Tagged: urban-design
Bedmo and Ashton Court
21 Nov 2020
A rather more wide-ranging weekend wander with Sarah and Vik, taking in some mock Tudor bits of Bedmo (I should note that I've subsequently been corrected to "Bemmie", but I'm an outsider and have been calling it "Bedmo" for short for decades...), a chunk of Ashton, a path up Rownham Hill called Dead Badger's Bottom(!), The Ashton Court estate, a bit of the UWE campus at Bower Ashton, and some of the Festival Way path.
I often walk through Greville Smyth park, and there's many other things in Bristol bearing the Smyth name. John Henry Greville Smyth was...
...an English naturalist and collector of natural history specimens. He is best known for his large private collection of mammals, birds, and insects kept at his stately home of Ashton Court in Bristol. On his death his wife, Lady Emily Greville Smyth, donated the bulk of the collection to the Bristol Natural History Museum, now known as Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
But the Smyth name in general is all over this bit of Bristol, from Greviille Smyth Park outwards, which is hardly surprising given that the Smyth family home was Ashton Court, where four hundred years' worth of Smyths resided after Sir Thomas Arundel sold the place to a John Smyth in 1545, a few years after being gifted it by Henry VIII.
I have no idea how anyone managed to smack this street furniture so hard, or what direction they came from to do it. It's a pretty straight 30mph road right there, and this is only one side of the dual carriageway. Never seen so much as a near-miss there.
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
Given that it's on an unwalled bike shed, I doubt it's there for insulation. The CREATE centre my just have it there as an example of what an eco-friendly roof can look like, though.
I don't think I ever crossed this bridge on foot before starting my "One Mile Matt" project.
When I first moved to Hotwells, there were still signs for the famous transport caff "Popeye's Diner", a well-known refuelling point for truckers on the way in or out of Bristol. It was also the cafe used for interior shots in some episodes of Only Fools and Horses. You can see it as it used to be in the "Trigger's broom" sketch, for one. These days it's a much posher affair, and they do a very good Eggs Benedict when they're open.
You can see a before/after comparison of how the interior looked when I moved to the area in the 1990s and how it looks now in this shot on Flickr that compares an Only Fools and Horses still with a modern shot.
Office? Control room? Whatever it is, I've always been a bit fascinated by the little suite of rooms under the north side of the Plimsoll Bridge. The little gantry is directly below the place where the swing bridge meets the road proper, so presumably it's there for inspections when the bridge is swung?
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.
And Back Down the Hill from the Flu Jab
21 Nov 2020
This is my return from getting my annual flu jab at Christ Church, as explained in more detail in my wander up the hill.
I do love this terrace. The mansard roofs, the grand central house, the ornamentation, the porches. It's all rather grand.
Used to be a fairly nondescript place with offices or a home—not sure which—over a double-garage, which seems to be the standard layout on this stretch of PVS. The only thing I remember about it is the only nondescript thing: it had a big flagpole jutting out of the top floor. You can still see a St George's Cross dangling from it on Google Street View.
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.
The Hillsborough Flats are a lot prettier from the back than their frontage on the Hotwell Road suggests, I think.
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.
I used to live down there, at 34 Portland Court, overlooking the marina. I wasn't paying the rent, mind you.
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...
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.
You can see how this sluice channel entrance in the side of the Entrance Lock wall is about level with the control wheel we saw on the far side—if you look closely, you can see it immediately to the left of and behind the modern building in the background. Given what the lockkeeper described to me, I'm confident that this is where the water for sluicing the Gridion clean of silt came from—they fill Entrance lock, then open the sluice to carry water—which must be under reasonable pressure with a full lock—across to the far side where the Gridiron is, washing off the accumulated silt.
Clever, these Bristol engineers: no actual pumping required. Just tides and gravity.
And that's the last of my musing on the Gridiron. I'm not sure why I became so fascinated by a giant Victorian boat-sieve, but I did!
I mostly went out to hang out with my friends Sarah and Vik in Bedminster, but along the way I thought I'd take a closer look at something a little nearer home: the last crossing point of the Rownham Ferry.
A sign of the times: all the new build homes of Balfour Road have solar panels on top. I bet they're grateful of that, given the current energy price crisis.
It's interesting to be able to look pretty much a mile back and see the familiar buildings of home. Descending from the top right in the distance we can just see the Observatory on Observatory Hill, then the end of Royal York Crescent, then the Paragon just eclipsing the suspension bridge, then below the bridge on the left there's Windsor Terrace and the more modern Windsor Court flats just visible behind the Bedminster foreground.
Getting back to the Rownham Ferry, the Ashton Avenue Bridge is one of the reasons it was closed. On the excellent Bristol City Docks website you can find a photo called "Rownham Ferry c1906 with Ashton Avenue Bridge nearly built.".
As you'll see in that photo, at low tide the Rownham Ferry was basically just a bridge made out of boats, so it probably still seemed a quick shortcut compared to walking all the way to Ashton Avenue Bridge. I imagine the foot traffic gradually migrated to the new bridge as the ferry was a more daunting prospect at high tide, from what I can gather. Also, the combined road/rail bridge would have allowed people to get the train across the river, rather than stopping at Clifton Bridge Station and using the ferry, I think.
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.
Most of the front gardens on this little stretch retain what's presumably the original garden walls, all rather nicely put together in a chequerboard pattern of bricks.
The South West Broadcast Centre for Celador Radio, it says. That certainly explains the big dipole antenna on the roof. I haven't heard of Hits Radio, but I suppose I'm generally more your Radio 4 type.
I snapped this to remind myself to see if I could dig out the price, and I could. The three-bedroom semi on the left there just sold for £550,000. Bargain!
Can't find out much about this place. Not sure I've ever seen any activity there, but I probably only pass by outside normal Monday to Friday working hours. Looking back on a post-War OS map, it's marked as a concrete works, back in the day. There's a tiler and a mason registered at the address, so it certainly still has some connection with stone.
It's certainly not very decorative, with its razor-topped fencing. I suppose the gabions full of rip-rap are at least in keeping with a stone yard...