Tagged: wood
Autonomous Vehicle
14 Jul 2021
As it turned out, I didn't manage to get a coffee on my lunchtime coffee trip, as Imagine That were briefly shut down by a Covid-19 exposure notification (false alarm, it seems.) On the plus side, my trip was made worthwhile by spotting a couple of people from the University of Bath Mechanical Engineering Department testing an autonomous body-finding catamaran, which isn't a phrase I was ever expecting to write...
All the way to the marina, but my destination had disappeared! Lucy and Dan were fine and I saw the Imagine That horsebox back here and working the following morning.
An Evening Wander to the Gallows
06 Apr 2021
I'd originally intended just to pop up to the area around Alma Road, where I'd missed a few streets on earlier wanders. It was such a nice evening, though, I decided to extend my walk up to the very top of Pembroke Road, just outside my one mile radius, to take a few snaps of something intriguing I'd found in my researches.
I've driven, walked and jogged past the little triangle of land at the top of Pembroke road a great deal in my time in Bristol, but I didn't know that it used to be the site of a gibbet, in fact that the road itself there used to be called Gallows Acre Lane. According to the Durdham Down history trail, by Francis Greenacre (an excellent name for a Downs researcher!) among other sources:
...it was below this quarry near the top of Pembroke Road, once called Gallows Acre Lane, that a gibbet stood. It was sometimes occupied by those who had committed robberies on the Downs and was last used in 1783 to hang Shenkin Protheroe for the murder of a drover. Stories quickly spread that he descended from the gibbet at midnight every night and stalked through Clifton. Such was the alarm that his body was cut down
and buried.
Also very close to this little triangle of land was one of the gates of the extensive turnpike system...
Anyway. Along the way I encountered a wooden tortoise and a real squirrel, among other things. It was a good walk, and more light in the evenings means I can move my wanders out of the ticking countdown clock of work lunch-hours and be a bit more leisurely.
This fella definitely wasn't here a few years back, when I used to commute to work at Axa at the top of Whiteladies Road past this garden.
There's a lot of outdoor trails of one kind or other going on, what with the current cicumstances.
The late, great Maggie Shapland was a familiar feature to anyone interested in historical industry in Bristol.
I think the first time I saw her was on an Open Doors Day for the Clifton Rocks railway, the disused funicular from the Avon Gorge Hotel down to near the landing stage in Hotwells, and the last time was when she was helping to restore Brunel's Other Bridge at Howard's Lock.
Both times I think she'd driven there in one or other of the classic cars she maintained. Sometimes when the garage door here was open on the way past you could sneak a look at the collection.
The last thing I saw her drive was this Moss kit car.
An amazing person by all accounts, I never knew that we shared the profession of "Database Consultant"...
Cliftonwood and a Secret Garden
03 Dec 2020
I love the isolation of Cliftonwood -- the geography of it, with its solid boundary of Clifton Vale to the west and Jacob's Wells Road to the east mean that you tend not to be in Cliftonwood unless you've got a reason to be there. It's not a cut-through to anywhere, at least not from side-to-side, and you can only really exit to the south on foot.
I sense that I'd be happy living in Cliftonwood -- like my bit of Hotwells, it's a quiet little area with a sort of quirky feel to it. Plus it contributes the colourful houses that are the backdrop of about half of all Bristol postcards ever made :)
I found the "secret" garden especially interesting, just for the fact that it really does feel quite secret, despite the obvious name on the gate. I've lived a half-mile from it for twenty years and I don't think I've ever noticed it before, despite exploring the area a few times.
From the Independent obit, March 1999:
PETER WARE was one of the West Country's most eminent architects. He was a leading member of the generation of conservationists who acted in time to save the region's historic building stock in the Sixties and Seventies, and a versatile designer too of modern edifices.
...
Among his less prominent jobs was the transformation of the threatened 18th-century Hope Chapel in Hotwells into a flourishing community centre. One of its most successful activities became an annual pantomime. Ware, in Edwardian bathing costume or silly hat, dancing the tango with a dummy or being fired from a mock cannon, was a staple of the cast. He greatly enjoyed a bit of clowning and a good laugh.
Until he and his wife Marie moved out of Hotwells in 1996, to be nearer to their horses and woodland, Ware remained a faithful participant in the minutiae of neighbourhood affairs, chairing the Dowry Square Garden Committee, and was always on hand with technical advice on houses, keenly interested in local planning matters.
Something about this seems Greek, possibly because a Greek capital Rho looks like an English "P".
I did once have a beer in the garden when it was The Spring Gardens. It became La Demi Lune for a while, from what I remember, then shut down. Having just Googled it, before it was the Spring Gardens apparently it was "Durty Nelly's"!
From what I can see on Street View it's just flats now, but I can't be sure without going and having a proper look around the front. Maybe next time...
