(no, I didn’t)
And on to the last of my BS walks – a merging of BS8, BS9, and BS11.
37 BS postcodes radiate out from Bristol city centre, going right up to BS49, but there is no BS12. Nor a BS13. So right back at the start of these jaunts I decided to call a halt at the end of BS11.
BS8 warranted a return visit because it houses so many Bristol landmarks which I’d yet to explore; BS10, on the other hand, does not. Out came the blue pencil and that one bit the dust. BS9 – where I’ve lived for years – is amenable, it has its good points, it’s hardly exciting, but it helpfully locates itself between crowd pleasing BS8 and more interesting than you expect BS11. So that decided it. And this way I would follow the River Avon from within sight of the city’s original harbour downstream to within sight of today’s Port of Bristol Authority docks. So in theory I could see three ships sailing into three ports.
For a lot of these walks I’ve used the little Severn Beach branch line to get me to and from and so I began this last walk at Clifton Down station. This is deepest BS8, not quite the grand Georgian squares and terraces of Clifton proper just yet, more the Victorian coat tail streets where the villas grow larger the nearer they are to the epicentre of Bristol’s finest display of mercantile success.
A few streets later I reached Pembroke Road, a long wide road, edged by some of the largest villas in the city. Without shops, pubs or any other reason to dally, it’s a speedy way of getting out of the built up area and so it’s one of my routes from A to B, but I’ve never stopped.
Of course, I knew where All Saints (1860s, Anglo Catholic) stands. I’d registered it as I drove past. But not for good reason. With the confidence of one completely ignorant of the field, I regarded it as an execrable 1960s modernisation project which should never have got off the drawing board. I hated its unsympathetic tacking on of a glass and concrete monstrosity to the sturdy red stone tower. And as for that spire…
Why did anyone ever think that any of it was a good idea?
Naturally I’d not been in.
Oh my goodness, was I wrong.
Inside it is stunning. Gloriously lofty, open and reverent without being echoing, contemporary despite being 60 years old, softly light and – will you look at that blue.
The stained glass is by John Piper who, from his Wikipedia page, seems to have been one of the busiest artists of his generation – Coventry Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral et al, Shell Guides, war artist and so on.
It’s not actually stained glass to be precise. It’s a technique Piper developed using fibreglass and resin. But isn’t it just fabulous?
And this Church was not a casualty of an earlier generation’s over enthusiasm for hacking places about to move with the times. Wrong again. This is a building that has had to move with rather earlier times as it suffered a direct hit in the Blitz in 1940. Only the tower and a small side chapel survived.
The latter – though carefully preserved – felt rather dull and dusty after the magnificence elsewhere.
After that unexpected delight I was off again, across the road and along to the next corner. Just a couple of hundred metres took me from one spectacular modern Church to… another one. (I feel obliged to remark that like buses, you wait ages for one to appear and then two come along at once).
This is the Roman Catholic Cathedral (1972) and my, what an exciting place this neck of the woods must have been back then. Now this Cathedral I had visited – to see the glass, of which more later – but I didn’t have too many memories of it. The first thing to say – which is actually the last thing I thought – is how sensitively the architects of the two Churches have responded to each other’s designs. It would, I assume, have been so easy for the Roman Catholics to try to out crenelate the Anglo Catholics. But no. This is a stunning design which neither apes nor outdoes what the neighbours have done.
That was my last thought. My first thought was Why those ghastly hexagonal paving slabs?
I have a real thing about them, since inheriting a garden in which broken hexagonal slabs were hidden amidst the shrubs. Pink concrete does not age well.
But then I got it – the whole Cathedral building is based on the hexagon. It’s the theme that runs through the entire place from the footprint to the door handles and it makes for the most wonderfully awe inspiring, yet reverent again, space. I’m sure that there’s a spiritual message in the hexagon too but, well, I never said I was deep so you’re going to have to fill that one in for yourself.
It’s huge space and full of light, but from most angles it’s devoid of colour or ornamentation. It’s a very restrained, calm space. But what’s this along two of the west(ish) walls?
Colour that’s beyond glorious, the sort of glass you want to touch and watch how the light plays over your hand.
This is not traditional stained glass either. It’s dalle de verre, it’s great chunks of rough hewn but shaped glass embedded in a frame. I cannot imagine that it’s simple to create but what a result.
From the sublime, I inevitably moved straight on to the ridiculous.
And then I was into Georgian Clifton with its honey coloured terrace and squares, all rather appealing.
