Avon Calling

[insert "ding, dong!" doorbell sound effect]

I know... But I've been resisting using that title for a blog post ever since we started spending more time in Bristol. Younger readers will not recall the TV adverts for Avon home-delivered cosmetics ("Ding dong! Avon calling!"), any more than – when they eventually come to discover The Clash – they are able to perceive the echo of "London Calling" with radio broadcasts during WW2, both out of London into Europe and into Britain by Lord Haw-Haw ("Germany calling"...). Time passes, and the felt resonances that are the invisible scaffolding of art become the stuff of scholarly footnotes. So it goes.

The idea of the receding echoes of passing time is very appropriate to my relationship with Bristol. The city has been a background constant in my life for a long time, although the longest I've ever actually lived there was a five-year period between 1977 and 1983 when I worked in the university library, interrupted by a year in London. My first ever visit, though, was pretty much exactly 50 years ago, early in 1972: I took a solo train journey there, all the way from my home town of Stevenage – it seemed quite an adventure at the time – in order to attend an interview for an undergraduate place in the university's English department.

I remember a very cold night in a hotel on St. Paul's Road behind the Victoria Rooms, followed by a friendly but probing interview with professor Henry Gifford, who seemed far more interested in my German than my English A-level studies, as well as my faltering efforts at learning Russian: I didn't know at the time that he was a pioneer of Comparative Literature, whose own keen interest in Russian literature would lead him to found the Russian department at Bristol. As it happened, it was the book purchases of that department that created a backlog of unprocessed Cyrillic acquisitions in the library, which in turn led to my eventual employment there in 1977 as a cataloguer equipped with that scant knowledge of Russian I had acquired at school. And, just to add another echo, I had spent the previous academic year studying Comparative Literature at UEA in Norwich, another city that has been a background constant in my life.

[insert a couple of "ping!" sound effects from "Echoes" by Pink Floyd]

Anyway, that's enough wandering down Memory Lane for one day (as usual, only to discover that it has now been re-routed through a new estate of houses and no longer leads to the echoing green but to a Tesco superstore). What I really want to describe is a Bristol-related project that has been accumulating in my files since we established a second base in the city in 2015, a flat in a building situated practically on the edge of its most spectacular feature, the Avon Gorge.

Whenever we spend time in our Bristol flat I usually end up taking a walk along the Gorge, either towards Clifton, where Brunel's famous suspension bridge is located, or towards Sea Mills, where the gorge opens out into a less dramatic valley, and the road and the railway to Avonmouth are conveyed over the mudflats of the Avon's tributary river Trym on two rather less elegant structures. Naturally, I take photographs as I walk, and have built up quite a solid collection over six and a half years. However, I'm wary of photographers who make work in landscapes they do not inhabit as a resident, and that includes myself.

In 2016, for example, I made a chastening calculation of actual time spent on our annual Easter visits to mid-Wales versus that of a pub landlord who had recently moved into the area: 

 Talking one night this Easter to the landlord of a pub who had taken over the premises just 18 months ago, having moved into Wales from Surrey, I had the unsettling revelation that in actual elapsed time he had already spent longer in the area than I had; seventy-five continuous weeks versus my sixty or so spread over thirty-five years. He might not yet have a clue about the local history or geography, and may never know very much about where he has fetched up – running a pub is not a job for anyone who values their leisure time – but he already has a greater stake in the local community than I will ever have. Does that also mean that the glorious ridge rising above and behind his pub, which I visit every year, and which he may never find the time to climb, is more "his" than "mine"?
(A Stranger Comes to Town, 23/10/16)

But no-one really inhabits the Avon Gorge. For locals it's primarily a landscape of transition, passed through when commuting into Avonmouth or into the city centre by road or rail, or briefly traversed when driving over the suspension bridge. For some it's a leisure resource: rock climbers learn the ropes on the cliff faces, and on many nights we have watched the flickering lights of daredevil mountain-bikers descending down steep tracks through Leigh Woods on the far side of the Gorge from the comfort of our flat. Then there are the peregrine-watchers, who regularly occupy a little rocky platform with their tripods and telescopes, and various other hobbyists, such as the cruisers and cottagers, in pursuit of chilly thrills under cover of darkness. But all of these folk, having done whatever they came to do, will go home to somewhere quite different within the city.

Consequently, I feel I am coming to know the area as well as it can be known, and that there is value in my particular take on the visual variety it offers. The challenge, as always, is what to do with a couple of hundred photographs, roughly linked by their geographical location, and not much else. In the run up to Christmas I had been experimenting with accordion-fold booklets made from cut-down A2 sheets (see You've Got To Know When To Fold Them), and the idea of a folded sheet of four A5 panels quickly emerged as both an efficient use of an A2 sheet divided in half, length-wise, and a handy way to show a mix of panoramic, portrait, and landscape oriented images. Better, once constructed as a single composite image, it could also either be printed by me, folded into four panels, and glued into an A4 cover as a handmade product, or uploaded as two facing A4 pages in a panoramic "layflat" book.

So, as I have long been an admirer of the genre established by Hokusai with his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji – followed by such projects as Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo [1], and Henri Rivière's Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower – I was initially tempted by the idea of "thirty-six views of the Clifton Suspension Bridge", using the "four A5 panels" layout. But, as so many of the better photos in my files do not include that particular landmark, I have now settled on aiming for Thirty-Six Views of the Avon Gorge. There don't have to be thirty-six, of course, although I doubt if there'll be one hundred. However, it's still very much a work in progress, so here are some sample spreads:

1. An extraordinary work of graphical inventiveness, and available as an incredibly good-value hardback book in Taschen's "Bibliotheca Universalis" series – highly recommended.