Brizzle Kicks

For reasons far too dull to go into here, I found myself in Bristol with some hours to kill.  How many hours?  I didn't really know.  It could be two, it could be four, it all depended on when I got a phone call.  I needed something to keep me busy but not an extreme voyage of discovery.

Readers with long memories might remember that I've been to Bristol before, back in 2016, when I was thinking of turning this blog into a book of some kind.  That didn't happen.  I did travel round the country, though, and one of the lines I visited was the Severn Beach Line, which goes from Temple Meads along the coast.  This is what the line diagram looked when I visited:

And this is what it looks like now:

Why, there's a whole new station on there!  (And also Weston-Super-Mare, but for the purposes of this blog, we're ignoring that).  Portway Park & Ride opened in 2023, which meant if I visited there, I'd complete the whole line once again.  (I repeat: ignore Weston-Super-Mare.  It's got a thinner green line, if you notice, because it doesn't count.  I decided.)

This meant travelling from Bristol Temple Meads, which I've never really got on board with.  I know it's an extremely important station, both from an engineering perspective and architecturally, but it doesn't fly for me.  It may be because it's largely a through station.  A terminus has a grand feeling of arrival, of being a destination in itself, while a through station is simply a stop on the way to somewhere else.  It also makes the station lopsided; the facilities all end up to the side.

Big fan of the Isambard Kingdom Brunel statue outside though.  I had no idea he was so dinky, barely scraping five feet.  He looks like he should be playing the Artful Dodger.  We love a Short King.  

It was fun catching up with stations out the window of the train, remembering where I'd gone and what I'd done.  I have a strangely powerful memory about railway stations - I get a glimpse and I can remember the day, the weather, where I went and what I did.  This doesn't extend to railway station names, by the way.  Those all blur together.  Show me a platform though and I can tell you some stupid fact about my visit, every time.

Portway won't win any architecture awards, not least because there's nothing there you could really call architecture.  A single platform, an off the shelf shelter, some lamp posts.  The line's single track here so there isn't even a need for a footbridge.  It's the most perfunctory of new developments.

Its real purpose is clear once you've followed a pathway lined with pictures of newts drawn by local schoolchildren.  Apparently this is to commemorate the newt crossing that was installed when they built the station.  As with all children's art on the railways, I have no time for it.  Pay a proper artist.  Still, I suppose we are now entering an era of AI art, and soon there will be illustrations of chubby cartoon characters with a yellow piss-wash to distract us all over the network.  Then I'll be desperate for a poorly scrawled daubing by Candace, age 9.

Portway has been gifted with a wide car park and a bus exchange, both of which were well used when I visited.  In fact, there was a double decker waiting at the top of the footpath as I approached from the station, only to pull away when I got within a few metres; I imagine that amused him greatly for the rest of the day, thinking that he had deprived a commuter of a bus ride.  What larks.  

It's interesting to note that the actual name of the station is Portway Park & Ride.  Firstly, urgh.  How demeaning.  Secondly, I'm not sure I've ever seen the words Park & Ride actually incorporated into the name before (I'm sure I'm wrong).  The usual format would be to call this a Parkway, which would then make it Portway Parkway, which I think is brilliant but I'm sure the council thought was unnecessarily flippant for a major transport investment.  

The reason for the station's existence can be seen soaring over your head: the M5 viaduct over the River Avon.  Junction 18 is down the road, and the hope is this station will pull some people away from driving directly into the city.  The car park looked busy so it must be working.

I left the station through a scrappy back exit that took me directly under the bridge, to a level crossing that blocked access to a section of industry.  I stood politely at the closed gate, trying not to catch the eye of the driver in the car waiting with me, trying to quiet the voice in my head that said look, you can nip right across, it's only single track and you can see if the train's coming.  

Eventually the Bristol-bound train passed through and we were allowed to cross.  I diverted to the side, into a small patch of gravel and through a gate into the Lamplighter's Marsh, a stretch of open country on a bend in the river cut off from the town by the railway.  Above me, the trucks on the viaduct made a tinny, metallic sound as they crossed.