Through an alley way, under an arch, and into Boyces Avenue
which, on this August Bank Holiday morning, was looking picture perfect should you be seeking to illustrate a piece on how to spend a Bank Holiday morning. Dodging coffee shops – never fear going thirsty around here – I headed for Royal York Crescent. Which is rather special. (Helen Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk refers.)
It’s bigger than that one they’ve got in Bath but as it’s not been so bound up by subsequent planning department red tape it’s a good deal less uniform in appearance. Still very pleasing all the same.
Naturally it’s attracted the big names over the years, the known and the no longer known.
The Paragon next door is pretty fine too.
From here, you can look down to the harbourside and away over the hills.
Too built up between here and there to see any ships now, not that Bristol is a commercial port any more, but back in the day I imagine it would have been a forest of masts.
Around the corner and up a rather quaint street, large houses backing onto the very edge of the Avon Gorge on one side, smaller properties on this side with their front doors set above the street.
I was just trying to snap a balcony supported by four caryatids when I heard someone call my name. Result – no photo, but an interesting conversation instead with John, an acquaintance of many years, who was out for a stroll too. He and his friends are serious walkers – long treks and mountain climbs – so explaining my BS outings felt a little, well, pedestrian but charmingly he professed interest. When he heard that I had a certain nature reserve on my route, he said that I must find the bench by the pond dedicated to his friend who’d died on one of his walking group walks. We don’t tend to talk about that very much he added. Understandably.
We parted company at the Suspension Bridge which was busy with people wandering around looking at things: the view, the bridge, the unicorn.
Bristol has had lots of these trails over the years, with all manner of fibreglass figures popping up around the city, and I’ve loved them and the ingenious way in which artists have made them their own. But the unicorns don’t hit the spot for me somehow. Too skinny and standoffish somehow.
And isn’t that horn just asking for trouble?
Enough of that. On to the slidey rocks. Or to be precise, a rock face down which people slide, thanks to generations of Bristolian backsides having previously polished the way.
No idea how long it’s been like this or indeed how it started. Just how many trouser seats suffered in its creation, I ask?
From this high point above the Avon Gorge you can look upstream over the bridge and in towards the city
and then downstream out towards where the Avon joins the Severn and heads off towards the sea.
That’s where I was going.
But first the Promenade – a very splendid avenue of beech trees which looks gorgeous in all seasons and which makes me want to cheer whoever it was who had the bright idea of planting them here.
Across the Downs via another less impressive avenue (good effort all the same) and over to Sea Walls for another look at the river.
The Downs is a 400 acre spread of open space and it is usually one giant expanse of green. Circuses and fairgrounds come and go and a couple of times a year, music festivals set up camp. Sometimes with rather oppressive fences.
On the other side of the Downs, BS9 begins as the route winds through Sneyd Park. Here were the almost country houses of the Victorian merchants.
Some houses survive, but many are long gone, their plots buried beneath twentieth century suburbia. BS9 is my postcode, but despite the many years, decades indeed, that I’ve been here I’ve never ventured over to this side. Which is pretty shameful, if I’m honest. I’ve heard of Bishops Knoll Wood and Old Sneed Park (yes, it is spelled differently in different spots) but I’d never been.
What a revelation they turned out to be and what an uplifting tale of generosity by the owners of the now demolished Bishops Knoll house.
I got myself a bit lost in the woods here.
I got to the bottom of the slope and was aiming for the small strip of flat land next to the river, where the little single track railway line squeezes along next to the big dual carriageway. By taking a woodland path going further down, rather than the one going up, I ended up in the sharp nose of a triangle bounded by the railway line and a fence. Back up the hill then.
Then through a gate and immediately down again into the nature reserve.
Wow, this is a huge space of managed for wildlife open space. It’s in the midst of suburbia, yet pretty much hidden from view. I never imagined it would be so big.
And the pond was huge.
Surely a small lake? How was I going to find Kevin’s bench here?
Strangely I went straight to it.
After a break on the bench, I headed back towards the path, past purposeful blackberry pickers, and up into the woods. I say up through gritted teeth.
I am not a fan of hills. Never have been. Throw in a touch of arthritis in the hip and they’re well and truly off my Christmas card list. So I planned all these BS walks to start at the highest points and work my way down. It had worked so far but now it looked like I was to get my comeuppance. No soon as I was at the top of the slope but the path headed downhill again. Ah well, I thought, that’ll get me to Portway and from there it’ll be a short flat stretch to my next point.
