Avon Stories

What November was like

I’ve been blogging walks I took in November, and there were some glorious sunny days, but I need to remind myself, most of it looked like this.

Actually I’m lying. That looks picturesque, and most of November was too grey and drizzly and nasty to even get the camera out. Days where the sun never seemed to rise, and the rain wasn’t heavy enough to be good for puddle photos, but was somehow the kind where every drop soaks down to the bones, freezing as it goes.

But it did mean there was a lot of this:

I’m sure that cormorants live on other rivers, in other cities, but they feel so Bristol to me. I’ll never stop grinning at them looking like miniature pterodactyls, or overgrown vampire bats. Definitely worth standing in the rain for a photo!

Repeating a walk: November adventure from Pill down the Avon

It took me a long time to be happy with the fact that a lot of my practice involves repetition and re-visiting places to see how they look at different times. I think part of this is doing a photography degree, where no project lasts more than 5 or 6 months, and each time it’s about doing something new. But one of the things my final project – and even more, my post-uni life – taught me was the value of the everyday, and how re-visiting can add depth and value in ways that continually jetting off to exotic new places can’t.

When I walked from Sea Mills across the M5 motorway bridge and down the Avon with my friend Tracy Homer in the summer, we talked about how we should definitely take that walk again, and see how it looks in different seasons, and what else we can discover. So last week we did it again, with changes – our November walk to see how the autumn looks.

Map, and click on the flickr album to see more photos, taken with my DSLR + 50mm lens and my Olympus XA2 35mm film camera. Below I have a selection of my favourite photos and thoughts about the day, along with some mini films and some sounds I recorded.

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1st November Avon view

Back at the start of the month I was taking the kind of walk I do a lot of in winter. I get SAD, and I’ve been freelancing, so I have to make a conscious effort to leave the house sometimes. One thing I do is order books from the library, so I have a continual reason to be out, dropping off read books, taking out new ones. They start off as functional, deliberate walks, rather than explorations, or leisure, but they can lead into more.

This time I started getting fascinated with the wooden structures that are built into the silt banks along the stretch of river between Bedminster Bridge and the former entrance to the Harbour at Bathurst Basin. They look so botched together, straining at the pressure of holding up the weight of the banking, and on their last legs. I wonder when they were built, how long they will last, and what will happen when they fall – and that makes me think about how so much of the New Cut has been so badly maintained, and seems like one or two big storms away from collapsing. It’s an unnatural river, and should need constant upkeep. Without it, it won’t last another 50 years, let alone 100.

My photos were bad – grey November day, just my iphone, and 200iso in my 35mm, but I love them. I hopped over the fence to look at the mechanics of the outlet that lets the Malago into the Avon, as I’m always intrigued as to what everything is. It’s this kind of view I like best, and these are the moments the functional walks turn into something more.

And it’s a continual obsession to take the same photos with multiple cameras, to see how the view changes – here’s the river from an unusual viewpoint, phone & 35mm.

The composition is better on the mobile, the colours better on film – but neither are great. I wish I’d had my medium format or DSLR with me. But I love them for the memory, and because I can’t remember seeing this view before. I want to see what it looks like in winter, and spring, and summer. Golden hour and frosty morning light, and everything between!

Exploring the river banks

I’m always trying to find new views of places I walk all the time, to try to find new photos, and it surprises me afterwards – why did I never do that before?

Last week there was a Spring tide, and the grass on all the silt banks was washed flat, so it was the perfect chance to go down onto the bank at the end of the Chocolate Path. I haven’t done this before, because the silt has holes and gaps that make it treacherous to walk on, and the grass hides that.

It’s a strange feeling, like it’s forbidden, or something. You can see people on the path taking a double look, but that’s probably about the careful footsteps, and clambering over the rivulets. The big surprise was how much the sides of the path are eroding, and look bodged together. I wanted to walk as far as the Outflow, but the bank narrows, with the trenches getting deeper, so we turned back.

It’s such a minor “new place”, but I loved it. Definitely want to do that again. More grey-ish photos below the jump…

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A November walk through Nature Reserves

Last week, Vik and I took a November walk, starting at Sea Mills, down through the nature reserves, then along the Portway to the Goat Gully, and up around the Downs to Clifton. We started a bit late for this time of year, getting on a bus at around 1pm, so by the time we’d got to the Suspension Bridge, it was definitely dusk.

I’ve been to these places before, but never as one walk, and that always shows new sides to places. The Avon always looks different every time, of course, and I’ve only been the the nature reserves in the Spring before.

Photos are in this flickr set – there are photos from my DLSR, point’n’shoot 35mm and medium format film cameras. Click through to see more, and I have more links below too.

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A coach trip to the Bristol Port

A few weeks ago, as part of the Docks Heritage Weekend, we took a coach trip around the Bristol Port sites at the Royal Portbury Dock and Avonmouth. I had no idea what to expect, except we wouldn’t be allowed to get off the coach, but it was free, and of course I was interested.

It was an interesting photography say, as the mini-coach didn’t stop, and had tinted windows which put a weird colour cast on everything. Plus window reflections are hard to avoid! But I have a flickr set, taken with my DSLR + 50mm lens, and my mobile phone (click the photo to see more).

It was really fascinating, especially in terms of spaces built for function, not design, and where space was not an issue. The two huge Avonmouth concrete buildings, for example, are standing empty because it’s cheaper and easier than taking them down, which seems so unusual in the context of Bristol.

Portbury is all about the rows and rows of cars, waiting to be shipped out, or shipped around the UK, but we also went through a huge grain storage shed, with pyramids of animal feed piled high. The Avonmouth side is bigger, with what feels like more diversity, but it was hard to tell – we went on a maze-y route that I couldn’t map in my head.

