It's very strange to be back, after thirty-seven years: like visiting somewhere in a dream. Plenty of Bristol feels, and is, much the same - like, of course and above all, the suspension bridge (which we can see from our room!). But then one goes somewhere else, and everything's changed. Clifton Village I can find my way around, because the streets are the same, but almost all the shops are different (and so trendy! And it's full of little cafes and coffee shops, like the one where we had breakfast (above).
We walked down Park Street - again, very different - many studenty vintage clothing stores - to the docks, which I were expecting to have changed beyond all memory (apart from the Arnolfini, and the Watershed, where I used to hire a darkroom and develop/print photos) -
and then to the M Shed - a newish, community oriented Bristol history museum, with a terrific Richard Long painting on the stairwell, painted in River Avon mud, and commemorating a walk in 1996 from Bristol to the sea, keeping the muddy water of the Bristol Channel in view each day (120 miles in four days).
Then walking back up hill to Clifton - signs of the oncoming Jubilee everywhere - here's the Queen peeking out of a downstairs window, in full sized cardboard cutout form.
Little community gardens - this one below Royal York Crescent -
and, on Dover Place, these Ruskinian windows: I'd forgotten them, until I saw them again. There's a lot that's rather like that ...
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