Hmmm, instead it’ll be 200m along a dual carriageway with no pavement and nowhere to step off the road to avoid the bus. Yes or no?
No.
Enough of the moaning – there was something interesting ahead. A site I’ve driven by hundreds of times but never stopped to take a closer look.
Seems it wasn’t just the Victorians who enjoyed the river views. Yes, it’s the remains of a Roman villa. Handy for the bus stop. Oh, ha ha ha. It was discovered in 1934 by Alfred Selley, an amateur archaeologist. Not sure which of these rather formally dressed fellows is Mr Selley, but I’ll guess that he is the one keeping his overcoat on.
This spot where the now insignificant Trym meets the Avon was once a Roman harbour. Must have been some major changes in river levels since then, I guess. Sea Mills station, which sits in the corner of the two waterways, is one of my most favourite stations.
Undoubtedly more beautiful, more isolated halts exist elsewhere, but this quiet watery spot is just so unexpected in the midst of the suburban sprawl.
Across the river, on the Somerset side, is the towpath that sticks to the river’s edge for pretty much all of the way into the city. It’s popular with walkers, runners and cyclists, even though it is rough underfoot in places. On this side though I didn’t see a soul. The path wanders in and out but for a while I found myself near the water.
The path had just moved inland again and passed under a railway bridge when I heard the sound of a buzzy little motor bike from behind me. I couldn’t see anything but it sounded pretty close. On my own, no one about, hidden from view from both rail to my left and road to my right – not great. I only had a bank card and a phone on me, but I really didn’t want to lose either. So I hurried on in the hope that something would turn up to improve the situation. It did. Another set of blasted steps.
Buzzy little motorbikes, like Daleks, cannot do steps. And once I’d calmed down I realised that as I could no longer hear it, it was probably on the opposite bank, bothering – or hopefully not bothering – someone else. But it spooked me all the same.
There followed an interminable series of flights of steps up followed almost immediately by flights down. Every time I thought I’d come to the end another came into view. The railway clings perilously to the edge of a river cliff here, while the road blasts its way through a cutting, and the path is left to pick its way in between, hence the gradients, hence the steps.
I guess they ran out of money for a nice gentle footpath then. Although they did furnish us with a very wide pavement, so it would be churlish to complain to the 1920s road builders that the noise from the 2020s traffic makes that option pretty unlovely.
At the top of the final flight
I got a fabulous view of the horseshoe bend which put paid to Bristol as a commercial port.
The ships got bigger, so the bend got harder to navigate, especially with the huge tidal range. Although a declining number of commercial vessels continued to use Bristol right up into the 1970s, in 1877 a new port was built at Avonmouth. This was then a boggy uninhabited spot on the north bank just where the Avon joins the Severn (which soon turns into the Celtic Sea and then the Atlantic Ocean). But the enormous modern container ships outgrew the Avonmouth docks so a new port was opened over on the south bank at Portbury in 1978. Cars and vans come in there, while fruit and veg and the occasional cruise ship comes in to Avonmouth. Plus bananas, lots and lots of bananas.
Somewhere along the line I had passed into BS11 and fetched up on the edge of Shirehampton. I had planned to divert up the hill and into the village itself the better to see a few sights and drop a few names. Alas, after eight miles and all the unexpected upping and downing my hip was screaming for mercy so I continued along the downhill strait to the finish line.
But over the next couple of days, I went back and walked the rest of the course so I’m going to tack it on here anyway.
Shirehampton is a pleasant, but unprepossessing, place that developed in the late nineteenth century, perhaps in tandem with Avonmouth, and then grew through the twentieth century with the expansion in the city’s social housing provision. It’s got a very splendid public hall, courtesy of the man in the big house up the hill, who was a friend to musicians
and it’s got a supermarket with antecedents of renown.
(Although it pleases me – and no one else – to call it Wordsworth’s Co-Op, as they were only there for a few weeks that’s probably pushing the connection a little too far. More holiday rental than home sweet home).
Heading out and back down towards the water again, here’s that little branch line one last time and here’s a station that’s opened since I started these postcode walks back in February.
And on one bank is Avonmouth,
while across the river is Portbury.
Finally to the end, to the Lamplighters and
to the site of the ancient ferryway across to Pill (until the M5 bridge put paid to it).
lt’s also the spot where William of Orange/William II of Scotland/William III of England/King Billy/half of William and Mary came ashore after the Battle of the Boyne.
On which I have nothing to add.
Woman, walking 