Tyne Walk

 Tyne Walk, Bishopston. Oil Paintings.

Some More Paintings of the City

 

Painting: A Map of Horfield

 

City Map

 

                                                            Painting: City Map

Visitors should be aware that any map of the city is likely to be just as untrustworthy as my memory and should not be relied on as a way of navigating the present day city.  Visitors are advised to place no more reliance on the city maps that are currently available than they would on, using a map of Tolkein’s Middle Earth to navigate around the South West of England. Unfortunately these city maps have a regrettable tendency to change at each iteration and edit. The reason for this is not because of the rapid pace of redevelopment in some parts of the city making maps quickly redundant, nor is it due to the rapid growth of urbanisation at the urban fringe. On the contrary, it is largely down to how the city’s many neighbourhoods are defined and constantly re-defined by the imaginations of estate agents and residents. The city is in such a constant process of evolution that any map published will hold good for a matter of days at the very most.

            The phenomena can be explained through a closer examination of two of the city’s largest neighbourhoods: Horfield in the north of the city, and Bedminster in the south. I am familiar with Horfield, having spent the first eighteen years of my life there, and it does to me appear to have shrunk somewhat since I was a child, nibbled away at the edges by more desirable areas.  In my memory Horfield extended most of the way down Gloucester Road, but now the Horfield Prison, which is about half way along the road’s length, lies at the very southern limits of Horfield and seems in danger of being swallowed by the estate agent’s creation of North Bishopston. It goes without saying that these days a Bishopston address is far more desirable than a Horfield address. Within the next few years it is almost certain that the cramped and insanitary nineteenth century prison will close, and when it is redeveloped for housing, as it inevitably will be, I doubt very much that those houses will be advertised as being located in Horfield. In many people’s minds the name of Horfield is now associated only with the Council estates that were developed in the open country beyond the Victorian terraces in the 1930s, not the Victorian core of the area, along the Gloucester Road.

The same process can be seen at work in Bedminster, the former centre of the tobacco industry and one of the city’s white working class heartlands. Bedminster is under attack on three sides. To the west, Ashton Gate, once just the name of a football ground is now a neighbourhood in its own right that has annexed Bedminster’s North Street. To the east, Bedminster is threatened by the newly resurgent Totterdown with its hipster bars and cafes threatening to invade Bedminster’s solid terraces.

To the north of Bedminster an area called Southville has emerged. Southville is hardly mentioned on historic maps, being the name for an area of just a few streets on the south side of the New Cut, around St Pauls Church, but it has now it taken ownership of all of the more desirable streets along the Cut, from the Bedminster Asda, all the way through to Ashton Gate.  There is even a story, hopefully an urban myth because I would not want it to be true, that estate agents once attempted to rebrand this area as Lower Clifton in order to capitalise on the appeal of the Clifton name. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, I hardly dare mention Clifton, lest its army of braying public school boys and girls, and entitled university students attempt to invade the whole city, but it was itself once subject to a rebranding exercise. In the 1960s and 1970s Clifton was not the place that it is now. It was a place of crumbling Georgian and Regency terraces and cold and damp student flats, and old ladies hanging on in Victorian mansions that they could not afford to maintain. The then low property prices made it allegedly a creative hub for artists and musicians. In the early 1970s a group of folk musicians, in an attempt to enliven the local music scene hit on the idea that if New York had its Greenwich Village, then Bristol could have a Clifton Village. In the long term the rebrand probably didn’t do much for the local folk music scene but it was taken up by estate agents who saw it as a useful tool in their attempts to up-market the area and the name has stuck. Clifton remains the most successfully and completely gentrified neighbourhood in the city. 

I am sure that the process of mutation that has gone on in Horfield and Bedminster is apparent elsewhere in the city. In the east of the city I sense that Easton is expanding as Eastville fades away, following the old stadium into memory, though it will be saved from utter oblivion by its wonderful park. I sense that St George is in decline, shrinking as Redfield is born and grows.  In the south-east, Sandy Park has carved a space for itself out of the mass of Brislington. Small wonder that map makers find themselves with an impossible task.

In the absence of reliable maps the best way to know the city is by walking it. Your mind will form its own maps, without paper or digital assistance, but even then you may find that the most pleasure is to be found in ignoring all the maps and allowing yourself to become lost in the many geographies and histories of this multi-layered city, just as I am.

