Tagged: terrestrial-plant
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...
Fresh Fields
17 Oct 2021
For the first time in a while, I had the time and energy to go further afield and knock off some new roads from my "to do" list. I headed through the first Hotwells Festival to Ashton and Bedminster to cross off a few of the suburban roads south of North Street.
First, though, I decided to try to reproduce an old photo of the now-demolished Rownham Hotel just around the corner from where I live...
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.
There are no signs of the railway to be found between the gate and the nearest tunnel entrance further north, as you'd expect, really.
I'm fairly sure I'm standing about where the train tracks used to be, facing the entrance to the station at the south platform end. To the left would have been the turntable for rotating the train onto the run-around loop to go back the way it came, and behind that the little stationmaster's house.
Interesting little sign of earlier civilisation. I don't see railings in any of the photos I've seen of Hotwells Station, though, so I can't really connect it with the station.
Having done even more research and a bit of eBay browsing, though, I ordered a postcard that might explain where these came from...
They certainly look like they were in place for a while, and maintained—I think I can make out where newer railings were welded in during renovations. I suppose they could be pre-War.
If I hadn't seen the photos and maps I'd have had no clue that there was once a busy railway station here, with three tracks, a platform, a ticket office, a turntable, a station master's house and so on. The last train would have been, I think, on 19 September 1921.
Hotwells Halt, the extension platform put in just north, on the other side of the first tunnel, survived until 1922, but after that everything would have changed for the Portway.
Not everything was lost, though. The rest of the line was effectively saved by the fact that it joined up to the main rail network (and didn't need to be completely obliterated to make room for the road.)
The joining to the mainline was achieved by the Clifton Extension Railway, which included a tunnel from Clifton Down to Sea Mills, the next station along from Hotwells Halt, and the closest surviving Bristol Port Railway station to Bristol.
The CER line is still in use, and we'll be taking a route that checks in on the tunnel in a few pics from here...
I've already earmarked that bench as a nice place to come and sit with a flask of tea on similar days.
I did not see hide nor hair of a single goat the entire time I was in the goat gully. I clearly need to spend a bit more time there.
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...)
Well, it doesn't seem to lead into the school, and presumably it leads somewhere...
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.
I've snapped this before, but I wanted to give it a bit of context. Peter Ware very much helped to save Dowry Square, as one of a group of "Newcomers" to the Hotwells area in the 1960s and 70s. Hotwells was basically a slum before then, with many of the buildings in a terrible state, including Dowry Square and Hope Square.
As I've recently been reading in Hotwells - Spa to Pantomime, these newcomers took their chances on a very dodgy area and decided to buy and do up a lot of the grand old houses that were almost ruins in some cases.
This early gentrification was important enough that John Boorman, of Excalibur fame made a BBC documentary about it called The Newcomers.)
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 love the way Spoke & Stringer's deli window with it predictably-hipster type choices and logo are somewhat put into perspective by their wonky big-arse OSB sign with PASTIES daubed on it.
There is a time for fancy marketing, and a time to just shout "GET YER PASTIES 'ERE" at the top of your signage.
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!
At this point they'd left me behind heading east up the harbour, so I decided to jump on the cross-harbour ferry to the inlet, grab a coffee and a pasty at Spoke and Stringer (their sign definitely worked on me!) and wait on the that side for their return, as knew they were heading widdershins around the harbour.
I took a moment to snap this little fella in the artificial reed bed between the inlet and Hannover Quay.
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!
In Which We Begin and End with Love
05 Mar 2022
I had a lot to get done around the house, so as soon as I heard there might be a shiny new piece of street art near me, under the Cumberland Basin flyovers, I immediately decided that was all the excuse I needed to set off on a round-the-harbour lunchtime walk to get some fresh air and see if I could spot it. So, here's a circular wander that takes in graffiti, boats, wildlife and graffiti again...
These feeders are in the little strip of floating reedbeds on the north side of the harbour.
Leigh Woods Purple Path
12 Mar 2022
There's a few tracks in Leigh Woods that lie within my mile and show up on my map but that I've not walked yet, so I decided to take one of my traditional big long walks through the woods on this nice crisp sunny morning.
For years—decades, even—I've been doing a similar route from my place, along the towpath to the far woods entrance, up the hill for a varied walk on one of the marked tracks and then across the Suspension Bridge to Clifton Village for a coffee-based reward. It's my default "long walk", really, and I almost always enjoy it. Today, at last, spring actually seemed to be springing, which made for some extra positivity...
There's been a lot of logging in Leigh Woods recently. Some of it is to control Ash Dieback, some of it to make way for the reintroduction of native trees.
Approaching what amounts to the "main road" through Leigh Woods, that runs along the crest of the slope down to the towpath.