Tagged: urban-design
Victoria Square Underpass
06 May 2021
I'm meant to be taking a little break from this project, but in my Victoria Square researches after my last walk I noticed a curiosity I wanted to investigate. The community layer on Know Your Place has a single photograph captioned, "The remains of an 'underpass' in Victoria Square".
Looking back through the maps, I could see that there really did used to be an underpass across what used to be Birdcage Walk. I can only guess that it was there to join the two halves of the square's private garden that used to be separated by tall railings that were taken away during WWII. Maybe it was a landscaping curiosity, maybe it was just to save them having to un-lock and re-lock two gates and risk mixing with the hoi polloi on the public path in the middle...
Anyway. Intrigued, I popped up to Clifton Village this lunchtime for a post-voting coffee, and on the way examined the remains of the underpass—still there, but only if you know what you're looking for, I'd say—and also visited a tiny little road with a cottage and a townhouse I'd never seen before, just off Clifton Hill, and got distracted by wandering the little garden with the war memorial in St Andrew's churchyard just because the gate happened to be open.
EDIT: Aha! Found this snippet when I was researching something completely different, of course. From the ever-helpful CHIS website:
When there were railings all round the garden and down the central path, in order that the children could play together in either garden there was a tunnel for them to go through. This was filled in during the 1970s but almost at the south east end of the path if one looks over the low wall the top of the arches can still be seen.
And opposite Prospect Cottage, as if to give some direct contrast, the modern and anything-but-quaint goods entrance to the Nuffield Hospital.
It's resurfacing season in Clifton, it seems. Certainly there've been a lot of cones and warning signs around the place.
Another bit of Clifton that a lot of people miss: the gardens at the back of the Kings Road shops.
A Trip to the Library
08 Jun 2021
I had to return a book to the library—Ellic Howe's Magicians of the Golden Dawn, very interesting, thanks for asking—so I decided to pick the Central Library as my drop-off point and walk down a segment of Deanery Road that I've surprisingly overlooked so far. In any normal time I'd have been walking to work that way quite often, or heading through at the weekend on the way to do some shopping in the city centre, or for a coffee at St Nick's, but those excursions have been quite thin on the ground for the last year or so, for obvious reasons.
I've never been inside a single building on Deanery Road itself; the Library is technically on College Green and the rest is mostly student accommodation or Bristol College buildings, by the looks of things. It's a fairly mediocre street, used merely to get to other places. (St George's Road, which merges into it, at least has the distinction of several good shops verging from the practical and long-lived car radio fitters to the excellent little Dreadnought Books, sadly currently closed for refurbishment...)
After dropping off my book I came home via the harbourside, the better to enjoy the nice sunny blue skies of the day.
Or rather, a bit of St George's Road. At the corner there, St George's Road actually continues down the side street to the left. The road straight ahead, on the far side of the junction, is actually Deanery Road, which is the bit I've not walked yet.
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...
It's very hard to get a decent look at this building. This is the top half of the back of it.
I have now moved buildings, to the Power House. This was the hydraulic cornerstone of the power for many of the key docks systems in Bristol. The hydraulic system powered from these electric (formerly steam) pumps was responsible for opening lock gates, moving sluices, operating cranes, and turning or raising some of the heftiest swing bridges in Bristol.
Here I've finally found my target, according to the nice man giving the demonstrations. The electrical control system used to control the hydraulic system's pumps, along with the pumps themselves, would have been too complicated and time-consuming to re-engineer to modern electrical standards when the National Grid came along, to say nothing of having to close down this cornerstone of many of the important mechanisms of a busy working dock while it was done, so some arrangement was come to with the electricity company to simply keep supplying the old, non-standard 360V electricity, which is why it still comes that way from the Avon Crescent substation.
I can rarely resist snapping this house on the end of Freeland Place at this time of year, especially when the sun's catching both of the ivy-covered sides (well, Boston ivy, anyway; parthenocissus tricuspidata, I think.)
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 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.
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.
...and I was right.
Incidentally, a brief aside for a rant: why the hell are self-storage places just like sodding gyms? You can't get a straight answer about how much storage costs from any of their websites. They just take your details and then you have to talk to some bloody salesman, and play each site off against each other to get what's alleged to be the best price. I think it must be some kind of price-fixing racket.
