The IsamBards in the City

Normally, when people ask me what I did on the weekend - polite younger colleagues, mostly, who actually get up off the settee and go places - I can't think of anything much to say, or worse, can't remember. Erm, walked the dog? I suggest, hopefully. Not so this weekend. It's been busy and memorable.

Saturday was a Twelve Red Kite Day. This is number 11, which flew over my daughter Jenny's friend Jenny's wedding to Michael in Swallowfield, Berkshire. (Lots of red kites up there.) (Have I mentioned before how much I like them? I think I probably have.) Even without taking the kites into consideration, it was the loveliest day. 

Today it was back to poetting in public again - not something we've been able to do much of these last couple of years. This morning's poetry walk with the IsamBards through some of the more hidden parts of old Bristol was part of this spring's Lyra Poetry Festival. Unfortunately, Pameli Benham couldn't join us as she had to self-isolate prior to a medical procedure that had been brought forward unexpectedly, but between us, Dominic Fisher, David Johnson and I managed to read her poems as well as our own, so that she was with us in spirit.  

Our starting point for the walk (and the poems) was the Haymarket, in the sunken roundabout that has been known since the 1970s as the Bear Pit (not that there was ever one there - you need to have visited Bristol Zoo before the end of the 1960s to have seen one of those in these parts).  

Here David regaled us with what did happen here in past centuries - notably, St James's Fair, which, come to think of it, almost certainly would have involved a bear or two - while Dominic meditated on the subject of lunchtime drinking, and I observed how cities change all the time, even if it's just people taking down their bean sticks. 

We then proceeded to St James Barton, which was rather more peaceful. 

David read Pameli's poem about The Bristol Giant, who was actually Irish and called Patrick Cotter, while Dominic read his poem about Charles Wesley, whose wife, and the five of his children who predeceased him, are buried near here. 

By the Art Deco Odeon, I read Pameli's poem about entrepreneur Oskar Deutsch, a Hungarian Jew who opened 258 cinemas around the UK in the space of 10 years, and David pondered/contemplated/mused/ruminated on why Peter Mark Roget's stay/sojourn/residence/stop over in Bristol from 1798 - 1799 isn't yet commemorated/memorialised/remembered/observed with a blue plaque. 

At the junction of Nelson Street and All Saints Street, we paused again in the doorway of what used to be a bank but is now something involving bowling. Being a Sunday, it wasn't too noisy, but even so there was a need to project and gesture a bit too.  

Here, we learnt about the people, and the river, buried beneath our feet, courtesy of Dominic ... 

... and I read my poem about the 15th century topographer, William Wyrcestre, and how his record of Bristol offers up occasional glimpses of a much older city.

The next section of our walk took us up St John's Steep and along John Street to Hasardysgarden, the churchyard that belonged to St John the Baptist's Church, also known as St John on the Wall. Here I read a poem about the tailors who used to play dice there before it was consecrated in 1409. We then moved on to Broad Street for poems about Edward Everard Printing Works, the steeple of St John's and the street art of two Civil War-era duellists.

My favourite bit of the walk was through the lanes that hug the ancient city wall, very little of which remains. Having traversed Bell Lane, we paused again in Small Street for poems from Dominic about Coleridge on the hunt for his publisher friend, Joseph Cottle, and St Leonard Lane, and one from me about the Flemish weaver, Edmund Blanket, who died in 1371 and is buried in St Stephen's Church. 

We were now a short step from the city centre, where David mused on the changing city and I told the story of my great-great-grandmother Mary Block and the day her ship came in. 

Our walk ended at the empty plinth where the statue of Colston once stood, and I'm pleased to say, there was absolutely no nostalgia for him or regret about his long over-due removal from anyone present. 

I read my poem about this righting of this shameful wrong, and a second about Pero Jones, the slave for whom the footbridge spanning St Augustine's Reach beyond the Centre is named. 

