12 May 2021
I wanted to take another snap of an interesting Gothic Revival place in Clifton, having found out a bit more about the owner. On the way I walked through the Clifton Vale Close estate, idly wondering again whether it might've been the site of Bristol's Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (I've not researched further yet.) On the way back I knocked off the last remaining bit of Queens Road I had yet to walk and tried to find the bit of communal land that Sarah Guppy bought so as not to have her view built on...
The owner caught me snapping this Figaro and apologised for how dirty she thought it was. "I parked under that tree over there..." Looks fine to me. Bit rusty, mind; I seem to remember you could only get these as imports, and they weren't really designed to stand up to British weather.
I love this Gothic Revival pile. I've snapped it before, but I recently found out something interesting...
There's actually a wide space for walking in front of the cars on the access road, which is just as well given the pavement...
19 May 2021
I just nipped up to Clifton Village to get a coffee, though I did manage to walk down a little alleyway I'd not really noticed before. Or perhaps I had noticed it and it looked private, but today I felt like wandering up its twenty or so feet anyway... The reflections in the shop windows on Boyce's Avenue gave me the idea to take a few snaps of them, so that's the majority of my small amount of snapping today.
I'd quite likely been down this little alleyway (that leads to the back of the Clifton Medi-spa where I used to have acupuncture) before, but it's so nondescript I coudln't remember. Better safe than sorry. It has a view of some cars and the back of Royal York Villas
22 May 2021
I didn't even think I'd manage to get out today, such was the weather forecast. As it turned out, it's been quite a nice day, and I managed to nip up to Clifton Village to pop to the Post Office. As with my last outing, I decided after snapping one shop-front on Regent Street that I might as well snap the whole row, and muse on a few of them, the only service I really offer over and above Google Street View for a lot of my pictures 😀
I have literally no idea what a "conscious apparel eco-fitness studio" is. It used to be Design Flooring, where I bought the oak flooring for my living room, a long time ago. It's lasted well.
The other two shops give an idea of the high concentration of hair salons in Clifton Village in general. I have little need of such establishments.
Carbon footprints, that is: it's not a children's shoe shop; it's one of those places that'll sell you seeds and cereal and whatnot by the scoopload to save on plastic packaging. Scoopaway on Gloucester Road is probably the best-known example in Bristol.
I think this replaced Pizza Provençal; they've got a much bigger branch on Whiteladies Road, which is the only one I've been to.
The Joy Raj do good food, from what I remember. I've never had any need for family law. Surprisingly, it was a hairdresser before it was a law firm.
I've not been in since it changed from a Boston Tea Party, but I may have to try it just to sit upstairs and watch the world go by like I used to...
28 May 2021
Another dash to Greville Smyth Park for a coffee from Rich at Hopper, but at least this time I managed to divert a bit and knock off a small section of Cumberland Road I'd managed to miss on previous excursions. Along the way I muse on a strange residence in between a warehouse and a tannery, and wonder if the Mayor might be deliberately letting the Cumberland Road Flyover area go to seed...
29 May 2021
I met my friends Sarah and Vik at Riverside Garden Centre today; I needed to buy some compost for repotting my wildly-overgrowing aloe vera, and I went a little bit out of my way to knock off a stretch of Ashton Road. It was a pleasant enough walk in the surprisingly warm (and surprising-not-tipping-it-down-on-a-Bank-Holiday-weekend) weather.
Interesting mixture. Behind Ashton Road, to the right and behind me in this pic, is Ashton Gate stadium, home to Bristol City, which goes some way to explaining the two big pubs (next two photos) on this stretch.
I managed to knock off a reasonable chunk of the roads I had left to walk around the University at the north-eastern extremity of my mile on this nice sunny walk. As well as being impressed by the number of big townhouses now occupied by various departments, I took some time on my way there to check out a war memorial, and some time on the way back to do a little extra wandering of Berkeley Square.
