Tagged: sky
Ticking Off a Few Streets in Bedminster
31 Oct 2021
There were only a few streets left to wander in the more residential bit of Bedminster, so I thought I should target those today. The streets themselves weren't that notable, though Balfour Road has a contrasting mix of old and new housing. I tried to snap a few more interesting things along the way there and back, snapping all three of the familiar bond warehouses, nipping onto North Street to find some new street art, and finding a few pumpkins for good measure. It is hallowe'en, after all...
You can see the disturbance in the water on the river side as the sluices drain water from the lock to equalise the levels.
One of the three roads I needed to knock off my list. Just a fairly average slice of suburbia, really.
There's still a few houses on Duckmoor Road (this is the corner of Duckmoor and Frobisher) that use their gardens for gardening rather than just to park cars on, and some of them even have quite big veg gardens growing.
Recreating a Loxton Drawing on a Lunchtime Jaunt
05 Nov 2021
I did do a much longer wander earlier in the week, but that'll take me some time to process (and cast a plethora of photos into the "out-takes" pile!) In the meantime, here's my lunchtime jaunt, taken to give myself a break from doing the company bookkeeping to send to my accountant so the taxman doesn't sling me in chokey.
I've recently bought a slightly creased secondhand copy of Redcliffe Press's 1992 collection of Samuel Loxton drawings, Loxton's Bristol: The city's Edwardian years in black and white. It's a nice selection of Bristol Library's collection of the drawings. I'd noticed a drawing of 25 Royal York Crescent, a house I pass quite often, so I thought I'd wander up the crescent on the way to pick up some lunch and try to reproduce it.
On the way back I took a few photos of Clifton Hill Bank as the crowdfunder to make quite a lot of it into a wildflower meadow has just hit its target, so I figured some "before" shots might be a good investment for the future...
Autumn's a busy season in Royal York Crescent Gardens.
(This is also the reason the photos of Royal York Crescent that come along in a minute look slightly hazy! It's not my lens, honest...)
There's a plan to cover this with wildflowers, and I just heard that it has achieved funding, so I figured I'd take a chance on taking a few "before" photos, even though I didn't know where the planting will take place!
As it turns out, having read the crowdfunder info, this is roughly the "westernmost third" where the wildflower meadow will be planted.
The crowdfunding effort has blown past its original £1400 target and stands at £1775 so far. The original target was to cover:
- £300 for wildflower seed to sow in the next few weeks
- £100 for non-plastic signage explaining what’s happening – crucial for public support
- £1,000 for plug plants to go in next spring
They also say that most of the existing popular daffodils will stay, which is nice, as that was my favourite spring feature of the bank.
I'm embarrassed to admit how many times I walked down Cornwallis Avenue wondering what the overgrown garden was along the top without ever bothering to work out that it's the back garden of Cornwallis Crescent (east).
I went out simply wanting to knock off the very last little unwalked section of Clanage Road, over by Bower Ashton, which has been annoying me for a while as it's quite close by and I've walked the other bits of it several times. So, my plan was to nip over to Greville Smyth Park via a slightly unusual route to wander Clanage Road and tick it off.
Along the way, though, I inevitably got a bit distracted. I took a few photos of Stork House, a grand Hotwell Road building that's recently been done up a bit (I imagine it's student lets, though I'm not sure) and which I found a reference to in a book about the Port Railway and Pier the other week, and also tried to match up a historical photo of Hotwells before the Cumberland Basin Flyover System laid it waste, which included some interesting markers I'll have to do a bit more digging into...
I've always loved the bow windows; if you look closely you'll see the window frames are slightly curved to match the curvature of the walls. Must be quite pricey to have repairs done, I'll wager.
Stork House was the Stork Hotel back when the Bristol Port Railway and Pier, which connected Hotwells with a deep-water pier at Avonmouth, was in its heyday.