I was almost immediately assaulted from all sides.  I'm not sure what's happening this year, but I have been suffering with the worst hay fever of my life.  I can't take a stroll past a single bush without sneezing, and as I walked across the marsh my eyes were streaming and my nose was running.  Nature seems to be particularly vindictive this spring and I'm not a fan.

I bravely pushed on, passing joggers and dog walkers, taking in the sunshine and the clear blue sky.  It was wonderful to be out on my own, strolling without a jacket, feeling the sun on me.  It was a slow rejuvenation.  I absolutely felt as though I was sloughing off my winter burdens.  

The Lamplighter's Inn was still there, and seemingly still open, which pleased me.  Ten years later that's not a guarantee with a pub.  As with my previous visit, I was too early for a pint, but that's good in a way - a decade long piece of symmetry.  I climbed up through the village, where the houses were painted; I remembered them as being gentle pastels before but now they were stark primary colours.  I much preferred this colour scheme, particularly the purple one; brave and bold, shaming the boring semis over the road.

Shirehampton station was still tucked under the railway bridge, opposite the Daisy Field, and I took another sign pic.  It's a GWR station now, not First Great Western, but while the font may have changed my dopey expression remains the same.

The question was, where to next, and I decided to take a trip to another new (to me) station, Ashley Down.  This opened on the line north out of Temple Meads in September 2024, barely 18 months after construction started, which may be some kind of record.  I've never known a railway station project go so smoothly.  (How's Liverpool Baltic coming along Steve?  Never mind).

It's not a looker, I'll give you that; two platforms, a bridge, lifts.  No sign of a ticket office.  But it's been neatly done, with a bit of landscaping outside and easy access to a cycle path.  A perfectly decent suburban station in a district that could do with fast efficient transport into town, forcing you to once again wonder why there was that sixty year gap between the closing of the old Ashley Hill station and the new one opening.  

There was now a steep walk uphill to the main road.  I'd forgotten how hilly Bristol is.  While Sheffield, say, has a reputation as a slog to get round, Bristol has a breezy, happy vibe to it that belies the absolute nightmare that is getting from one district to another.  I pushed up the slope to the top, where a block of new build flats barely concealed the floodlighting rig for Gloucestershire County Cricket ground.  Bristol Rovers' home ground is also within a mile of here; I repeat, why wasn't the station opened before?

It was bin day, apparently, and in Bristol there seems to be a mix of wheelies, crates and bags for their recycling and rubbish.  I looked at it with a slight feeling of dread.  At the moment Wirral has one wheelie for rubbish and one for recycling, but there's a promise to introduce food caddies at some point, and I imagine our free and easy days of chucking paper and glass all in the one bin will soon be over.  Our neighbours once wandered off with one of our bins, which we had to reclaim when they put it out again a couple of weeks later, so I get anxious about disappearing receptacles.  Surely the wind will blow a bag away?  Or those crates will prove tempting for teenagers to chuck about?

That was an awful lot of Bin Chat.  This is how you know you're a middle aged man.  The bins assume an importance entirely out of step with reality.

Up and round the block, descending to a pair of retail parks with a Lidl and an Aldi side by side; I didn't think that was allowed.  It feels slightly dangerous.  Maybe they all roll out at eight o'clock for rumbles in the car park, with the staff of Home and Bargain coming between them shouting "no, it's not worth it!".

A neat row of hire scooters were parked by a greenspace; unlike in Liverpool, where you are never more than eight seconds from being mown down by a student recklessly weaving on one, even though the city centre is about eight foot wide and entirely flat, I could actually see the point of them in steep Bristol.  It also helped that the scooter users seemed much more considerate, and there were plenty of cycle lanes for them to be segregated from the traffic.

