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.