Tagged: window
Docks Heritage Weekend Day One
09 Oct 2021
I could spend a lot of time at the Docks Heritage Weekend, poking my nose into industrial places along the harbourside that are usually closed off, but throw open their doors once a year to show off a bit of the backstage area of Bristol's floating harbour. In fact, I warn you: the next wander is a long one, and will have quite a few photos.
However, for today's wander, on the Saturday, my friend Lisa needed a shorter walk than our usual long rambles, as she's recovering from an operation and still a little under the weather, so we just wandered into town for some food and back, with me making mental notes of the places I wanted to come back to on the Sunday... We walked through Underfall Yard, along to the L Shed (this is the warehouse next to the M Shed museum, where they still have the kind of fun old industrial stuff that used to be crammed into the M Shed's predecessor, the old Industrial Museum), through the street food market in town to Ahh Toots for cake and then back home. So, still quite a walk, but no hills and not so much of Lisa having to hang around waiting for me to fool around taking photos as usual, at least...
The Patent Slip is actually a grade II listed building. Personally I live in a II*-graded building myself; not sure I'd want to slum it down here.
They're among the first to show autumn colour in Bristol, so by early October they're in full effect.
I figured I'd try a bit of street photography, seeing as there were actually people around. This isn't bad for a from-the-hip shot, but I'm a bit out of practice, as you'd expect.
Of course, it's not on the quay any more, because they moved the quay. However, St Mary's Facebook page has at least one picture of it from when this strip of the city centre was still the river.
I wasn't expecting to see a train carriage in the Lloyds amphitheare. Apparently it's got something to do with Stephen Merchant's new drama The Outlaws. They're filming some of it down at my end of the harbour soon, too; I've had a letter through the door about night shoots that'll be closing sections of the Hotwell Road.
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...
Via this Tweet and taken from KYP Bristol, showing the interior with a couple of Westinghouse rotary converters and a Peebles-La Cour motor converter, assuming this picture ties up roughly with this 1908 Institute of Mechanical Engineers' visit to works.
You can see a picture of similar Westinghouse converters to the two at the back in the Wikipedia rotary converter page and a Peebles converter that looks very similar to the one in the foreground on the cover of the Peebles motor converter catalogue in the sidebar of their entry in Grace's Guide. I'm guessing the additions on the ends of the Westinghouse converters were for different voltages? A rotary converter is basically a motor connected to a dynamo, so extra dynamos with different windings would give you different voltage outputs, I suppose, but I know very little about power generation.
Most of the gear in this docks machine room is belt driven from a motor we'll see in a bit. The motor is electric but the drive system is pretty much the same as it was in the days of steam.
A hydraulic accumulator, (similar to its namesake in electronics, now more commonly known as a capacitor) stores the energy. (This is done rather than just using the pumps directly as, say, you can use these weaker pumps over a long period of time to store a large amount of energy that the accumulator can release more quickly to do a job that requires more power.)
All that pumping next door has raised this accumulator—basically a big drum full of 80 tons of scrap metal—high off the ground where it normally sits these days. This is the stored energy that's sitting on top of the water in the hydraulic system, ready to be diverted to anything around the docks that needs power. Up until as recently as 2010, this was the power source that opened and closed the main Cumberland Basin lock gates. Without it no ship could have entered or left the harbour.
I've really taken all these photos in the wrong order, haven't I? This is an overview of the last many shots. The visitor centre is the right hand side of the building. The chimney behind is for the boiler that was inside in the days of steam. In the roof above the visitor centre was the header tank. The pump room we were in is where the open door is between the visitor centre part and the accumulator tower, on the left-hand end. Inside the tower is the old accumulator, and on the end of the building is the newer external accumulator, which as you can see has now descended fully to the ground as the hydraulic power has dissipated.
Can you guess? Yes, the Power House was obviously something of a target during the war. It was strafed by the Luftwaffe at one point.
Before the pumps were converted to electricity, this chimney would have been pouring smoke out pretty much 24x7, as I understand it, from the boiler in the main building to the right. It's a pleasant little visitor centre now, with a nice cafe at the back. When this was a working dock I can only imagine that it must have been like hell on earth inside.
Fresh Fields
17 Oct 2021
For the first time in a while, I had the time and energy to go further afield and knock off some new roads from my "to do" list. I headed through the first Hotwells Festival to Ashton and Bedminster to cross off a few of the suburban roads south of North Street.