In case you can't read that, it's a picture of Jesus under the slogan, When all hope is lost, remember some people still support Bristol Rovers.  One thing I dislike about Bristol is that Banksy has seemingly given graffiti artists carte blanche to fill every piece of wall with their nonsense.  We get it, you're an alternative city - I have never seen so many people with coloured dye jobs in my life - but 98% of the scrawl on the walls isn't art, it's just names and letters and the odd bit of swearing.  I'm not really a Banksy fan - oh, the police aren't necessarily on the side of the populace?  Please, deliver more astonishing truth to power, sir - but at least his stencil work has a certain amount of class and talent to it.  It's like the council are afraid to power wash away Holly McManus Is A Big Fat Slag And Nobody Will Touch Her With A Bargepoll - Donna in case Donna later uses her spraypainting skills to portray, I don't know, Gemma Collins as the Mona Lisa, and her "Treatise against Holly McManus, 2026" is suddenly worth eight hundred thousand pounds and the city can flog it to fund a library for another six months.

The road continued up and up, long stretches of semis, a lot of them undergoing building works to take away pesky front drives and add loft conversions.  A delivery driver did a frankly terrifying u-turn across both lanes of traffic, causing cars to slam on their brakes in both directions, and I don't think his cheery wave of thanks placated them.  I remember reading once that DHL's delivery programme in America never makes the vans do a left hand turn, preferring to send them round the block on the much easier right turn; clearly Amazon or Evri or whoever don't extend the same software to their UK drivers.

A crossroads and I was passing the Bristol Civil Service Social Club and a bus shelter filled with expectant riders.  Houses were To Let from the unfortunately named CJ Hole estate agency.  A small row of local shops, with the owners stood outside having a chat, then a clothes recycling bin surrounded by bags and bric-a-brac.  

More shops, mainly takeaways and beauty salons, the only businesses that can't go completely online.  A pub had been converted into a Tesco Express, while a restaurant promised English breakfasts and Indian meals, which I believe is the only food any British person ever needs.  Further up, a regeneration project had filled the back roads with new avenues of homes named after writers.  Shakespeare Avenue and Wordsworth Road?  Fine.  Beatrix Place?  Disrespectful; no surname, just because she's a woman?  (And all three Brontës get one Walk between them.)    Amis Walk and Dahl Walk?  Problematic. 

Still, it was better than the next bunch of streets that were all simply given numbers - Seventh Avenue and so on.  I imagine the intention was to give it a glamorous, American air, but it actually came off as unimaginative and impersonal.  

I'd left the city of Bristol at some point, into one of its neighbouring boroughs, and there'd been a definite social slide.  Filton had once been home to aircraft manufacturing, but it had been downsized over the years.  The Bristol Brabazon and Concorde were built here, but now the runway is being turned into a new town, also called Brabazon; there will be thousands of homes, offices, a new arena and a railway station on a former freight line to serve it all.  

Filton Abbey Wood station, meanwhile, has slowly grown over the years from a couple of platforms to four, though its facilities remain minimal - long ramps and stairs and a footbridge.  

I'd gone to the local Asda to get a bit of lunch - in a masterpiece of planning, even though it's right next door, there's no way to access it from the station, and it involved a twenty minute detour.  I bought three things, for the meal deal, and all three items were wrong.  I picked up Cherry Coke Zero: vile.  I got what I thought was a steak slice but turned out to be steak, cheese and Marmite - in the bin with that.  And the only wrap they had left was a disgusting "Southern Fried Chicken" concoction, that dripped a radioactive sauce on my jeans that stained them a frankly disturbing shade of brown.  I only managed one of the wraps before my gag reflex kicked in.

Still no phone call.  I guess a couple more stations wouldn't hurt?

Home Run

The first thing you see when you step out of Walton station is a wall.  Five metres high, with a rounded top.  The distinctive exterior of a prison.  This is Liverpool Prison, or, as it was known before the modern world decided to suck all charm out of everything, Walton Gaol.  The main prison for the Merseyside region, famous and infamous, home to 1300 people and not somewhere I ever hope to see the inside of.

Prison frightens me, as I think it does for anyone who's never so much as shoplifted a Mars Bar.  One of my most persistent fears is that I'll be accused of something I didn't do and end up serving time for it.  A friend of a friend was once accused of molesting some kids he'd babysat for as a teen.  It got all the way to trial before being thrown out by a judge who was baffled by the lack of evidence; he was entirely innocent, of course, and it turned out his accusers had made similar allegations about other people in the hope of getting compensation.  Still, imagine getting that close to being locked away, tarred as a criminal, put in the nonce wing; vulnerable, scared, and entirely innocent.  At least if you've done the crime there's a slight edge of "it's a fair cop".  I shuddered slightly as I walked by.