The Stork Family Hotel at Hotwells sought custom by advertising to seamen on ships arriving at Avonmouth, a combined rail ticket to Bristol and meal in this hotel. The same concern also advertised bed, breakfast, hot evening meal and seven days’ ticket to Avonmouth by BPR for sixteen shillings a week.
— Colin Maggs, The Bristol Port Railway & Pier, Oakwood Press, 1975
I imagine this would have been quite an attractive deal to a sailor, who could stay in Hotwells with its vast plethora of pubs and other entertainments and pop back to his ship in the comparative wastelands of Avonmouth when necessary. (There would also have been plenty of sailors who were already quite used to hanging around in Hotwells while their ship was in town rather than waiting around at the new pier at Avonmouth, and familiar with the local facilities. Thinking about what other "facilities" there may have been for sailors makes me wonder again if the bit of the Hotwell Road that ended up being called "Love Street" might've been a bit of euphemism at some stage or other...)
I was trying to recreate the angle of the old, pre-Cumberland Road Flyover System photo that comes next. I couldn't get the angle, mostly because of the height, but this seems to be shot from about the right direction.
I found this image on Pinterest and as usual for that site it was annoyingly uncredited, but it seems to be from the book Hotwells, Spa to Pantomime, which I've just ordered direct from Bristol Books. Hopefully I'll be able to update the credit a bit when it arrives.
There's quite a lot in here that I didn't know about and will be researching a bit more, especially the Spa Assembly Rooms, which I think later turned into a school before being demolished for the flyover system, and also Anderson's workshop, a last vestige of the figurehead-carving industry.
That historical photo seems to have been taken from a higher vantage point. The most likely place seems to be the B Bond, perhaps from that fire escape, or maybe the roof? Something tells me it's unlikely they'd let me up there, but you never know, maybe one day I'll ask an archivist; I think that area's part of the Bristol Archives stores...
A milestone, perhaps? And there looks to be a benchmark on the bigger bit.
Aha! A quick look at the historic OS maps on Know Your Place finds a marker right on this spot marked "B.S.", which the National Library of Scotland's helpful abbreviations page translates as "Boundary Stone". With that in mind I then had a look on the wonderful geograph site and there it is:
The front stone appears to be an old boundary stone, delineating the Administrative County, Parliamentary County and Rural District boundaries that were part of the Bristol limits in the twentieth century, possibly dated 1897? Behind it is a larger block of stones that may have been part of the Smyth estate further up the hill. On the latter is a partly hidden benchmark.
So I spotted the partly hidden benchmark correctly, too :) There is, of course, a benchmarks directory with an entry for the benchmark itself. What did people do before the internet?
EDIT TO ADD Nearly a year later, I watching a DVD Bristol Railway Stations by Mike Oakley and found out what the larger bit behind the milestone actually is: it's the last remnant of the Clifton Bridge Station buildings, which once faced out onto the road here.
View into the car park of the former stables/kennels. I just poked my camera through a big hole in the gate.
The more I research it, the more I find that Hotwells had far better transport links back in Victorian and Edwardian times than it has today. Along with buses that went to more useful places than the City Centre, there were trams, the funicular up to Clifton, the landing stage for paddle steamer services and two railway stations all within easy walking distance of me.
Today I took a day off work as preparation for doing the bookkeeping for my tax return1, and took a wander along to the site of what would have been my nearest station, Hotwells (or Clifton, as it started out in life), nestled in the shadow of the suspension bridge, the Bristol terminus of the Bristol Port Railway and Pier.
From there I wandered down the Portway, following the original line, until I got to the area around Sneyd Park Junction, where the tunnel from the slightly later Clifton Extension Railway joined up with this originally-isolated BPR line. Then I headed up to Clifton through the "goat gully" at Walcombe Slade, seeing the few above-ground bits of evidence of the tunnel (which is still in regular use) along the way.
