Tagged: wheel
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, too: the home of Humphry Davy, but here it again for context, as it's currently on the market for £1,200,000...
Okay, away from our little Dowry Square explore and across to Bower Ashton. Along the way, we saw many, many Santas. On motorbikes. As you do.
Given how much Bower Ashton feels like an anachronism, walking past this wasn't that surprising. 1954 Morris Minor, I think.
Night fell fairly fast on our way from our mulled wine at The Ashton to North Street to have a poke around the stock of Storysmith bookshop in their new location—they've just moved here from much further east along the road.
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 came this way on a whim, assuming that I'd be able to find my way back out to the Hotwell Road. At this point we've moved from Rownham Mead to Pooles Wharf Court, who always feel like they're a bit more protective of their space, so a quick exit seemed only polite...
I've walked down this alley once before, but in the other direction, so I don't think I've ever noticed this before. This is a car park, but ...
This is a LeeSan LeeStrom LS200W Pump Out Station, I believe. It pumps things out of boats. You would probably rather I drew a veil over the details.
Nearly trod on this as I was heading down the steps. Popped it safely on the side in case the owner comes hunting. Dodge Charger, maybe? Some kind of American muscle car, anyway.
A Constitutional to Burwalls and Back
21 Dec 2021
The recent lack of posts here is mostly due to my feeling very run down following having a couple of wisdom teeth extracted. Having had an emergency appointment yesterday1, hopefully I'll be on the mend now, though it does mean I'm on the kind of antibiotics where you can't touch alcohol for the whole of the Christmas period. I have tried to keep myself a little distracted from the pain by working on the nuts and bolts of this website—you should notice that the front page loads rather faster now than it used to, and that there's a shiny new statistics page that I'll probably be continuing to work on. Oh, and you should find that the tags below the photos are now clickable and will take you to a page of all other wanders that have photos with the same tag.
Today I felt like I needed to drag myself out of the house, but I didn't want to go too far, and I needed to get to the Post Office up in Clifton Village to post a Christmas card (spoiler for my parents: it's going to be late. Sorry.) As luck would have it, idly looking at the map I spotted that I'd missed off a section of Burwalls Road in the past, and that's basically one of the long-ways-round to Clifton Village, crossing the river to Rownham and walking up the hill on the Somerset side before coming back across the Suspension Bridge.
As I was heading for Burwalls Road I decided to make Burwalls itself the focal point of the walk, but unfortunately the mansion grounds are private and the place is hard to snap. Still, at least it gave me a destination. Burwalls was the mansion built by Bristol press magnate Joseph Leech, who I've mentioned before after buying a vintage book he wrote on a previous wander. There's a good article about the house on House and Heritage which has some photos from angles I couldn't ever get to. (Well, maybe with a drone, but it seems like the kind of area where they may be kitted out for clay pigeon shooting, so I probably wouldn't risk it.)
1 My dentist admitted that she probably needed to keep her internal monologue a bit more internal after we started the appointment with her staring into my mouth and immediately saying, "oh, that's weird." These are words one doesn't want to hear from a medical professional.
Speaking of major roads, this is why you wont' see a track down the actual road here on my maps: no pavements. On the plus side, there's the forested path with the amazing name of Dead Badger's Bottom starting on my right, and a little raised off-road walkway in the trees on the left, starting about where you can see the speed limit sign.
A delightful little return to the road, which peters out in a disconcerting rough slope in between two blind bends on a busy road with no pavement. It's not spectacularly pedestrian-friendly over here. This might explain why I never walked down the bit of Burwalls Road opposite. The forest path up Dead Badger's Bottom1 on the far side of the road skips the first section.
1 No, I will never get tired of saying that.
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.
This may be somewhere around my actual destination today, though perhaps a little too much toward the east.
The buildings and green space on the hill in the background are the Knowle West Health Park. I'm pleased to have figured this out by using an OS map and a ruler and projecting a line from where I'm standing through the Tobacco Factory flag that you can just see poking up from Bedminster (you can see it on the corner of the building in this earlier pic](https://omm.gothick.org.uk/image/7175), then looking for densely-packed contour lines further out of town. Very old-school, but it worked!
I'm probably heading in more of a Bedminster Down direction. It's a similarly elevated green space further west, which is hidden behind the bond warehouse on the right in this pic.
This area continues to be blighted with ugly and neglected-looking infrastructure. We're just on the edges of Ashton Vale, which is among the 30% most deprived areas in the country. At the north of my one-mile radius we have Clifton, among the least 20% deprived. Source: UK indices of deprivation.
Interesting sign up on the left there. This isn't talking about the Metrobus line, which as you can see rises above the crossing, but about the MetroWest train plans, I think, which would see a revivial of the old Portishead line. That's not happening until at least 2024, but clearly the business park is fearful of the impact.