The traditional, Victorian, HMP Slade gates are now hidden behind the wall, and a new entrance has been built in the corner of the complex.  Colourful images of the city skyline welcome visitors like it's a theme park; in reality, it's an awful place to be, regularly condemned for its conditions, overcrowded, and in need of comprehensive redevelopment, if not demolition.  There's a real problem with drug use and the small signs pinned to the walls advising that flying drones is illegal don't seem to be as off putting as you'd expect, strangely.  

I turned south onto the Southport Road, one of those fine avenues that are all over Liverpool.  Long straight lanes constructed to allow trams to run with ease, but completely devoid of them in the 21st century.  Semis with paved over lawns were the norm, with the households' other cars parked on the pavement.

A side road took me between two expanses of municipal green.  The Stuart Road Playing Fields straddled the road, wide lengths of playing fields laid out for the betterment of the residents.  There probably should've been a leisure centre here, but instead there was an "Activity for All" building.  It seems to be a sort of indoor football pitch with a cafe attached.  Looking at their website, it's a community interest company, doing stuff the council used to, which is the modern way I suppose.  My main objection is that it uses the American spelling of centre on its exterior.

I walked round the side of it to get access to a leisure facility I've never seen before in the UK.  The playing fields are home to the Liverpool Trojans who proudly proclaim they're the oldest baseball team in Britain.  As such, they've got a diamond laid out behind the "center".

That's an actual baseball diamond, sitting in a park in Bootle.  It's fascinating to think that there are leagues and games going on for these sports all over the UK with a small but loyal following.  I actually don't mind baseball; it's the most tolerable of America's big sports, with a proper history and style to it, and like all the best sports you don't need hundreds of dollars of equipment to play it - just a bat and a ball.  It also helps that it's basically Posh Rounders, and we've all played rounders at school, so it's that little bit more comprehensible than whatever nonsense happens during an American Football game.  Also, and this is very gay indeed, but I really like baseball shirts.  They're very appealing.

I took the opportunity to stand on the Home Plate like I was [quickly googles "famous baseball player" here - who was the one who was married to Marilyn Monroe?] Joe DiMaggio and take a selfie.  Look at me, I'm doing a sports.  Then I turned back and walked through the car park to the street, attracting the attention of a wiry gentleman and his mate in a car with the engine running.  They watched me as I left, examining me for possible narc giveaways, but then concluded I was simply a fat loser and left me to it.

The houses along Stuart Road get a great view of the playing fields, and it was clear that many of the owners had spruced up their homes with extensions and attic conversions and the like.  One household had left a pair of unwanted bar stools on the pavement for any passers by to claim, so if you like black leatherette, head there now.  A carpet van was parked on the lower stretch, hazards flickering, while the workmen manfully carried an enormous length into a house that didn't look big enough to accommodate it.

On the back streets behind, there were terraces of Victorian redbricks, two up two downs.  Occasional new builds gave away the locations of bomb sites.  Outside a sheltered housing development, there were two workmen, one in his forties merrily carrying a single bag to his van, while behind his teenage apprentice staggered under the weight of a load of tools.  He helpfully opened the back of the van and waited for his protégé to catch up.

The Breeze Pub is, per Google, "temporarily closed;" the Facebook site hasn't been updated since January last year and half the sign is missing, so expect it to be converted to bedsits any day now.  It's a terrible shame when a pub closes of course but looking around it was a miracle it had lasted this long.  A real back street boozer, no gastropub menu, reliant only on local patronage, not a destination in any way.  Society has changed, as has what we want to spend our disposable income on, and for all the trumpeting about "save the British pub!" if nobody wants to use it then is it really good to preserve it?  If it were up to me I'd have put all the WH Smiths under preservation orders and insisted on government money to force them to go back to the orange cube logo and selling records but this is the problem with capitalism; the market dictates.