It was a lovely day, and a good walk, and it was interesting to daydream of the times when I could have walked a few minutes from my flat down to Dowry Parade, caught a short tram ride to Hotwells Stations, and then headed from there to Avonmouth, perhaps even to board a transatlantic passenger service. The completion of the Clifton Extension Railway that linked the Avonmouth station with Temple Meads made relatively direct transatlantic travel from London via Bristol possible, with passengers travelling up from Paddington to Temple Meads, on to Avonmouth on the Clifton Extension Railway and Port Railway and Pier line, then perhaps catching a Cambpell's paddle steamer—which sometimes acted as tenders for large steamers—to a larger ship that was headed out for Canada, say.
1 I've learned that the best approach is to take two days off and deliberately do something that's not my bookkeeping on the first day, as otherwise I just inevitably end up procrastinating and feeling guilty on the first day no matter what. I have an odd brain, but at least I'm learning strategies for dealing with its strange ways as I get older...
2 Information mostly gleaned from Colin Maggs' The Bristol Port Railway & Pier and the Clifton Extension Railway, The Oakwood Press, 1975.
I'm pretty sure from looking at some maps that this is the gate that would have led to Prince's Lane, if it were still passable.
St Vincent's Parade looking a bit more run-down than normal. This street, like the one I live in, was built as lodging houses for visitors to the hot wells. I imagine it was quite a pleasant aspect before later developments like the building of the Portway.
One of the many problems with the Hotwell Road and Portway is the complete dearth of places to safely cross this road, with a varying number of lanes and a speed limit that hits 50mph for stretches.
You can stand for a very long time looking both ways before taking your life into your hands and scurrying across. It took me quite some time to dash to the other pavement at the point where this one runs out and your only choice is to head up the Zig Zag or cross.
It's a (glass-fibre reinforced, I think) concrete roof to keep falling rocks from blocking the road at this particularly friable bit of the cliff face.
It doesn't look like much, because it isn't much any more. However, this used to be the site of Hotwells Station (formely Clifton Station, before the opening of Clifton Down and the continued existence of Clifton Bridge meant the proliferation of stations with "Clifton" in the name warranted some disambiguation.)
Nestled in this little nook underneath the suspension bridge, it was the Bristol terminus of the Port Railway and Pier, whose aim was to avoid increasingly big ships having to wait for the right tides to come into Bristol and unload. They ran a line from Hotwells Station, here, to a deep-water pier at Avonmouth so the ships could moor there regardless of the tide, and transport cargo and/or passengers to and from Bristol, with this being the Bristol terminus. Work started at Shirehampton in 1863.
Originally this was an isolated line, but it was later hooked up to the rest of the rail network by the Clifton Extension Railway, and a tunnel under Clifton. That's a connection we'll be exploring a bit today, at least with a few of its visible above-ground bits.
The line saw its biggest use during the First World War, as dockers, munition workers, hospital trains and so forth ran back and forth between Bristol and the port. They even added an entire extra platform, Hotwells Halt, just down the road, to cope with the increase in traffic, platform space being at something of a premium in this unexpandable little nook, which runs from the bridge to the first of two tunnels in the cliff face to head onward to Sea Mills.
From the other angle. It was a single short platform, squeezed in to this little inset in the cliff face. Here you'd have been looking at the station wall, with the entrance and office at the far end. In this photo on Pinterest you can see the three tracks—the main platform track, a run-around loop so the engine could make its way around the carriages and onto the other end of the train, and a siding. At the far end is the station master's house, just behind a turntable that would have been used to turn the engine fully around for the return journey.
Bower Ashton is an interesting little area just south of the river from me—in fact, the Rownham Ferry used to take people over from Hotwells to Bower Ashton, operating from at least the twelfth century to around the 1930s.
It's a strangely contradictory little area, with a cluster of old and new houses sandwiched in between the busy A-roads and significantly more industrial area of Ashton and the bucolic country estate of Ashton court roughly east to west, and also between Somerset and Bristol, north to south.
