Lights And Action

In which we spot some filming going on, so talk about something completely different

Written by Forest Pines; published at 7:12 am on January 20th, 2010.
Filed under: Media Addict.

On my way home, last night and the night before, I noticed something going on along Ashton Road. Big floodlights, lighting up the whole street: some sort of night filming was going on.

Being intrigued, I went to the internet to try to find out what it might be. And then I checked my website stats, and found that people have been coming to this site, already, to try to find out what was being filmed. They can’t have got an answer, at least not from me. I haven’t been able to find a complete one, either, but I have found that it’s a drama about “the lives of young women who are involved with drugs and prostitution“, and it’s not specifically set in Bedminster, Ashton Gate, or in Bristol in general. Cheerful, then.

It reminded me, though, to say: you’d be able to tell, just by looking at my website stats, that the new series of Being Human has started now, with new extra dark edginess and even dirtier vampires than before. You can tell, because of the number of people who are asking The Interweb where it was filmed. To be honest, the establishing shots in the new series make it even more obvious than previously: most of them clearly show the street name. For new readers: the Being Human house is 1, Windsor Terrace, Totterdown, Bristol.* The pub, going by the exterior shots, appears to be along Henry St. K and I had a debate about the location of the car park in Episode 1: she said Trenchard St, I said Prince St; and the gay vampire’s house in Episode 2 was on Redcliffe Parade – as anyone who’s visited Bristol probably realised. Handily just round the corner from the hospital, in fact, should you have an urgent need to pretend to be dead.**

* Not in Cardiff, as one searcher seemed to think, presumably as the series was commissioned by BBC Cymru/Wales.

** In fact, I’m slightly puzzled now, why he didn’t pop up in the first series? After all, if you’re going through a major crisis and the self-proclaimed Vampire Leader is promising to destroy you, and you have a friend who has helped you in the past and is probably On Your Side … and he lives about 2 minutes walk from where you work, you think you’d probably pop round at least once. Of course, I know the real reason is that he hadn’t been invented at that point, but never mind.

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Keyword noise: Ashton, Ashton Gate, Ashton Road, BBC, BBC3, Bedminster, Being Human, Bristol, drama, film, filming, ghost, television, telly, Totterdown, tv, vampire, werewolf, Windsor Terrace

Weather Ever Changing

In which things get sweaty

Written by Forest Pines; published at 10:27 pm on July 2nd, 2009.
Filed under: Dear Diary.

I had hoped that a thunderstorm would clear the air, get rid of some of the humidity, cool things down a bit. Unfortunately, nothing changed. We had the thunderstorm, and half an hour later the ground was dry and the weather was still hot, muggy, and sticky to the touch. Oh well. Summer isn’t nice when it’s too hot to think.

Things I was going to blog about recently but haven’t: the rather silly “let’s bring the World Cup to Bristol” proposals, which seem like nothing more than a plan to blackmail the council planning department into letting Tesco build a new Ashton store, two minutes down the street from the Sainsbury’s that’s already there. Plus, the Easton Arts Trail, a rather enjoyable wander round which, already, was nearly a fortnight ago. Not to mention pictures of old trains from the weekend before that, and all the other things we’ve been getting up to lately apart from the strange foreign dirty movies. If it’s too hot to leave the sofa, it’s definitely too hot to blog

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Keyword noise: art, Ashton, Ashton Gate, Bristol, Bristol City, Easton, Easton Arts Trail, heat, hot, July, planning, summer, temperature, Tesco, weather

Photo post of the week

In which we wander around the harbour

Written by Forest Pines; published at 8:47 am on April 3rd, 2009.
Filed under: Photobloggery.

More around Bristol

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Keyword noise: Ashton, Ashton Swing Bridge, boats, bridge, Bristol, chain, ferry, Floating Harbour, footbridge, Gas Ferry Road, harbour, Harbourside, Hotwells, No Swimming, photography, photos, ships, sign, Spike Island, swing bridge, warning

The Return of the Guided Bus

In which we wonder how the Misguided Bus will fit along Winterstoke Road

Written by Forest Pines; published at 10:38 am on November 18th, 2008.
Filed under: Political.

Time to return to the West Of England Partnership’s misguided Bristol Guided Bus project,* I think, although Councillor Bradshaw never did reply to my last email. The rude chap. In the meantime, I’ve been poking my nose around the Winterstoke Road area.

