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

 

Leigh Woods

Now I live in a home with paintings on every wall but in the Gloucester Road house where I grew up there was, for many years only one piece of original art, hanging above the sideboard in the largely unused front room. It was an oil painting of a woodland scene, all greens and browns and dark shadows, at once both empty of people and yet claustrophobic. It hung there throughout my childhood and stayed there for all the time that my parents were alive. My mother said that it was a painting of Leigh Woods and that the artist had been a friend of my father. She said that it had been given as a wedding present.

 

One time my father walked me through the woods and told me that it was a home for tramps, and people living in wooden shacks who couldn’t find a place to live in the city. It was easy to imagine this, in the gloomy late afternoon woods and, then in the dark corners of the picture that hung in our front room.  Nowadays we would recognise those woodland dwellers as homeless, many with mental health and addiction problems, who have fallen through the bottom of society.

 

Although the woods are only a short walk across the suspension bridge, for a young child they felt a long way from home. When I came back to live in the city I walked the woods with their crowded trails; the young families with their buggies; the mountain bikers, and the joggers. I found it hard to recall the dark and empty woods of the painting and my childhood memory, in the other place that lies behind the world that we see. Sometimes I try to imagine the artist who painted the picture and wonder why he, or perhaps she, never came to see the picture hanging in our front room.

 

Enough of this gloomy stuff. After all, this is a tourist guide of a kind, so you you must go and walk the wildwoods that lie just outside the city, on the far side of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and find the magic for yourself. Marvel at the views across the Avon Gorge and wander around the remains of the Iron Age Fort.  Walk to the far end of the woods and let your dogs swim in the pools of Paradise Bottom, where you can look at the beautiful trees and find the grotto, which has the charm of a bus shelter but great views across and along the Avon Gorge.  Stray from the main paths with their walkers and mountain bikers and lose yourself in the wonderful urban forest that is Leigh Woods.

 

Do not fear, in 2020 the woods are too well policed for the homeless to attempt another colonisation.  No middle class sensibilities will be offended in this place.

 

Bristol: The Unreliable Guide to the Two Cities

 I returned to Bristol after forty years of living away. For some time after I had returned to the city I was obsessed with the extent of the changes to the city over that period.  I was initially overwhelmed by the feeling that we were living in two cities, not one, though whether the separation was in time (between the city of my childhood and the modern day city) or geography (inner and outer city, or, east and west city) was not initially clear to me. We had moved back to a place that was on the one hand quite familiar but in many ways utterly different to the one that I had left to go to college at eighteen years of age. I found this mismatch a source of creative energy and used this in my writing and in my painting. Much of my writing has been either directly or indirectly centred on understanding this dichotomy.

     I was, at the same time, disappointed in the lack of interest in the city’s evolution expressed by our neighbours and new acquaintances. These were mostly people who had moved to the city from elsewhere in the country and they seemed to me to have little interest in the place that they now live in beyond the lifestyle benefits that the city confers on them. They did not know, or appear to care about any of the city’s neighbourhoods that lay outside the middle class bubble of west Bristol; they knew nothing of the city’s football teams and never visited its pubs. Their knowledge of the city’s history was thin and extremely selective. On the very few times that I was asked about how the city had changed in my absence I would begin by describing the city that I left in the mid-1970s as a dull provincial city where nothing much ever happened.  It is fairly obvious to me that most of the middle class incomers that now live in our part of the city can’t or don’t wish to connect with this idea, whether it is true or not. It was rare for me to get any kind of response and many people just didn’t seem to have heard me. It is as if my words refer to somewhere that is so far from their personal experience and beliefs about the city that it cannot be true.  Perhaps my words are too damaging to the sense of self-esteem that they have built up through living in this undoubtedly desirable and popular city. I long to be asked what I mean by that statement, but the questions never come.  My words do not resonate at all. Unlike me they are only interested in the present day city, and in all honesty I am not sure whether I have any right to criticise them for this.  The fact that I am living in their city, and at the same time in the older one of my memories is my problem, not theirs, and the reality is that I am talking about a place that few of those incomers ever saw; a city that is lost to time, truly alive only in the memory of those who were there. For me it is the city that lies behind the one that we can see today, and I am trapped somewhere between these two places.  While my neighbours see only the current day city, perhaps I still see and feel too much of the old city. Much of my writing is about how I reconcile the Bristol of my memory with the city that I live in today and that does not always provide for a straightforward narrative.

    It is quite possible that my ability to see the two cities simultaneously has not solely arisen out of my long absence from the city. My grandparents also had a tendency to see an earlier city, the city of their youth, so perhaps it is a function of age as much as physical absence. At times my grandparents appeared to only be able to experience a location in the modern city by referencing back to what was in that place in an earlier time – “yerrz ago”, or, "in my time", they would say, and I often find myself speaking in a similar way, to the confusion and frequently the disinterest of others.

    Most of all, I suppose, this blog is about how I reconcile the Bristol of my memory with the city that I live in today and that does not always provide for a straightforward narrative. There is no thesis to explore and there is no resolution to the tension between the two cities.