I got curious about Bioinduction's sign down on the Hotwell Road once. According to the company's website theire mission is to "develop a precisely targetted brain pacemaker that offers new hope for the millions of sufferers... To revolutionise the treatment of cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases where there is no effective drug therapy available today."
Apparently Gnodal "was a computer networking company headquartered in Bristol, UK. The company designed and sold network switches for datacenter, high-performance computing and high-frequency trading environments"
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...
I've mentioned before the suggestion (apparently from Pete Wills, senior electrical engineer) that this building is haunted by the ghost of a worker who fell from the roof into the building but whose body was never found... Maybe I should have waited until Hallowe'en to feature the substation!
You can't see much. If you want some photos of the current sorry state of the interior, have a look at this Tweet from Pete Insole,
Historic Environment Officer at Bristol City Council, and founder of Know Your Place.
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.
The Long Lunchtime at the End of the World
27 Nov 2020
I took an extra-long break at lunchtime today as I'd taken the day off my normal day-job to do the accounts for my previous side-job, which is still generating paperwork, though not much in the way of money. This took me through some undiscovered bits of Cliftonwood, including Worlds End Lane, which unexpectedly leads to White Hart Steps. That's certainly not where I expected the end of the world to lead to...
You'll have trouble getting the bus up the White Hart steps.
Edit to add: According to my friend Jess (a very reliable source of information about Cliftonwood who's quoted in this Bristol Post article about the bus stop) it was put in 15 years ago as part of the West Bristol Arts Trail...
A long ramble, starting with trying to find the Hot Well of Hotwells and leading up the side of the Avon Gorge to the Downs and then through Clifton for coffee.
Ten O'Clock Shop and Can't Dance Coffee
30 Nov 2020
I had to return a faulty AirPod Pro to Apple (there's a first-world problem!) so I just took a quick trip up the hill to the nearest UPS drop-off point, The Ten O'Clock Shop, which is famously open until 11pm. Unfortunately it's a fairly cramped little place and neither of the staff were wearing masks, so I made it a very quick drop indeed and got out of there as quickly as I could.
I grabbed a quick coffee from Can't Dance, a stall that's—as of yesterday—in a tiny converted cargo container on the edge of Victoria Square; up until this week they were running from a little trike parked in the same place. Hopefully the new premises will let them see out the winter without worrying quite so much about the weather.
I tried to fit in a few extra streets from the surrounding area on my there and back, but that was basically my wander today: a quick little shopping trip.
Around the back of the White Rabbit, which was the Richmond Spring when I first moved to the area, I think.
I'm not a great fan of their coffee, but that was based on a single try, so I should probably give them another go at some point. But there's so much coffee nearby that's pretty much guaranteed to be excellent—Twelve, Foliage, Spicer+Cole, to name but three—it's hard to take a chance.
Got your work cut out making that window look good. They were actually working around the corner.
Fruitless Coffee Excursion
01 Dec 2020
Unfortunately by the time I got to Greville Smyth Park I was already about halfway through my lunch-hour, and the queue was too long to wait to actually get a coffee. Is that a fruitless excursion? Presumably a coffee bean is technically a fruit...
This kind of vague musing was sadly overshadowed by my delay at Ashton Avenue Bridge on the way back, where someone—hopefully still a someone, rather than a body—was being stretchered up the bank of the river, presumably having just been rescued from the water. As I made my way home the long way around, avoiding the cordoned-off area at the back of the CREATE centre and its car park, I saw an ambulance haring across the Plimsoll Bridge, siren running, presumably on its way to the BRI. I'd like to think that was a good sign.
Looks like a rubber duck perched on a (maybe) fibreglass pole. Wonder if this is an actual radio shack? Or does someone just want to really extend their Wi-Fi :D
Nothing New
02 Dec 2020
This may be the very first time I've gone for a One Mile Matt wander and not actually gone down any new roads, trod any new steps. I just wanted a coffee, frankly, so I went the same old way to Imagine That in the marina and back again.
I'm always a little worried that one day a swan's going to get garotted by this wire strung across the bit of Cumberland Basin behind the little causeway. It's used by the water football (?) people to string their goal up.
As I understand it, these are the numbers assigned to the people (who am I kidding? men.) who lived in the dockers' houses on Avon Crescent; the houses still have their separate numbers.
An office for one of the industrial places along Coronation Road; I think this is the back of the metal spraying yard rather than the tannery.
Strangers' Burial Ground
04 Dec 2020
I tried to find the Strangers' Burial Ground the last time was up in Clifton, but I'd not realised that Lower Clifton Hill continues further on after the turning with Constitution Hill. Sadly it was chained shut, but it still looks beautifully-maintained, perhaps by the same man referenced by this story from John Hodgson, which helped me find it. Apparently Thomas Beddoes is buried here.
He sounds... a little unusual. Just to be clear, it's the pederasty I'm frowning at, not the homosexuality.
This is a fine, friendly little pub. I think I was first introduced to it on a Flickr meet ten or fifteen years ago.