I've been around here before, mostly poking around Bower Ashton's arguably most well-known bit, the Arts faculty campus of the University of the West of England, but I'd missed at least Parklands Road and Blackmoors Lane, so I initially planned just to nip across briefly and wander down each in turn. On a whim, though, I texted my friends Sarah and Vik in case they were out and about, and ended up diverting to the Tobacco Factory Sunday market first, to grab a quick flat white with them, extending my journey a fair bit.
To start with, though, I nipped to a much more local destination, to see something that you can't actually see at all, the Gridiron...
(I also used this wander as a test of the cameras in my new phone. I finally upgraded after a few years, and the new one has extra, separate wide and telephoto lenses compared to the paltry single lens on my old phone. Gawd. I remember when speed-dial was the latest innovation in phones...)
You can't actually see the Gridiron in this photo, but I believe it's still there, under that amazing buildup of silt.
The Gridiron—one of the few photos of it can be seen on the Maritime Mud and Miasma page of About Bristol—was a cheaper alternative to putting your boat in a dry dock. It was a 200-foot long grid (there seems to be some debate over whether the grid itself is actually metal, or in fact timber; I'll have to try to find out), 38 feet wide, nestled here between the north and south entrance locks. A ship captain could sail his vessel over here at high tide, then as the tide gradually receded, the ship—up to 250 feet, as overhanging a bit was apparently okay—would settle onto the gridiron.
At that point an inspection and repair crew could make their way down to the gridiron by ladder and do whatever work they could manage before the tide rose up again.
You can still see some ladders in place, I can only presume they were there to get you down to the gridiron, but that is just a guess; information on it seems quite hard to find.
One last snap before we move on. I'm using the wide lens on the iPhone here, and have managed to include a silhouette selfie...
I decided to try out the three lenses on my new iPhone camera. This is the "telephoto" lens. It does a reasonably creditable job, though the phone is oversharpening things a bit and I'm not sure I like the colours much.
And here's the middling lens on the camera. Not bad, though on every shot I've taken on the iPhone so far where it's been able to see blue sky it's managed to oversaturate it for my tastes. Still, I guess they're aiming at the mass market, and the mass market does seem to like oversaturated colour and the sharpening turned up to eleven.
Not bad, and it's certainly better than not having a wide-angle lens in your pocket everywhere you go. I won't complain too much. "My iPhone oversaturates my photos. Also my wallet is too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are pinching..."
It's a nice little terrace, but given that it backs onto the city ground, I'd imagine you have to be a football fan to really enjoy it here.
At this point I've already abandoned my original plan of heading straight to Parklands Road, as some friends had texted me to say there were at the tobacco factory market and would I like to join them for a coffee? Best laid plans, so forth...
Okay, diversion to Tobacco Factory for a flat white complete, now it's time to figure out how to find Blackmoor Lane or Parklands Road from this direction.
Trying to get somewhere around here is a bit like following the White Rabbit, except when you pop back up again there's more industrial estates and fewer hookah-smoking caterpillars.
“Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
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.
The delights of the Bower Ashton roundabout. Here's a picture of it under construction in the 1960s from the Bristol Archives. Don't tell me I don't know how to show you a good time.
Here it is: my target road to tick off the list.
These are the houses in that archive photo.
Some of the houses along here are definitely 1950s, as you can hear in this oral history, where Eileen Pimm describes the process of watching the house she still lives in being built in 1957.
Although we're heading towards the trafficky roar of the A370, it's still more of a subdued hum from here, and you could almost convince yourself that you were on the outskirts of a little town in the country.
Bigger than Sunday's nearby semi, today's is a four-bedroom (it's the left-hand house) and has just sold for £725,000. It all looks very well-put-together and modernised throughout, mind.
Opposite Country Gates, which is the rather aspirational name for the office block there.
Out of sight to my right is Ashton Park School, which accounts for quite a few things that look like roads on the map, but which aren't public and which I'm not going to wander down.