My favourite part was when we got out to the helicopter pad on the edge of Avonmouth, where the Avon meets the Severn. The driver did a very neat turn very close to the edge, which had us all gasping! I so wanted to get out and take photos – it’s always a surprise how close Wales is, and I’ve never seen the junction between the rivers. It made me want to take a boat trip out into the Severn – to Steep Holm maybe?

It’s something I’d absolutely recommend to anyone, if you have the chance to do this. It was such unusual landscapes, and structures, and the commentary was fun (unintentionally hilarious in places too!). So much to enjoy, and for free? Perfect!

High tide, and experiments

Last night I was walking home in the dusk, under beautiful skies, and the tide was so high that the lock gates in the Cumberland Basin were left open, and 11.2 metre tide, per the Bristol Tide Tables, and that’s without any extra rainfall coming in from all the tributaries.

It's a very high tide at the Cumberland Basin pic.twitter.com/ZS6Hq9DQp0

— Avon Stories (@Avon_Stories) August 22, 2017

On evenings like this, it’s always hard to choose what to do, as the sun sets so quickly, and the river changes fast. Between here and Vauxhall Bridge, where I left the water, the tide kept coming in, and it was a beautiful night – windy and gorgeous, and all my phone photos look like I’ve put crazy filters on them.

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Avon Stories podcast 12: Abona and the Romans in Bristol

Bristol isn’t a city famous for links with the Romans, like Bath, York, Gloucester or London, but the Romans were here for around three hundred years, and built a port on the Avon, Portus Abonae, which became the town of Abona, which is now Sea Mills.

In this podcast, Gail Boyle, the Senior Curator for Archeology at Bristol Museums, told me about Abona, the other Roman sites in the city, and what we know about who the Romans in Bristol were, where they came from, and why they were here.

She told me about the Roman remains in Sea Mills and the Kingsweston Roman Villa, and how a lot of what we know is thanks to teenage archeology enthusiasts in the 1950s, and how local teenagers were involved in the recent interpretation of the site. She also told me what we can visit today, and I’ve included links below, and photos of what they look like.

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Exploring the Avon – Pill to Sea Mills, and following in Roman footsteps

One of the things I want to do with this project is to use it as an excuse to go walking, and exploring places I’ve always thought about – and last week was an adventure I wouldn’t have had without it.

I’ve known Tracy Homer for nearly 12 years, when we met at the first Bristol flickrmeet. Back when flickr was this amazing social media site, we were part of the Bristol flickr group, and there was this moment when some of us went to a pub to take it from online friends to In Real Life, which branched off into going for flickrwalks to take photos together. Some of my best friends in Bristol are people I met that way, and I still go to a pub once a month or so with some of them, even though we now arrange through different ways, and flickr has gone from being about social media to being somewhere I just upload my photos to.

I liked Tracy from the moment I met her, and I’ve got so many good memories of talking mile-a-minute with her, taking photos, discovering new places, and always laughing a lot. It’s one of those friendships where we can go years at a time without being in touch, but start where we left off, and she’s the best company for photowalks. There’s something about not needing to explain why the walk will take twice as long as it should, because we’re stopping for photos, with someone who’ll get exactly what I mean when I’m over-excited about the light on the mud, or the way the grass curves, or whatever it is, and will understand the need to take the same shot on three different cameras, because she’s doing exactly the same thing.

Last week we went for a long walk, one I’ve been wanting to do for ages: from Pill, up the Avon to the M5 road bridge, then down the north side of the river to Sea Mills, to look for echoes of the Roman town of Abona, and then up the old Roman road to the Downs. All walks with Tracy tend to start with frantic texting and laughing at ourselves right from the start, and this was no different. Could we manage to meet on the same bus from different stops? Of course we could!

This is the map of our route, with my photos on it, and there are more in my flickr album. I had four cameras with me – my Canon DSLR with a 50mm lens, my Olympus XA2 point & shoot film camera (though I ran out of film, stupidly), my iPhone, and the last of the £1 disposable underwater cameras, and there are some from each on the map, plus a mini film.

I’ve also put photos in the blog below. It’s a long one, because it was a long walk (that’s my excuse, at least!)

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Avon Stories podcast 11: How Bristol nearly lost the Harbour, and other Planning stories

One of the main features of Bristol is the Floating Harbour that meanders through the city, lined with boats, from tatty barges to three-masted sailing boats, right up to floating nightclubs and restaurants. But did you know that in the late 1960s there was a plan to close the Harbour to navigation, and build giant roads over it? And that a City Docks Act was passed in Parliament to make it possible, and it was only the global recession of the 1970s that prevented it?

Richard Holden worked in the Planning Department at Bristol City Council for 36 years, and he told me all about that, what would have happened if the road plan had happened, and more of the stories about the Harbour, including how the M Shed cranes were saved.

We also talked about the good, the bad and the ugly in Planning, how some of the developments came about, and how the best Planning work is essentially invisible. He also told me about the current threats to the Harbour – nothing as extreme as a giant road, but developments that really do risk destroying some of the wonderful things that are emblematic of the city. Scroll down for what everything can do to try to prevent these, and other, threats.

Richard sent me some photos of what parts of the Harbour looked like before redevelopment, and I’ve put them on this map, under the red icons, along with pictures I took about places we talked about, which you can also see in this flickr album.

Of course, you can find all kinds of other photos of the Harbour in the past on the Know Your Place website, and there’s more about that in my first Avon Stories podcast.

If you want to help shape the future of Bristol’s infrastructure and planning, there are things you can do:

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