"Hello? Yes, I'd like to order a cubic mile of bland industrial building, please. No, anything'll do."
I'd really hope for at least a chartreuse microbus for carrying long-haired friends of Jesus...
See, there's a reason I've been putting off these roads. I didn't think I'd find much to excite, or that was aesthetically pleasing, and here I am, proved right.
Trust Ford. I came here to look into buying a Fiesta last time I was looking for a new car. Nobody seemed remotely interested in selling me a car, so I went to Dick Lovett instead and ended up with a Mini.
Redpoint climbing centre. Used to be an art deco cinema, apparently. At the far end you can see a sop to that in the style of the CAFE BAR sign. It looks rather swanky and modern inside from the pics on their website.
At this end of the building is a giant digital advertising board. I'm with Adblock Bristol on this one, but then I've never been a fan of public advertising.
A Random New Year's Day Wander
01 Jan 2022
I picked a fairly arbitrary reason for a wander today. Really, I just wanted to do a New Year's Day wander just to get out of the house and to set a precedent for the year to come.
My ostensible reason was to investigate what looked like a road on my map that quartered the lawn in front of the Ashton Court mansion. As it turned out, this is just a muddy footpath/desire line similar to a half-dozen other tracks nearby, and must be some kind of bug or misclassification with the mapping system I'm using, but that's not important. What's important is that I went for a little walk on the first day of the year. As a bonus, I did happen to wander down a couple of sections of new footpath, so technically I broke some new ground too, which is nice.
Quick Clifton Jaunt Finishing with Southville
09 Jan 2022
It's been pretty dismal recently, weather-wise, so when Sarah called up to say that she and Vik had just left the swimming pool at the student union building up in Clifton, and would I like to join them for a trip to the Last Bookshop, also known as The £3 Bookshop, for reasons you can probably deduce, I leapt at the chance.
Not many photos on this walk, but I did manage to get down a little road I'd never been to before, basically just the access road to a car park at a block of flats, but it was on the map looking all tempting, so I figured I'd knock it off the list as we were passing.
Lunchtime Reproduction (of an old photo...)
17 Jan 2022
This was basically the quick lunchtime jaunt I tried to do at the beginning of January, only this time I actually managed to get to roughly the viewpoint I'd been hoping for to recreate a historical photo of the Bristol International Exhibition.
I did this walk about a month ago, but I've been a bit poorly and not really up to doing much in my spare time, and it's taken me this long to even face processing even these few photos. Hopefully normal service will be resumed at some point and I can carry on trying to walk any roads and paths that I need to do to make this project feel complete...
We've been as far as we can go down there on an earlier wander. From the top you'd just think it led to the Hotel car park.
Lunchtime Cliftonwood Wander
18 Jan 2022
Another workday, another quick lunchtime trip to get me out of the house. This time my flimsy pretext is a tiny bit of Clifton Vale Close that I'd apparently not walked, and the fact that although I'd walked down Church Lane at least once before I still hadn't taken a single photo of it. Really I just fancied a mosey through Cliftonwood in the sunshine, with the promise of a coffee from Clifton Village at the top of the hill.
I really do like these little houses. Hate to think how much you'd have to pay for them, though.
Ouch. Just looked it up. Apparently the average property sale price over the last year was £750,000. I suppose the Tesla parked to the left there should have given away the income level; the Model S sells for about £75,000 in the UK.
It's a perfectly nice street, but there's nothing too photogenic in it. I suppose that's why I didn't feel the need to raise the camera too much on previous occasions.
Mid-to-late 18th century, in the "gothick" style according to the listing. I approve of their spelling. This is definitely the right listing, as here's exactly what we see:
Symmetrical end has an elaborate Dutch gable with a 2-centred arched doorway with panelled door, and matching windows each side with lattice leaded lights. Above is a tripartite window with 2-centred arched heads, central casement with interlacing upper glazing bars and blind outer ones.
I've always really liked the big mansard-roofed houses along this stretch. There's something big and dignified about them.
And that's the end of another lunchtime jaunt. I don't know if there's any trips left in the backlog. Hopefully at some point the weather will let up a bit (we've just been through Storm Eunice and there's more heavy weather on the way, apparently) and I'll feel like heading out for a wander again.
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!
The Bedminster branch of Asda—pronounced as "Asdawl" by proper Bristolians including my friend Cindy—is enormous and pretty much always busy. It used to be my local supermarket when I lived at Baltic Wharf; I now have a couple of smaller "metro"-style supermarkets I tend to visit now I live in Hotwells. I think the last time I came here I was after something from the pharmacy that my local place didn't have.
This is Little Miss Sunshine, by Will Blood. Apparently the visible skeleton is something of a theme.
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...
And we're back where we started. Incoming from the left is @beardedjourno, who is about to take the banner photo for this article, I believe :)
In the background on the right you can see another piece by AcerONE (also known as Luke) that I've previously featured.