I find something intrinsically nice about this modest little terrace sandwiched in among the rather more industrial surroundings.
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 think this is the very first time I've set foot on Clifton Down Station platform. I believe this is the platform for the "up" trains, if I'm getting my terminology right, but I think it's a fairly arbitrary choice, as much of the line is single track.
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!
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. Its title is "The northern side of the Cumberland Basin Bridges Scheme: Completed and landscaped, 1965".
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.
I was just about starting to feel better—the antibiotics seemed to have kicked in for my dental issues, and it had been some days since I'd left the house, and I was at last starting to get itchy feet. So, a wander. But where? Well, there were a few industrial bits near Winterstoke Road in the Ashton/Ashton Vale areas of Bristol that needed walking. I knew they were likely to be quite, well, unattractive, frankly. So why not do them while I wasn't feeling exactly 100% myself? Maybe it would fit my mood. Hopefully you're also in the mood for a bit of post-industrial wasteland, for that's what some of this feels like...
Then, at the last minute, I thought again about the Bristol International Exhibition—I've got a book about it on the way now—and that gave me another goal, which could just about be said to be in the same direction, and I decided to walk significantly further than my normal 1-mile limit and try recreating another historical photo...
Sadly I don't know much about the Ashton area; it's just on the edges of my mile and I rarely have cause to go there. It's brimming with history, I'm sure: the whole South Bristol area rapidly developed from farmland to coal mines to factories to its current interesting mixture of suburbs and industrial work over the last few hundred years. As a more working class area less attention was paid to it by historians, at least historically-speaking, than the Georgian heights of Clifton, and much of it has been knocked down and reinvented rather than listed and preserved. I see here and there some of this lack is being addressed, but I'm afraid I'll be very light on the history myself on this wander, as most of my usual sources aren't throwing up their normal reams of information as when I point them at Clifton, Hotwells or the old city.
"Hello? Yes, I'd like to order a cubic mile of bland industrial building, please. No, anything'll do."
If one tried to conjure an image from just the phrase "HMS Flying Fox", this probably isn't what would spring to mind, is it? It's not a ship, it's not flying, and it's not a fox, for starters.
Royal Navy Reserves HQ for Wales & South West of England, I think it says on the sign at the far end.
Note the Egyptian kings on pillars at the top of the pilasters bracing the doorway. No earthly clue what they're doing there. As usual, Bristol's historical sources seem to peter out south of the river.
Wikipedia says on Egyptian Revival Architecture:
By the end of the 19th century, the style had very nearly disappeared, but in 1922 with Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb the style underwent a dramatic revival it was used particularly for cinema architecture and sometimes for factory buildings.
...and given the surroundings it wouldn't entirely surprise me to find that this was originally a factory, at least, though the 1940 date in between the Egyptians suggests they were a little late with the styling.
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.
I noticed I had a few things on my "potential wanders" list that could all be done relatively close to home, and in a fairly straight line, so I set off at lunchtime to recreate a photo of a now-defunct pub, wander behind a Spar (which turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, but I admit it's a low bar) and spend some time browsing in Dreadnought Books before coming home via a coffee from Spoke & Stringer, a little diversion up Gasworks Lane and a tiny bit of the Rownham Mead estate I'd somehow previously skipped.
On Know Your Place you can check out old maps of Bristol. Sadly there doesn't seem to be an easy way of linking to a particular map/location. Still, here's a little screenshot of the 1898-1939 layer. These tracks are still there on the later 1949 map, so at least this section survived the war, I think.
Having checked Wikipedia I think this section, which ran from Canons Marsh to Ashton Avenue Bridge and then on to the south was created in 1906, and closed in 1965.
This map fragment will be © Ordnance Survey.
Interesting to think that this street art will presumably be sitting as a layer in between Marcruss Stores and the new-build flats for ever...
Here's a snap from before the cover-up.
Having checked the planning application it seems these may be going to be called the Black Horse Apartments, echoing the former name of Pembroke Place, which is a nice little touch.
While we're on a theme of things to find down alleyways...
We've had a wander around the old gas works site before but I wanted briefly to focus on one tiny detail, which is to be found in this alleyway called Gasworks Lane.
And again—imagine it without all the rampant shrubbery and tree blossom. Great job, landscapers.