Three Lamps and The Bush

 

One arm of the Three Lamps signpost points the way uphill along the Wells Road to Totterdown. There, high up on Ravenhill Road was my grandparent’s house, bought brand new in 1939 for £525. It was the first and only home that they ownedand it must have been quite an achievement for the family of a tobacco factory worker to move out of their council house in Bedminster and into their brand new home. They it bought just in time to watch from their upstairs windows as the city centre burned less than a mile away in the Bristol Blitz of 1940. Also, in Totterdown was the house in Oxford Road where a single room was my parent’s first married home.

When you are very young and don’t really understand the geography of the city some places take on a mythical quality, and so it was with my grandparent’s frequent references to “Three Lamps” and “The Bush”. Now I know the Three Lamps as a wonderfully ornate signpost at the junction of the Bath Road and the Wells Road, not far from Temple Meads Station.. The Bush is somewhat diminished, being just a modern pub on the Wells Road, the original having been demolished to make way for an urban motorway in the early 1970s. That scheme was strongly resisted by local people and eventually scrapped so that at least some of Totterdown, along with much of the city centre was saved. Totterdown has become, in its modern day incarnation a hipster outpost with, vertiginous roads and spectacular views across the city, the last stutter of the central city before the South Bristol housing estates begin.

After you have seen Totterdown, take the left fork from Three Lamps, along Bath Road to visit the wonderful Victorian Cemetery at Arnos Vale.  There are many ornate tombs in a landscape that has been partly reclaimed by nature, giving it a feeling of true wildness. There is a small display in the vault beneath the café with the original cremation machinery. It’s a very strange feeling for me to see the ovens where my grandparents’ bodies were incinerated, no doubt along with many other members of my extended South Bristol family who are unknown to me.

At Arnos Vale there is a wonderful memorial, in the style of an Indian temple to Rajah Rammohun Roy, the great Hindu reformer, and, in a prominent position near the entrance gates, there is a memorial statue to a footballer who nobody remembers, but was clearly loved by the family that commissioned the monument.

 

The Back Lanes of North Bristol

 Throughout the older housing areas of Horfield, Bishopston and Redland there is a network of back lanes behind the terraced houses. Some are wide enough for cars to pass down to access garages while others are only wide enough to be walked along in single file.  While the small front gardens of this area are usually neatly kept it is in the back lanes where home owners relax and allow walls and fences to decay, and trees and shrubs to grow freely with only occasional trimming and the truths of the lives that the city’s inhabitants live is exposed. When I was a child these lanes were the way that we got to explore our neighbourhood and they were our main playground.  By giving us access to the usually unseen side of houses and their views into kitchens and living rooms they taught us how other people lived their lives, with the thrill of being somewhere that we were not really supposed to be.

Off Longmead Avenue there was a long section of lane that ran between the houses and the walls of Horfield Prison. This was a particularly daunting traverse and we hurried along with the high red brick prison wall towering above us on one side and the tiny back gardens of the houses, some with their wartime Anderson Bomb Shelters still in place on the other.

In the first term of my degree course at the Polytechnic of the South Bank we were tasked with designing a layout for a new housing area. I submitted a layout based on terraces of houses with a complicated network of back lanes linking them. I provided a written justification for the layout saying how the back lanes would be a meeting place and they would foster a sense of community. I failed to achieve a pass mark. The tutors, heads full of rising car ownership and Radburn layouts just did not get it at all.

The back lanes are extremely varied in their character. In Redland and Henleaze they take on a rather green and suburban air.  On the other hand, off Gloucester Road, near to the Memorial stadium there is a somewhat foreboding warren of narrow lanes where you are hemmed in by harsh brick and concrete walls, baked hot in summer like miniature canyons. The back lane that I played on as a child was a triangle of wasteland at the rear of three terraces, with a rough track running behind the Gloucester Road houses to access a number of ramshackle wooden garages and garden sheds. We called the waste ground “the dump”, and that is what it served as for most of the year. Through October we built a huge bonfire on the land, scavenging cardboard and wooden boxes from local traders while local residents would add to the pile their unwanted furniture and rags. By bonfire night the pile would tower ominously and dangerously over the surrounding houses. We aimed to light the bonfire around 7pm but in most years local teenagers would subvert our plans by arriving with small cans of petrol and matches to start the fire ahead of schedule. The dump was developed for lock up garages many years ago and offers little for the visitor today but there are still many other back lanes that are worth viewing.

                                            Painting: The Dump

 I can’t believe that children are still allowed to roam the back lanes as we did but they are still there for the adventurous tourist to find.  See if you can find one of the tiny bomb shelters still standing in a back garden.

 

Paintings: Back Lanes