A series of bollards across the road discreetly demarcated the old city from a new development.  Walton Hospital was a famous neurology centre on Rice Lane for a century, but consolidation of the services in the area plus a need to expand saw it move to Fazakerley - sorry, Aintree - Hospital in the 90s.  The empty site has since been converted into a twist of cul-de-sacs and town houses with neat little driveways and Ring doorbells.

The railway line ran across the back here.  A couple of bridges crossed it, taking you to undeveloped scrubland, ready for enterprising homebuilders to sweep in at some point, but also the site of a never-was station.

The plans for the Link and the Loop back in the 70s were incredibly ambitious, with underground loops meeting at a new six platform station called Rocket, a below ground University stop, and new halts all over Merseyside.  One proposal was a new station called Breeze Hill, between Kirkdale and Walton.  It shows up on some early "proposal" maps, sometimes as a replacement for Walton and Rice Lane - allowing interchange between the branches - and sometimes as an extra station to fill the gap.

It never happened, of course, and I can't really see it ever having had much demand; it would've cannibalised the stations either side if it was an infill.  It's not really a huge gap, and there's not a density around there to justify it.

It is, however, fun to imagine where it might have been, and this cutting behind the old hospital seemed like a prime candidate.  No expensive tunnelling necessary, next to a useful amenity, space to encourage new development.  I wandered onto the bridge and snapped a photo of what might have been in a world where Merseyside got everything it ever wanted.

Back onto the road, and round the front of the Walton Hospital, now converted into apartments of course.  It's still a prominent local landmark and pleasingly preserved, even if the clock is wrong.  

There's still some medical provision on the site.  Clock View Hospital is a mental health centre, catering for acute cases, and housed in a pleasing modern building.  I shuffled past, once again hoping never to see the inside of it.  Next door was a block of housing association apartments with inset balconies.  Strangely, each balcony had a glass screen at the top and bottom, with only a narrow gap around it to let fresh air in.  It negated the principal of a balcony, to me, and if anything reminded me of Hannibal Lecter's cell in The Silence of the Lambs, with its perspex front and air holes to let you smell Jodie Foster's L'Air du Temps.  It's an unfortunate association given the building across the way.

I was on Rice Lane proper now, a road that gives its name to a station I'll be visiting another time.  There's a huge Sainsbury's, and a former pub, and a small curved building which houses a pizza delivery firm.  It's a surprisingly elaborate building, considering its humble occupant, and that's because it was originally built as the entrance booth to the Liverpool Zoological Gardens.  

Where there's now a housing estate and car park was, for a period in the 19th century, a space for chimpanzees and elephants.  It was a disaster almost from the start, with the owners constantly adding new attractions to try and pump up visitor numbers (a concert hall! a camera obscura!).  It gained a reputation for prostitutes, though, which meant it definitely wasn't a place to take the family on a quiet afternoon, and finally closed in 1865 after thirty two years.  The pizza place is the only remnant of the old zoo.

The road's lined with retail units with flats above, though more and more were being converted into ground floor residences too.  The Revival 7 tea room carried the Royal coat of arms over its door, though the wording underneath was Recognised by HRH, a delightfully vague term.  I'm imagining the Queen being driven along the road in her limo on the way to Aintree Racecourse and pointing at the shop out the window - "oh a tea room, how nice" - and that was it, Royal patronage.  

I turned off into a side road.  Victorian villas that would be getting high six figures elsewhere in the city looked dirty and unloved; multiple bells by the door told the story of their conversion.  As I rounded the corner, a man was hefting a wardrobe down his driveway to his waiting car.  I felt like I should've offered to help him, but I've recently been suffering from terrible back spasms - I spend way too much time slapping on Deep Heat patches and grimacing at the dinner table.  Don't get old, folks.

Between the side walls of two houses was a tiny public footpath, which I eagerly took.  I love delving into the backs, the off grid routes.  This one takes you over the top of the Kirkby branch of Merseyrail...

...and drops you neatly at the back of Walton station in time for your train.  I'd completed a loop, or, if we're going to use baseball terminology, I'd rounded all the bases.  I think.  I don't actually care enough to check if that's right.

This entire trip was paid for by Ko-fi donations.  Once again, thank you for your support!