First, though, I decided to try to reproduce an old photo of the now-demolished Rownham Hotel just around the corner from where I live...
Here's the view I wanted to take a stab at reproducing. Bristol's Lost Pubs—a great website, which sadly currently seems to be lost itself—said:
Originally known as the Hotwells Tavern. Around 1873 when the entrance to Cumberland Basin was enlarged, a pub named the Rownham Tavern was demolished and Rownham ferry moved downstream towards the Hotwells Tavern, not long afterwards the name was changed to the Rownham Hotel. The pub was removed in 1969 for road Widening.
This particular image is from Brewerypedia; I'm afraid I don't know its original provenance.
Here's my version. I couldn't get to the exact original viewpoint without the railings on the far left being in the way of the picture, but this is pretty close.
So, presumably the house (or possibly two?) on the end of Freeland Place, which looks to my eye just as Georgian as the rest of the terrace, must've been built after the Rownham Hotel was demolished for the road widening in 1969...
I've taken a few photos of the similar place around the corner, but I hadn't noticed there's another one of these odd mansion-mansard-bungalow-what-the-hell places here, too.
The rest of the road is just your normal-for-round-here brick boxes, really. At the end is the back of the little Winterstoke Road retail park, including PC World and Halfords, which I think are the only two shops I've ever been in there.
A Wide Angle View
30 Oct 2021
I had an unsuccessful wander last week, on Tuesday afternoon: my GPS died within about five minutes of leaving the house, and I didn't notice, plus I found hardly anything I'd been looking for. On the plus side, as I was wandering around Park Street I decided to nip into London Camera Exchange on the offchance they had a secondhand Canon 17-40mm lens. I've been thinking of buying one for around a year, I think.
Long story short: not only did they have one, but due to a mistake with their price labelling which they kindly honoured, I now have a shiny new (to me) wide-angle lens and it cost me less than £300, which is a very good price for one of these in good condition (and including a lens hood.)
So, rather than try to salvage Tuesday's walk, here's a walk where I basically just bimbled up to Clifton Village for a coffee and wandered around taking photos of as many wide views as I could find. I took a lot more photos than these seventeen, but as you might expect, a new lens takes some practice getting used to, so most of them ended up in the "outtakes" pile.
Pretty sure I couldn't have snapped the whole length of this terrace with my previous-widest lens, the 24-70. Fits fine in the 17-40.
Set back on the end of Worcester Terrace is Worcester House. I've never succeeded in getting a good snap of it. Today does not seem to be an exception. Oh well.
I've mentioned the spire before, I'm sure: colloquially known as the "three pin plug", it's apparently meant to represent the Holy Trinity.
One of several odd short-cuts and alternative routes I worked out to vary my commute to work, when work was at the top of Whiteladies Road.
Ticking Off a Few Streets in Bedminster
31 Oct 2021
There were only a few streets left to wander in the more residential bit of Bedminster, so I thought I should target those today. The streets themselves weren't that notable, though Balfour Road has a contrasting mix of old and new housing. I tried to snap a few more interesting things along the way there and back, snapping all three of the familiar bond warehouses, nipping onto North Street to find some new street art, and finding a few pumpkins for good measure. It is hallowe'en, after all...
One of the three roads I needed to knock off my list. Just a fairly average slice of suburbia, really.
There's still a few houses on Duckmoor Road (this is the corner of Duckmoor and Frobisher) that use their gardens for gardening rather than just to park cars on, and some of them even have quite big veg gardens growing.
There were quite a few signs that Frobisher Road is a sanctuary for hedgehogs. We've actually seen a similar sign at the far end, on an earlier wander that went past the end of the road.
I'd been looking at the map and wondering if I needed to walk down this, as it looked like a road. I'd say it's private, though.
Again, pretty sure this isn't a public road, and frankly it didn't look like I'd see anything interesting even if I did risk venturing to the end...
Recreating a Loxton Drawing on a Lunchtime Jaunt
05 Nov 2021
I did do a much longer wander earlier in the week, but that'll take me some time to process (and cast a plethora of photos into the "out-takes" pile!) In the meantime, here's my lunchtime jaunt, taken to give myself a break from doing the company bookkeeping to send to my accountant so the taxman doesn't sling me in chokey.
I've recently bought a slightly creased secondhand copy of Redcliffe Press's 1992 collection of Samuel Loxton drawings, Loxton's Bristol: The city's Edwardian years in black and white. It's a nice selection of Bristol Library's collection of the drawings. I'd noticed a drawing of 25 Royal York Crescent, a house I pass quite often, so I thought I'd wander up the crescent on the way to pick up some lunch and try to reproduce it.