Whilst I was doing so, the Evening Post, as I’d done, interpreted the scheme’s maps to read that a new bridge was going to be built over the harbour. It apparently isn’t, although you have to look at the maps very very carefully to spot this. Which is a sign of how poor this whole “consultation exercise” is, if the main local press outlet is allowed to get the wrong impression like that. In the same story, the partnership admitted that they have only a vague idea of the cost of the scheme. And then, Cumberland Road was closed for emergency repairs, due to a burst water main. At present the road’s mostly used by cars, with relatively few buses. What’s going to happen to it when there are buses putting much, much more stress on it every few minutes?** Moreover, this, like any other traffic incident on either Cumberland Road or Coronation Road,*** froze the rush-hour traffic trying to get south out of the city centre. What’s going to happen when the westbound side of Cumberland Road is taken up by bus lane?

Anyway, pressing on. Winterstoke Road, where the new bus road is due to run alongside the railway to Portbury. This railway line was only used occasionally for the best part of thirty years, before being rebuilt for heavy coal traffic from the docks. When that happened, it was singled, so there’s plenty of space alongside the line. Plenty of space for a new road, you might think. Let’s look.

Not much room there at all, really. That blue band is the width of two guided busways, with a narrow kerb at the side for access and evacuation. I’ve drawn it right up to the edge of the still-active railway; and it takes up, well, pretty much all the space available. No room at all for the promised cycleways alongside the road. I’ve widened it a bit at the site of the Ashton Gate stop shown on the maps;**** if it’s any bigger than I’ve drawn, it then starts to swallow up the existing (and rather poor-quality) cycle/footpath too.

What’s going to happen to that building alongside the line? The partnership’s simulation video shows it on the ground and unaffected by the busway – which, at the bottom of that picture, is due to ramp up onto a flyover and, at the top, execute a sharp turn across the railway and off to the left. Is there really enough room for that, though? Without scraping the side of the building every time a bus passes? I’m not very convinced.

* You know, the one they like to call “Bus Rapid Transit”, or just “Rapid Transit”, to gloss over the fact that it’s nothing more than a slightly-altered bus route.

** Some useful information here: the stress caused on a road varies with the fourth power of the axle loading, more or less. In non-maths language: if you double the weight on a wheel, that wheel will cause 16 times as much damage to the road. A car’s axle loading isn’t likely to be above 1.5 tonnes even for something big; a bus will be more like 9 or 10 tonnes on its heaviest axle. That six-times weight multiple turns into a 1296-times damage multiple. So, a stream of cars with one passing every couple of seconds – supposedly the safe separation, according to the Highway Code – causes roughly the same amount of road damage as one or two buses per hour. That’s a very rough back-of-envelope calculation, but gives you an idea of the scale of difference we’re talking about. Trucks, of course, are even worse.

*** such as the fatal motorbike accident at the Coronation Road/Dean Lane junction a few weeks ago.

**** using the size of the Leeds guided busway stops as a guideline

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Keyword noise: Ashton, Ashton Vale, Bedminster, Bristol, BRT, bus, Bus Rapid Transit, Cumberland Road, guided bus, guided busway, Mark Bradshaw, public transport, rapid transit, transport, West of England Partnership, Winterstoke Road

“1000 Tide”

In which we are briefly puzzled by some art

Written by Forest Pines; published at 2:06 pm on November 10th, 2008.
Filed under: Artistic, Photobloggery.

A few weeks ago, exploring the local area, we started walking up the Ashton-Pill path. It runs along the side of the railway up the south bank of the Avon, along the Avon Gorge and under the famous Suspension Bridge, downriver towards Pill.* We walked along it until we got bored and turned around.** En-route, though, we saw something slightly unusual. A big pile of plastic bottles, on the shore, below the path but above the tide line, corralled together.

Presumably, we thought, some sort of anti-littering campaign, fishing non-degradable bottles out of the river or out of the undergrowth. But then, the other day, we were up on the Downs on the far bank, and noticed the bottles—or, what we assume is those bottles—again. They’ve been arranged into words.

We have no idea, though, what it is. An art project? An advertising slogan? An anti-littering project as we originally thought? The internet doesn’t seem to be helping – the only relevant search hit at the moment is, er, that photo. We’re puzzled.

UPDATE: Thank you to a correspondant called Liz – who was also puzzled by it – for letting me know what it is. It is, indeed, an anti-littering art project; there are apparently 1000 plastic bottles washed up on every tide,*** hence the text. It does, though, change regularly, and eventually the artist, whose name is Pete Dolby, is going to make them all into a raft. So now we know.

* as you might expect, given its name

** after all, walking down towards Pill and back another way would have been a very long walk; and any other circular routes would have involved a stiff climb through the woods.

*** in the Avon Gorge, that is. I’m not sure what the number per mile of coastline is.

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Keyword noise: 1000 Tide, art, Ashton, Avon, Avon Gorge, Bristol, Clifton, Clifton Suspension Bridge, litter, Pete Dolby, Pill, river