31 May 2021
A nice warm Bank Holiday Monday saw me walk back over to Bedminster to do justice to something we glimpsed on my last wander. Along the way I spotted a couple of new pieces of street art tucked away on the south side of the Cumberland Basin Flyover system, so this turned into a micro-graffiti walk.
We'll get to my main reason for coming here in a minute, but for now let's just have a little poke around this semi-industrial, semi-residential alleyway.
I imagine I've seen the stall there at places like the Tobacco Factory Market, but I've got a terrible memory for things like that.
Apparently this is 34 Baynton Road. Looks like just a tiny, isolated house, stuck in a very odd little corner.
06 Jun 2021
The track on the map doesn't tell the whole story of this walk with Lisa around and about Clifton, Berkeley Square, Brandon Hill and the harbourside, because the batteries on my GPS ran out while we were on the roof of Trenchard Street car park, it seems. Oh well. I think I did most of the area I was interested in finishing off around the University; there were only a few new bits around Brandon Hill that won't be on the track, and I can easily do them again.
Still, technology woes aside it was a nice walk, albeit a bit warm for climbing all those hills, and sat on the harbourside watching the world go by for a while, too. It was good to see the Bristol Ferry Boats carrying people around again, especially.
We're just outside my mile radius here, but Osborne Villas Looked too tempting to just walk past.
Looked a bit to me like number 16 had tilted over to the left a bit since it was built...
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.
"He was known for his efforts to abolish the practices of sati and child marriage." I was aware of the awful practice of sati purely because it came up in a crossword once. Efforts to abolish it certainly seem statue-worthy.
This statue stands outside the Central Library, between it and City Hall. The Bristol connection is that he travelled to the UK as an ambassador "to ensure that Lord William Bentinck's Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829 banning the practice of Sati was not overturned". He died in Stapleton, Bristol in 1833. As well as this statue, he's buried in a fine mausoleum in the beautiful Arnos Vale cemetery.
A fifteenth century caravel replica and a very modern RIB. Odd neighbours. I think the bloke leaning out over the gunwales at the prow of the RIB was trying to encourage fish onto the line. Not your typical patient fishermen :D
19 Jun 2021
I hadn't really planned to go out for a wander yesterday; I just got the urge and thought "why not?" (Well, the weather forecast was one possible reason, but I managed to avoid the rain, luckily.)
I wanted to finish off the A369—as it turns out I may still have a small section to go, but I've now walked the bulk of it out to my one-mile radius—and also a few random tracks in Leigh Woods. I'm still not really sure that I'm going to walk them all, especially after discovering today that "the map is not the territory" applies even more in the woods, where one of the marked tracks on the map wasn't really that recognisable as a track in real life... I'm glad I'd programmed the route into the GPS in advance!
Anyway. A pleasant enough walk, oddly bookended, photographically at least, by unusual vehicles. Leigh Woods was fairly busy, especially the section I'd chosen, which was positively dripping with teenage schoolkids with rah accents muttering opprobrium about the Duke of Edinburgh. I'm presuming the harsh remarks were more about taking part in his award scheme than the late Consort himself, but I didn't eavesdrop enough to be certain...
I'm not sure what's being delivered to the lock-keepers' house, but it looks like they'll probably all be a lot happier afterwards.
They've been working quickly. I'm pretty sure this house didn't have the extension when I last passed.
A little housing estate I've snapped before. I think it's an alternative spelling of "Fowey". Which frankly, being actually phonetic, should probably be the actual spelling.
This might explain why I've put off this bit of the A369 for so long. It's mostly just a boring road, desgined for cars.
I guess it's more to reduce road noise than privacy, but it seems a shame these lovely-looking houses are all just peeping over giant hedges and walls.
The economy seems to be booming in the area of big houses for rich people, at least.
There's something about a slightly brassy classic car that makes we want to turn up the Lightroom sliders a bit too high.