All that was left was for David to read the final poem, Pameli's 'In the centre of the city', and a little chit-chat and book-selling before we returned home, full of the sunlight and salt air of the city we're passing through during this lifetime.

Psychogeography and Poetry in Old Bristol

Now that Project Breadcrumbs is nearing completion, I'm starting to think about what I want to focus on next as a poet.  Landscapes - both rural and urban - have always fascinated me, which is fortunate because I can combine that interest with another passion, which is walking about a bit. And as writers from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, to Thoreau and Dickens, to Woolf and Rowling have attested, the two drives - to walk and to write - are often inextricably linked. 

Having recently moved house to an area I knew well as a child, I've been enjoying wandering around the lanes that run along the back of almost all the houses, though they contain little more than dilapidated garages, brambles and puddles.  There's something secret about them, and they also hotwire my childhood in a way that the streets and roads I've been familiar with consistently, throughout my life, don't. 

And there are other, more exciting lanes to be explored in the centre of the city.  Much of  old Bristol that survived the slum clearances of the Victorian era and post World War I was either obliterated in the blitz in 1940-41 or subsequently demolished by a council intent on building a wholly 20th century city.  But down by the Church of St John on the Wall, the last remaining stretch of the ancient city wall, the city remembers itself in the shapes of the lanes that echo the walls and the River Frome, now culverted and buried under tons of concrete.   

I've known these lanes all my life.  For many years, my mother worked as a legal secretary in nearby Albion Chambers. My father would pick me and my sister up from our grandmother's house in Bishopston on a Saturday lunchtime and we would drive to town to meet her from work, before stopping at the chippy to pick up dinner. 

He would park in Small Street outside the tobacconist and confectioners and point out things to me like the old stone step into the Chambers, worn by the feet of countless Bristolians over centuries - and since replaced, probably for reasons of Health and Safety.  

Years later, I also worked in the area, in an office in St Lawrence House (now fashionably graffitied and converted into student accommodation), the windows of which looked out directly onto the tower and clock of St John's.  

However, despite being in thrall to them since earliest days, it was only when I went on A Guided Walk Around Mediaeval Bristol a few years ago that I really started to get a feel for their history.  On that walk I was introduced to the 15th century topographer, William Wyrcestre, and learnt that back in 1480, Nelson Street was known as Gropecunt Lane; that in the middle of the crossroads that marked the centre of the settlement, where the High Cross stood in Wyrcestre's day, there was once a waymark hawthorn tree (now a traffic bollard);  that a ship with an oak mast and a stripy sail was found buried in mud under the tower of St Stephen's Church during 15th century renovation work, thus indicating the original course of either the Frome or one of its subsidiary streams in the marshy delta that existed before wholesale drainage and re-routing of the river took place;  that the concrete car park off  Bell Lane was the site of the Jewish Temple prior to King Edward I's Edict of Explusion in 1290.  (Almost 200 years later, Wyrcestre, a man of learning, was so ignorant of Judaism that he repeated a rumour he'd heard, namely that Jews worshipped an idol named Apollo.)

William Wyrcestre also gave me a poem, reprinted below. 

Here are some photos showing the shape of the now lost city walls.

Leonard Lane

John Street

Because its contours are, like the Frome, buried under layers of rubble, concrete and tarmac, it can be quite a surprise to discover how significant the hillock upon which the city was originally founded actually is.  This becomes most evident on Leonard Lane, where a doorway will suddenly take you down 22 steep steps to the next street, St Stephen's Street. 

Yesterday, while I was maundering about in town, I also decided to find the site of an etching by John Skinner Prout, which used to hang on my grandmother's wall when I was small. I remember being fascinated then to discover that this romantic (romanticised) scene was of somewhere in Bristol, now long vanished.  It says on the back that it is the Frome ... but where is the bridge?  

Oh, look ... could it be? ... Fairfax Street with Union Street above it?

