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.
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