Tagged: thoroughfare
Underpass
25 Nov 2020
A quick lunchtime jaunt for coffee. I've often wondered about the dots on the wall of the underpass. Apparently they're not intelligible Braille. Maybe it's Marain :D
The Cumberland Basin Flyover System is indisputably ugly, I'd say. At least you get presented with the rather lovely pink of the Rose of Denmark when you get through it and swing around onto the main Hotwell Road into town.
Up for the flu jab
21 Nov 2020
A trip up the hill to get my winter flu jab. I'm not sure I really needed it this year, what with avoiding Covid—I haven't had so much as a sniffle in more than a year—but seeing as they offered... Instead of the doctor's surgery on Pembroke Road, they'd taken over Christ Church, presumably to give more room and ventilation for the necessary social distancing at the moment. As usual, it was their typically efficient operation, and I was in and out in about three minutes.
On the way there and back I snapped as much as I could, but I wanted to be home in time for the first online Times Crossword Championship. As it turned out, I needn't have bothered, as the technology at the Times couldn't keep up with the demand from competitors, and their system just collapsed under the weight of page-views. They tried again the day after, and it collapsed just as badly. Maybe next year...
This wander is split into two parts, as I turned my tech off to go into Christ Church for my jab. The walk home can be found over here.
Avoiding the Accounts
26 Nov 2020
I took the day off my day job to do my accounts—or at least do enough bookkeeping to send them to my accountant. I hate doing the books. I woke up late, tired and with a headache and decided to bunk off for a walk around Cliftonwood, Clifton Village and Clifton instead, taking in a couple of good coffees along the way. Thanks, Foliage Café, and Twelve for the flat whites.
I don't know who named Canynge Square, but I respectfully suggest they attend a remedial geometry class. (image courtesy Google)
The impressive building on The Mall that now houses the Clifton Club was originally built as a hotel and assembly rooms. I was looking up the history the other day in an attempt to track down the assembly rooms the eponymous heroine visited in Fanny Burney's novel Evelina, but Evelina was published in 1778 and this building wasn't built until 1805, from what I can work out. (It definitely wasn't the Victoria Rooms, either, for fairly obvious resons, given the name!)
More Cliftonwood
05 Dec 2020
Back to Cliftonwood for a wander that included some of the belle views of Bellevue Crescent and other bits of the easternmost part. Highlights included watching someone bump-starting an elderly Nissan Micra in the narrow confines of Bellevue Crescent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Considering I didn't know there was a historical photo to copy when I shot this, it's not too far off the same viewpoint.
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 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.
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.”
This happens to me all the time in this area. I try to get somewhere by aiming in the most obvious direction, and the pavement just peters out leaving me with the options of either going back the way I came or dashing across four or five lanes of traffic.
The entire area is very pedestrian-hostile. I assume the parents and kids making their way to the school opposite know all the right routes to avoid this kind of problem, but as a visitor it's very annoying.
As-was. I'm standing on the bridge pictured in the main photo on the Wikipedia article, looking back to the A370 flyover that that photo was taken from.
As with Clifton Bridge Station, the next stop "down", there's not much to be seen these days.
Apparently there's some pressure to re-open the station as part of the MetroWest scheme, at which point I'd presumably be able to walk to a station that would get me on a train to Portishead on this old branch line, which would be a nice way of going on a day out. I've hardly ever been to Portishead, but I quite enjoyed the couple of trips I've taken there... I won't hold my breath, though.
Wikipedia notes that it was renamed temporarily in 1914 to Bristol International Exhibition, traces of which we've previously seen—it was the halls being constructed of white plasterboard and mouldings made from fibre and gypsum that led to its nickname of "White City", which is the name of the allotments that stand there now.
