Places to Visit in Southern England - Bristol Town Centre (Part One)

This blogpost comes with a few asterisks, mainly that it's not going to focus on every corner of Bristol - a thousand words wouldn't do the city justice. Instead, I'll focus on three places which I saw in Bristol, before ending with a write-up on Millwall's game against Bristol City on New Year's Day. Hopefully that works well for you, Honourable Reader. Two of them will feature here, whilst the other two (including the match) are in a separate blogpost which I've now published and can be read now.

Bristol Temple Meads - directly at the start

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bristol Temple Meads is the main station serving the city centre, and is also the oldest station in Bristol. The main railway operator here is the Great Western Railway, who have been running trains here since 1840, initially as a terminus, but now also seeing trains pass through on their way to places like Plymouth, Exeter and Penzance. It's an hour an half away from Paddington by train, conveniently a good approximation of how long the football match lasted, and those looking out their window can admire the dull suburbs of Reading, Swindon and other M4 towns before they're in Bristol.

Yeah, let's talk about Bristol. 

You might wonder what the Temple Meads bit means. Well, it's simple - Temple Meads is the area in which the station is located. Obviously, though, that's still rather vague. It refers to the land on which the station would eventually be built, once a property of the Knight's Templar (which explains the Temple bit) and which lies alongside the River Avon besides a series of meadows (which explains the Meads bit). 

The station itself is magnificent, looking rather gothic and cathedral-like and a refreshing contrast to the glass-walled stations back in London, and boasts a statue of Isambard Kingdom Brunel who designed the station (and whose other work is visible throughout Bristol and on the railways) which I didn't photograph. What I did capture was the entrance to this passenger shed, which is apparently now used for events and seemingly looks brilliant inside (though I couldn't say for sure). On I went into the town centre, along a river...

River Avon

You walk for a while away from the station, along a series of roads, and you end up along the River Avon. Taking it's name literally, it's a river called "river", but no one notices that easily in English.

The Avon is one of two main rivers which can be found in Bristol. The other is the Severn, which doesn't flow near the city centre and instead is ending its journey in the impressively large Severn estuary, the water becoming part of the Bristol Channel instead. The two will meet each other at the channel near Avonmouth and the M5, but before that, the Avon will have passed towns like Chippenham and Bath, before coming to Bristol.

 

 

One place where it can be found is the Floating Harbour, called such as the water level doesn't particularly change all that much here. This is as the tide doesn't have much of an effect here, which is partially due to William Jessop's engineering work in the 19th century constructing locks along the river. 

A large chunk of the city centre after all is essentially an island - Spike Island - which is due to the Avon splitting in two. One branch is its progression via the Floating Harbour, whilst the other branch was engineered in the early 1800s to straighten the Avon to facilitate the construction of the harbour, running south of the harbour. Unsurprisingly, there are various bridges to get you away from the island, so you can get closer to the large shopping centre, university, and cathedral. I crossed two bridges - one is Redcliffe Bridge, which can open a lá Tower Bridge to let boats through (both are called bascule bridges), which I don't have any photos of, and after a jaunt through the green Queen's Square, populated with a statue of William III on horseback, I crossed the Avon again, this time over a grey footbridge in Bristol, known as Pero's Bridge, which is named after a slave (Bristol has a rather controversial history with slavery, due to it being a major port and thus was involved with the slave trade).

Past this footbridge, you'll find more cafes and an aquarium in the Anchor Square, and I spotted a beetle sculpture outside that aquarium. I wondered why this sculpture was randomly standing here, and I thought I'd solved the mystery after thinking it could be an ode to Bristolian band Massive Attack's third album Mezzanine (the cover has a beetle), but the internet tells me the beetle sculpture is of a different species. If anyone who knows is reading this, please help me answer the question!

As always, remember to read part two!

A final footnote for those who made it all the way here: I'm happy to inform you that this is my hundredth blogpost. Thank you to everyone who has read All Over 2a at some point and I'm hoping you enjoy all the future blogposts, whatever they might be about. It's been six very enjoyable months!