Bristol Gallery

As a change from my usual wordy posts, here's a small gallery of photographs from our recent break in Bristol, mainly from an afternoon wander along the Portway that runs through the Avon Gorge. The Avon being tidal, a lot depends on the timing of your walk. I generally prefer a low tide, which exposes the photogenic mudbanks. Plus anything cast up by the river or thrown down from the roadside, like this empty guitar case... Perhaps Orpheus passed this way.

On the Downs above the Gorge, yet another a festival was in preparation. It seems many cash-starved councils are having to rent out their green spaces in this way to raise essential funds. I read that a big event can generate as much as £500,000. But it's a shame: why central government seeks to put a cash stranglehold on essential local government is a mystery to me. It's also a nuisance: the sudden arrival of thousands of merry-makers into a neighbourhood not equipped to receive them, accommodate them, or park their cars can be a problem, to say the least, not to mention the wear and tear on the grass on its thin soil, still under stress from a summer of drought.

On the Clifton side of the Downs Bristol Zoo was in its last days on the site it has occupied for the last 186 years as it prepares to close down, in anticipation of a future move to a new out-of-town location out near the M5 motorway. For many British children of my age the Bristol Zoo holds a special place in our affections, as it was from there that Johnny Morris presented the children's TV programme Animal Magic, with him got up as a zoo-keeper and voicing dialogues with various animals. In its heyday the Zoo offered elephant rides and a "monkey temple", fondly remembered by my partner, who was born and grew up in Bristol. I myself only got to visit the Zoo in its later years, when concerns for animal welfare had thinned out the inhabitants and it had become fairly dull as an experience: more like a park than a zoo. And a park is what it is about to become; or rather, "The 12-acre site is due to be sold with planning permission for sustainable homes set in beautiful gardens".

Monkey temple, but no monkeys...

Of course, another fan of mudflats is Bristol's own world-class artist, Richard Long, whose enormous smears and streaks of river mud were a central part of an exhibition Earth in the newly-refurbished buildings of the Royal West of England Academy:

Although I think my favourite piece in the exhibition was this, the key to a necklace of 170 beads made by Katie Paterson from individual fossils spanning all the geological periods of the earth in sequence, from Pre-Cambrian to Holocene. I prefer it to the actual necklace, which looks like any other bead necklace you've ever seen. I also think the key has an uncanny resemblance to a famous diagram of a slave-ship; an appropriate, if unintended resonance in Bristol.