On the way back I took a few photos of Clifton Hill Bank as the crowdfunder to make quite a lot of it into a wildflower meadow has just hit its target, so I figured some "before" shots might be a good investment for the future...
I tried to capture something of the feeling of the Loxton drawing by snapping a busy postman as part of the general scene :)
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 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.
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.
That historical photo seems to have been taken from a higher vantage point. The most likely place seems to be the B Bond, perhaps from that fire escape, or maybe the roof? Something tells me it's unlikely they'd let me up there, but you never know, maybe one day I'll ask an archivist; I think that area's part of the Bristol Archives stores...
They didn't seem to be footballers. I asked Rich at the coffee van and he said it was a Rugby match. I don't know much about sportsball.
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.
St Vincent's Parade looking a bit more run-down than normal. This street, like the one I live in, was built as lodging houses for visitors to the hot wells. I imagine it was quite a pleasant aspect before later developments like the building of the Portway.
This is the Pembroke Road ventilation tower, sometimes known as the "pound tower", as it's next to the pound the Downs maintenance people use for equipment storage.
From To Keep Open and Unenclosed, the Management of the Durdham Down Since 1861, Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 2005:
...construction of the tunnel began immediately at Cooks Folly Wood, the top of Pembroke Road and two other points. The Pembroke Road shaft was subsequently retained to ventilate the tunnel. The sinking of this shaft had reached rail level by May 1872 when Captain Beaumont's compressed air diamond drilling machine came into use. Most of the machinery associated with the diamond drilling machine was on the surface: the machine had a 4" diameter compressed air service from a 50 hp steam engine at the surface. By comparison, the engine to lift spoil and water from the tunnel was only 20 hp. The drill had to be cooled by water which was run into trucks and presumably wound to the surface. Dynamite charges were set in the holes after the dynamite had been softened by steam before use! On 10th May 1872 four pounds of dynamite exploded while being 'softened' at 2.30 a.m. blowing off the engine-house roof and smashing windows in the three houses facing the Downs at the top of Pembroke Road. Fortunately no-one was injured and when the glazier called at one house he found that the occupant had slept through the whole episode!
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.
I have, however, spent an evening in there. They do a good Old Fashioned and an excellent Manhattan, from (somewhat hazy) memory.
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!
They do make it look quite easy. I'd have definitely fallen in about a hundred times by now.
Apparently there was quite a headwind on this bit. I think keeping closer to the side helps.
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.
As my plan was to knock off the remaining section of Burwalls Road, my first photo is the small segment of Burwalls itself that you can see from near my house. Burwalls is the mansion on the hilltop, peeping out about halfway from the left edge of the photo and the Suspension Bridge.
The Burwalls site is split into two halves, according to some of the estate agents' details I've looked at. This read section has some more modern-looking places where you can buy an entire house, if you're rich.
The mansion itself has been divided up into "lateral apartments". If you don't know what those are, you probably can't afford one.
Maybe if I'd got interested in this project before the university sold the place, I'd have been able to pop in and have a look around. Still, I can't blame them; when the estate was on the market in 2012 it was Bristol's most expensive house, valued at £5m, according to the Daily Mail.
That was for the main house and the old stables and lodge, which have been converted to the housing we're looking at. Given that by 2017, just a single one of the five aforementioned lateral apartments in the main manor house was on the market for £1.5, I think the developers probably did quite well...
Our first close-up sight. Sadly the main building is disappointingly hard to take a photo of. Still, I suppose if I'd just bought a flat for one-and-a-half million quid I'd probably not want some plebe with a camera being nosy around the place.
The manor was originally built by Joseph Leech, a fascinating man who was owner of the Bristol Times. Among other fun things, he used to be the "Bristol Church-goer", publishing an anonymous and apparently quite funny column as a "mystery shopper"-style reviewer of church services.
There's a bit more about him on my blog, prompted by my buying a lovely old book by him in a secondhand shop on a previous wander.
Joseph Leech doesn't appear to have had a coat of arms, and it's not the University of Bristol's (they were another former owner), but I struck lucky with my third guess: the Wills family crest apparently features three martlets around a chevron, as on the right, and three wyverns, as on the left... Can't find anything that's exactly like this one, but them I'm not exactly au fait with heraldry.
George Wills, of the Wills Tobacco family, was Burwalls' owner after Joseph Leech.