Here

I used to live here. That is to say, for about a year from 1980 I rented the top flat of 7 Gloucester Row, in Clifton, Bristol, which is the leftmost facade you see in this row: my flat was a kitchen and two rooms directly beneath that large triangular pediment. Clifton is one of those urban areas that has gone through cycles of grand and grim ever since it was developed in the Georgian boom times, financed largely by the, ahem, products of New World slavery like sugar and tobacco. In 1980 it was at the bottom of a grim cycle; now, it has swung back to grand. I see the three-bedroom basement flat is currently valued at £763,000, and the two-bedroom 2nd floor flat sold last year for £430,000. I don't suppose anyone will ever again occupy the whole edifice, however, as originally intended.

When I moved in, taking over the lease from some friends, every floor bar the top two was unoccupied, and the one beneath me was haunted by a pair of junkies, their two small children, and a large alsatian dog that roamed the communal staircase. Coming back at night, I dreaded the sound of its pattering claws on the uncarpeted, unlit wooden stairs. It was beyond grim, actually: that winter of 80/81 was the sort of long, cold, snowy, ice-bound freeze-up that we haven't seen in England for many years, now. My toilet bowl actually froze and cracked. Worse, snow somehow blew into the roof space, and when it eventually thawed it created a large, expanding bubble in the ceiling paper that eventually burst and sent water cascading everywhere. I moved out as soon as I could.

It's strange, revisiting such places, forty years on. There's a wonderful graphic novel, Here, by Richard McGuire, which imagines the goings-on in the space occupied by a single room over the decades, centuries, and millennia. As with the absence in the sky once occupied by my teenage bedroom, in a block of flats which was demolished a dozen years ago, one's own little stretch of time in a room is both incredibly significant from a personal perspective, and yet utterly without meaning or connection to previous or subsequent occupants of that space. Whoever lives in that top-floor flat now can have no idea of those cold winter nights when I sat reading in the tiny kitchen with the ancient gas oven turned on, just to keep warm. Why, I bet they've even got central heating.

A distant prospect of the Suspension Bridge

The edge of the Downs

Gloucester Row is a mere hundred yards or so from the famous Clifton Suspension Bridge, which spans the Avon Gorge at its most impressively craggy point. On Tuesday and Wednesday last week we were in Bristol, and I went for a couple of walks along the Gorge: one along the top into Clifton, the other along the bottom to Sea Mills. Unlike the surrounding city, the area has a certain air of permanence, at least viewed on a human scale. The timeworn rocky steps along the cliff-edge paths remain as treacherous in wet weather as they always were, and the open green space of the Downs appears unchanged: even in these Covid times it echoes to the barking of excitable dogs and the shouts of young lads chasing footballs. The lack of space within the Gorge means that infrastructural changes are slow and constrained: the Portway road and the light railways that run along on either side can never be expanded or diverted, and the river just keeps on being the river, and the cliffs and the woods, as I've noted before, have a primal quality, all of which is doubtless illusory, but nonetheless reassuring in a Wordsworthian kind of way. 

The Avon is a tidal river, and twice a day drains away into the Bristol Channel, leaving behind an expanse of slick grey mud, intricately patterned into herringbones by the runoff channels of the departing water. At Sea Mills, about half way from Clifton to the sea at Avonmouth, you can get good views of the gloopy wilderness, should you find that an interesting prospect, particularly where the tributary River Trym runs beneath the railway and Portway bridges, stranding small boats at low tide, and depositing rubbish onto the grassy edgelands when the river floods. I must admit it's my kind of place, although I wouldn't want to live there.

A rising tide lifts all boats

(but not this one any more)

Yes, that is a dumped motorbike, centre right