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.
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.
A glimpse of Cornwallis Avenue across the back gardens between St Vincent's Road and Dowry Road.
I've snapped this before, too: the home of Humphry Davy, but here it again for context, as it's currently on the market for £1,200,000...
And here, at the other end of the terrace, is Peter Ware's old house. According to Hotwells - Spa to Pantomime, during the area's regeneration:
One house in Freeland Place was bought for £250 and Peter Ware, a charismatic local architect, bought a stunning corner house in Dowry Square for £200 including bed bugs!
It's currently set up as a set of separate serviced offices. If you're interested in buying the freehold, they're looking for offers in excess of £1m.
As well as being the former home of Master of Ceremonies of the Hot Well, William Pennington, it was for a while The Hotwells Nursery and School for Mothers. Later it looks like it turned into Social Services' Hotwells Day Nursery, if the footage in this BBC documentary, starting at around the 20-minute mark.
Okay, away from our little Dowry Square explore and across to Bower Ashton. Along the way, we saw many, many Santas. On motorbikes. As you do.
It was this notice that finally let me figure out that this strip of land was called Ashton Gate Depot and find out a bit more about it.
Site of a manor house since the 11th Century. Last time I was in there it was also with Lisa, my companion for this walk, as a team of storytellers from Red Rope Theatre read us ghost stories just before Halloween. It was excellent.
They should form a pub. This is just over the road from The Ashton, so there's perhaps a little too much local competition. Lisa and I popped in for a mulled wine.
This is arguably better than the last time I tried to snap a cow in this field, but it's still terrible. Maybe next time I'll have a longer lens, or the cow will be closer...
This field is called St John's Chapel. On the oldest map I can find, from somewhere between 1844 and 1888 it's marked as the "Site of St John's Chapel" but with no sign of the chapel, so it must be very long-gone. "The Chapel was dedicated as St. John or St. James depending on the source consulted, and it presumably fell into decay after the village was deserted, in the 13th or 14th century. No trace remains above ground level today, and the site is just a field" says The Churches of Britain and Ireland.
I can see on the same map that there's clearly been a pub where The Ashton is for a very long time. It was called The Smyth Arms back then.
Night fell fairly fast on our way from our mulled wine at The Ashton to North Street to have a poke around the stock of Storysmith bookshop in their new location—they've just moved here from much further east along the road.
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...
Built on the site of Champions Dock, 1982, it says on the sign.
I walked through this little estate every weekday for years, on my way to catch the commuter ferry into town when I used to work on Victoria Street (in the days before the ripples of the global financial crash finally swept away the council subsidy for the beloved early-morning boat service.)
The Society of Merchant Venturers did, of course, own this dock, like most of the rest of Bristol. Perhaps the most curiosity-inducing document in the Bristol Archives for Champions Dock is "Papers re the Quays & Nuisances, 1751 - 1784", including "Proposals to cleanse the quays to take on Champions Dock and to deal with nuisances in the river". Well, I'm sure there are fewer nuisances now they've filled it in and built an estate on it, but it took them a while...
I came this way on a whim, assuming that I'd be able to find my way back out to the Hotwell Road. At this point we've moved from Rownham Mead to Pooles Wharf Court, who always feel like they're a bit more protective of their space, so a quick exit seemed only polite...
...but you can't tell that it's not a house from the Hotwell Road. I wonder how many times I've walked past the windows and front door and not realised that they're just the frontage of the car park?
I'm heading for a coffee from Imagine That, in the Bristol Marina. Which is on the other side of harbour. Normally I'd have walked down that side to get there, but today...
First, though, we'll take a poke around the Harbour Inlet. Here's Skyloom just pulling away from the pump-out station.
This is a LeeSan LeeStrom LS200W Pump Out Station, I believe. It pumps things out of boats. You would probably rather I drew a veil over the details.
