Bristol - it's good to be back
I love Bristol. I really, really love Bristol. Bristol is one of my favorite cities in the whole world. It just has this great feel to it. It's not really pretty, although it has pretty bits, but it's interesting, it has a lot of Indie nights and good places to go, and it feels like a real city to me. It has a port, for a start, and some hills. I always feel cheerful once I get there.
This day I had been planning to go to the pictures with my Most Recent Ex Boyfriend, and he was meant to be there at lunch time but he missed his bus so he was three hours late. As the most recent ex, I am not quite secure enough in the friendship to push him into the canal! Actually, it worked out really well because I had three hours to wander about in Bristol on my own.
I had driven in to town - I realise I am going to hell for my carbon usage, but it is a seven pound fuel bill rather than a fifteen pound train ride after a two and a half pound bus ride and the whole journey would take about an hour longer, assuming the trains were even running, which often, on the weekends, they aren't. So I parked across the river in Bedminster and came into the town centre across the Avon, passed the weird old ruin thing, and in at the Floating Harbour.
The Floating Harbour was called that because it was one of the first city ports to use lock gates to maintain a constant level of water, allowing sailing ships to dock safely without having to worry about grounding at low tide. The harbour is no longer used for cargo shipping, because modern vessels are far, far larger and come in at Avonmouth and Portishead instead. But some of the old warehouses are still there, used as bars, cinemas and the contemporary art gallery Arnolfini, and the Floating harbour itself is home to some of the Bristol city ferries and some houseboats and yachts. I decided that a chocolate crepe would cheer me right up nicely, so I went to the crepe stall at the head of the harbour, and then ate it by the side of the harbour.
Park Street is one of the most interesting shopping streets I know. Somehow, a bunch of boutiques, vintage clothing stores, and non-chain shoe shops have managed to cling on here, as has the Bristol Guild shop which has loads of really interesting things in it too. There is also a Banksy masterpiece on the side of a house. Banksy is a graffiti artist who has become so famous that his works are apparently worth tens of thousands of pounds. There are auctions. This really puzzles me - if I bid £20,000 for a Banksy, having married some millionairre, is it mine but still on the wall? Do you get the wall too? How does the person who owns the wall come in to the equation, given that they probably think it's just a normal bit of graffiti? All puzzling.
The city museum and art gallery is a really nice, really free, municipal type museum at the top of park street, and it has some great fossils.
We grabed some food in Iguanas, a tapas restaurant that is near the floating harbour. It was really nice, the food is always good there and the waitress was lovely. Unfortunately, there were some really noisy eejits in the bar that night and they let off the fire alarm, which was annoying. Ex put some rather harsh comments on the comment card, but I really don't think that restaurants can always prevent that sort of thing. I'd still recommend it if you were eating before 6.30, as they have some great offers then. There is a posher, more intimate sort of Tapas restaurant in Bristol that I slightly prefer, but that isn't a good place to take an ex, and it's a chunkier bill at the end. Dinner was nice.
Ex and I wandered off separately afterwards, and I crossed back to the car. The M4 had patches of fog. I wish the trains were cheaper!
It is nicely decorated, the staff are lovely, and there is a terrace outside in the summer. The food is well cooked, the sauces are nicely seasoned, and the coffee is good. The food is also quite quicly served, which makes it quite a good idea for if you're going on somewhere else afterwards. It is in amongst all the bars and cinemas of the FLoating Harbour/ Milenium square area of Bristol.
The City Art Gallery and Museum is a city museum at the top of Park Street, with free admission. And marine reptile fossils. There are two giant icthysaur fossils. It can't get better than that. There are also some old maps that chart the expansion of Bristol, which are interesting, some ceramics, some nice art from the city's collection, and a small natural history section. Oh, and some antique aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling. The museum also hosts some travelling exhibitions, currently the Shell Wildlife photography prize winners.
It is also a really lovely museum space. The building is nice and airy, the toilets are original fixtures, and there is a cafe, a small play area and a shop. Each time I've been there there have been signs advertising special children's activities. It would be a great place to spend a couple of hours between activities.
There are tolls for cars, but not for pedestrians or bicycles - the toll is currently 50p and free (if scary) on foot. The bridge is closed to all traffic including pedestrians for the balloon fiesta and the old Ashton Court festival/ whatever replaces it. It is a seriously long way up in the air - you can see why people at the time doubted it could be done - but it's a gorgeous bit of engineering.
The bridge is held up with chains rather than cables, and the cables themselves were recycled from teh even older hungerford bridge in London. The cliffs are a site of special scientific interest because there are several species of flower and small tree that only grow here. Apparently, this was known when the bridge was built. The wife of one of the senior engineers managed to convinve Brunel to have a clump of flowers carefully replanted further along the cliff to save them.
Of course, it won't take you long to see it. I'd recommend building it into a day trip to Bristol, if you were there for a day - before the cider barge, I'd think! You can see it from a distance from the approach you'd take on the airport bus, walk to it from Clifton (where the delis are, but well away from the more normal attractions of the floating harbour or welsh backs), or see it really clearly if you're going to some event at the Tobacco Factory as you make your way through Bedminster or up the side of the Avon Gorge. Your other option is to work it into a trip to Leigh woods which are lovely (if sometimes invaded by conceptual artists from Arnolfini...), and get some fresh air, if you are in the area for longer.
