Wellington Road, Bristol, 1975.
As a boy I sometimes walked into "town" from Downend so that I could trouser the bus fare my mother had given me, thereby augmenting my weekly 5/- pocket money by 7d ...a considerable increment in spending-power. The cinema was my usual indulgence, and I think I was collecting a set of the Pan paperback editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. For a schoolboy it was quite an extravagant lifestyle and funding had to be taken seriously. Following lucubrations over a map of Bristol belonging to my father I had developed a personal route into the city. In those days, long before the construction of the M32, Lower Ashley Road crossed the River Frome by a bridge with green-painted wrought iron railings. If you turned left after crossing it you were in an alley which came out in Wellington Road.
This was exactly the sort of place I loved. Feeling myself to be rather overlooked, I suppose I had a kind of fellow-feeling for these unregarded places which, to my infatuated eye, had a strange, sad, mysterious beauty. Sheds and little brick structures, roofed with corrugated iron, backed onto the far side of the river. Alsation guard dogs bayed from across the water. Great drifts of detergent foam built up in the river, from which little pieces broke off from time to time and floated away on the wind. The water was clogged with bicycle frames, mattresses and old sinks. Puberty was upon me, of course, and for some years all experience was hormonally heightened.
All this was 12 years or so behind me when I took this photograph of Wellington Road on Sunday 1st June 1975. Almost every building, apart from this one remaining house, had been demolished ...as had been the south side of neighbouring Newfoundland Road and all the streets between. This was to make way for the dual carriageway road which would bring the M32's traffic into the centre of the city. The solitary house, I noted on the back of the print, was gone by May 1980. The last time I popped along here for a look at my old haunts, in the summer of 2006, my main impression was of the great proliferation of vegetation. Himalayan Balsam, which has colonised every riverbank in the Bristol area during the last 30 years, grows in great profusion, and there were a few specimens of Giant Hogweed. Damoiselle Flies and a couple of exquisite blue Emperor Dragonflies darted about. There is no detergent foam now (why not?) and shopping trolleys predominate among the articles thrown into the water.
Wellington Road, Bristol, 1975.
As a boy I sometimes walked into "town" from Downend so that I could trouser the bus fare my mother had given me, thereby augmenting my weekly 5/- pocket money by 7d ...a considerable increment in spending-power. The cinema was my usual indulgence, and I think I was collecting a set of the Pan paperback editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. For a schoolboy it was quite an extravagant lifestyle and funding had to be taken seriously. Following lucubrations over a map of Bristol belonging to my father I had developed a personal route into the city. In those days, long before the construction of the M32, Lower Ashley Road crossed the River Frome by a bridge with green-painted wrought iron railings. If you turned left after crossing it you were in an alley which came out in Wellington Road.
This was exactly the sort of place I loved. Feeling myself to be rather overlooked, I suppose I had a kind of fellow-feeling for these unregarded places which, to my infatuated eye, had a strange, sad, mysterious beauty. Sheds and little brick structures, roofed with corrugated iron, backed onto the far side of the river. Alsation guard dogs bayed from across the water. Great drifts of detergent foam built up in the river, from which little pieces broke off from time to time and floated away on the wind. The water was clogged with bicycle frames, mattresses and old sinks. Puberty was upon me, of course, and for some years all experience was hormonally heightened.
All this was 12 years or so behind me when I took this photograph of Wellington Road on Sunday 1st June 1975. Almost every building, apart from this one remaining house, had been demolished ...as had been the south side of neighbouring Newfoundland Road and all the streets between. This was to make way for the dual carriageway road which would bring the M32's traffic into the centre of the city. The solitary house, I noted on the back of the print, was gone by May 1980. The last time I popped along here for a look at my old haunts, in the summer of 2006, my main impression was of the great proliferation of vegetation. Himalayan Balsam, which has colonised every riverbank in the Bristol area during the last 30 years, grows in great profusion, and there were a few specimens of Giant Hogweed. Damoiselle Flies and a couple of exquisite blue Emperor Dragonflies darted about. There is no detergent foam now (why not?) and shopping trolleys predominate among the articles thrown into the water.