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. It's title The northern side of the Cumberland Basin Bridges Scheme: Completed and landscaped, 1965, BRO 40826/CUM/28.
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.
A mighty blast of a horn drew our attention to the fact that the superyacht Miss Conduct was just making her way into the harbour.
This used to be a luxury dining yacht in New York, the Abigail K, Abigail Kirsch apparently being a famous New York catering company.
Here's a snap of her in Sharpness, looking rather the worse for wear. I understand the helicopter is for decoration and has no engine. Certainly the G-MISSC registration is a bit of a giveaway; UK registered aircraft typically (always?) only have four letters after the G.
A Constitutional to Burwalls and Back
21 Dec 2021
The recent lack of posts here is mostly due to my feeling very run down following having a couple of wisdom teeth extracted. Having had an emergency appointment yesterday1, hopefully I'll be on the mend now, though it does mean I'm on the kind of antibiotics where you can't touch alcohol for the whole of the Christmas period. I have tried to keep myself a little distracted from the pain by working on the nuts and bolts of this website—you should notice that the front page loads rather faster now than it used to, and that there's a shiny new statistics page that I'll probably be continuing to work on. Oh, and you should find that the tags below the photos are now clickable and will take you to a page of all other wanders that have photos with the same tag.
Today I felt like I needed to drag myself out of the house, but I didn't want to go too far, and I needed to get to the Post Office up in Clifton Village to post a Christmas card (spoiler for my parents: it's going to be late. Sorry.) As luck would have it, idly looking at the map I spotted that I'd missed off a section of Burwalls Road in the past, and that's basically one of the long-ways-round to Clifton Village, crossing the river to Rownham and walking up the hill on the Somerset side before coming back across the Suspension Bridge.
As I was heading for Burwalls Road I decided to make Burwalls itself the focal point of the walk, but unfortunately the mansion grounds are private and the place is hard to snap. Still, at least it gave me a destination. Burwalls was the mansion built by Bristol press magnate Joseph Leech, who I've mentioned before after buying a vintage book he wrote on a previous wander. There's a good article about the house on House and Heritage which has some photos from angles I couldn't ever get to. (Well, maybe with a drone, but it seems like the kind of area where they may be kitted out for clay pigeon shooting, so I probably wouldn't risk it.)
1 My dentist admitted that she probably needed to keep her internal monologue a bit more internal after we started the appointment with her staring into my mouth and immediately saying, "oh, that's weird." These are words one doesn't want to hear from a medical professional.
As my plan was to knock off the remaining section of Burwalls Road, my first photo is the small segment of Burwalls itself that you can see from near my house. Burwalls is the mansion on the hilltop, peeping out about halfway from the left edge of the photo and the Suspension Bridge.
There was a notice of seeking possession on the gate when I got around to the far side. Looks like it's definitely going to be the replacement for the caravan park at Baltic Wharf. Shame for the caravan folk, really; this is sandwiched between major roads and not anything like as close to the pubs and other tourist-friendly places around the harbourside.
The Burwalls site is split into two halves, according to some of the estate agents' details I've looked at. This read section has some more modern-looking places where you can buy an entire house, if you're rich.
The mansion itself has been divided up into "lateral apartments". If you don't know what those are, you probably can't afford one.
Maybe if I'd got interested in this project before the university sold the place, I'd have been able to pop in and have a look around. Still, I can't blame them; when the estate was on the market in 2012 it was Bristol's most expensive house, valued at £5m, according to the Daily Mail.
That was for the main house and the old stables and lodge, which have been converted to the housing we're looking at. Given that by 2017, just a single one of the five aforementioned lateral apartments in the main manor house was on the market for £1.5, I think the developers probably did quite well...
Our first close-up sight. Sadly the main building is disappointingly hard to take a photo of. Still, I suppose if I'd just bought a flat for one-and-a-half million quid I'd probably not want some plebe with a camera being nosy around the place.