed I'd missed this end bit of Durnford Street in previous wanders, so on my way to knocking off some full-length roads (and alleyways, as it turned out) I took a snap. It's not very prepossessing.
In my defence, this little alleyway/service road looked more like a road on the map. Still, seeing as I'm here...
Not much to say, really. The strange mock-Tudor upper halves of the right-hand-side of the street were about the only distinguising feature, and personally I'm not sure that's distinguishing in a good way.
I've clearly sniped this one from the end of the road on a previous pass, but this is definitely the first time I've actually walked the length of it.
According to Google Street View, a few years ago this was just a modest corner house. I imagine someone's made a tidy profit.
This was a work in progress last time I passed. Now all Six Sisters of this female-led graffiti project are finished and fair glowing in the sunshine.
Lunchtime Zig Zag Climb
13 Jul 2021
A snappy little trip up the Zig Zag to the shops. It's a steep old route, the Zig Zag, going from just over river level to about the height of the suspension bridge (101 metres) in a compact switchback of a footpath.
I was too busy struggling to breathe to take many snaps of the actual Zig Zag (I've been trying to make it up all the way without stopping the last few times, but I've not quite managed it yet). I did at least take a few snaps either side on this quick lunchtime jaunt to fetch coffee (Coffee #1) and a sarnie (Parsons) from Clifton Village...
But I don't think it's the original end -- if you check this picture from a history pamphlet I posted on Twitter you'll see that it looks like the Colonnade used to curve around rather more, and there's an even better view on this drawing from the British Library collection of Hotwell Parade. Looking at the historic basemap layers there on KYP it certainly seems like sometime between 1855 and 1874 (both Ashmead maps) the first couple of houses in the terrace were lopped off, leaving only numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6. I imagine they were shaved off at the same time as the second Hot Well House was demolished, which was in 1867. It used to stand on Hotwell Point, sticking out into the river, and the whole lot was removed to ease navigation.
I've never actually looked at the Colonnade door numbers to see if they're still like that—I'll try to remember the next time I pass.
One of many fine old lamp posts in Clifton Village. The late, great Maggie Shapland apparently used to keep an eagle eye on them and make sure they were returned if they were ever carted off for repair. The Clifton Club lurks grandly in the background.
Although you may immediately think "gas lamp", here's an extract from Electric Arc Lamps in Bristol by Peter Lamb, published as a supplement to the Histelec News, newsletter of the Western Power Electricity Historical Society:
In looking at old photographs of late Victorian or early Edwardian scenes, many of you may have noticed very decorative street lights gracing the foregrounds. These lamp standards had long cylindrical shapes above the lamp, which distinguished them as being electric arc lamps. You may have wondered, like me, what was inside these housings. These cylinders, known colloquially at the turn of the century as “chimneys” were not chimneys at all, but housed the complex mechanisms regulating the carbon electrodes. Only two lamp standards of this distinctive design remain as street furniture on the Bristol streets and these are situated at The Mall, Clifton Village.
Apparently one of the reasons that collections are being missed (this lot's been on Albermarle Row for nearly a fortnight) is a shortage of drivers. There's a general HGV driver shortage at the moment, as well as a backlog of testing for new drivers.
Autonomous Vehicle
14 Jul 2021
As it turned out, I didn't manage to get a coffee on my lunchtime coffee trip, as Imagine That were briefly shut down by a Covid-19 exposure notification (false alarm, it seems.) On the plus side, my trip was made worthwhile by spotting a couple of people from the University of Bath Mechanical Engineering Department testing an autonomous body-finding catamaran, which isn't a phrase I was ever expecting to write...
A Cliftonwood Revisit with Lisa
10 Jul 2021
Lisa had a couple of hours to spare before going up in a hot air balloon (exciting!) so we went for a quick local walk, revisiting a bit of Cliftonwood we've seen before, exploring the secret garden I'd visited before that I thought she'd enjoy (I didn't take any new photos there) and then pushing on to another garden, Cherry Garden. Last time we passed this way, I'd noticed the gate, but we hadn't gone in as I'd assumed it was private. I'd since found it on CHIS's list of communal gardens in Clifton, so I wanted to have a look inside this time, and try to figure out whether it was private-communal or public, and possibly Council-owned, like several of the other gardens in Clifton.
...with the end of "Jacobethan" Transit Shed "E". The end facing and baroque tower were apparently created to make looking this way from the centre a bit more pleasant; it's fairly plain further down. This is a smidge outside my one mile, but I was interested in the gates, having spotted them in a historic photo in one of my research books—see next pic.
There are some other pics from earlier times on the Watershed's web site, including one from 1981, not long before the E and W sheds were transformed into the complex that houses the excellent Watershed Cinema, their Cafe Bar, the Pervasive Media Studio and other modern features.
The boatyard seems quite quiet at the moment, but there's definitely work still going on—as you'll see from Mike Taylor's little Instagram video here, where you can see them lifting his boat out with the 50-ton capacity travel lift, ready for a lot of work to be done, just a few weeks ago.
Okay, I don't think there have actually been any changes to this plot. I just figured I'd snap a different angle on it before it gets turned into a house.