Of course, when I got home, I looked online and someone else had already beaten me to it, and in colour. Even so, unearthing buried rivers under buried roads is what I want to do next.

Here's my poem about walking around Bristol in the company of William Wyrcestre.  It's from my collection, Map Reading For Beginners, published by Indigo Dreams.

William Wyrcestre Dreams Of Bryggestowe

Ditchers, digging through silt

to strengthen foundations, discover a relic.

‘A boat,’ William tells us in Latin,

‘with sails of striped canvas,

a main mast lofty as a tree.’

His Bristoll’s a modern-day port,

yet the names of its streets

conjure mudflats and creeks,

long after its rivers were tamed

and rewritten in mortar and brick.

William’s a wanderer like me

though topography, not stories, is his passion.

He’s obsessed with measuring space,

pacing quays and sizing buildings,

plumbing drops with knotted rope.

He fathoms every well and drain,

reveals the length of Gropecunt Lane,

not what goes on there.

When my attention wanders too,

he stops at the crossroads and relents.

‘Dynt the Pumpmaker,’ he says, ‘heard tell

how once a hawthorn flourished

where now stands this splendid Cross.’

But all I see’s a traffic bollard,

yards of tarmac, withered grass.

‘And here,’ he adds by a concrete car park,

‘in deep vaults beneath these walls

the Jewry made a heathen temple

to exalt their tin-pot Lord, his name

Apollo, folk do say, or some such idol.’

©Deborah Harvey 2014

Snow in May

One of the things I missed most during last year's miserable spring was the almost complete lack of may.  It was just wrong wrong wrong and I blame the unseasonably late snow that we had in March, for depriving the land of later drifts of blossom.

Not so this year - in fact, my drives to Yorkshire towards the beginning of the month and to Manchester and Liverpool the following weekend were more like bridal processions.  It made me wonder if the oak isn't the wrong choice for our national tree.  After all, we don't name a month after it, do we? (The first person to say Oaktober will get a hard stare.)  And whilst there's no doubting the larger tree's magnificence,  the sight of tracts of landscape covered in white, with the occasional, more isolated thorns to mark the old ways really brings home its significance to our ancestors.

Here are some photos I took on my phone when I was up on Purdown on 14th May.  When I semi-glanced at the road sign you can see in the first one, my brain  short-circuited and I read it as SNOW instead of SLOW.

  

Within a week all this glory in Bristol had disappeared, yet when I went up on Dartmoor a full nine days later,  it was to find that the may there had yet to blossom fully.  It reminded me of how, in the absence of instruments to measure it, time was not as well regulated for our ancestors as it is for us. 

 

Of course, I would be failing in my duty as a card-carrying Libran if I weren't to backtrack at this point and mention how beautifully the oaks of Purdown were doing at the same time ... 

... but I think the final word on the matter should go to William Wyrcestre, who heard tell from Dynt the Pumpmaker back in 1470s that it was a whitethorn, not an oak that marked the centre of Brygstowe once upon a time, long before the first coming of Bristol High Cross.  

Not quite Memory Lane ...

I recently started following Julia Cameron's course for unblocking creativity, 'The Artist's Way'.  One stipulation is to go on an Artist's Date once a week - ie to set aside two hours when you do something special on your own, just for yourself.  Well, I only managed one hour, but I did have fun photographing a corner of Bristol which has particular resonance for me.

These are all views of Nelson Street, wrecked first by the Luftwaffe in the Bristol Blitz of 1940-41 and later by the city council.  You can still see, however, that it runs in the shape of a curve, and that's because it used to hug the outer perimeter of the city's mediaeval walls.

Very little of the walls remains - just the Church of St John the Baptist (or St John on the Wall, as it's more usually called), which you can glimpse on the right of this photo. It's no longer in use, but you can still visit it from time and time and it's really worth making the effort because there are mediaeval wall paintings inside and fascinating vaults.

Here's a better view.  Hooray for sensitive 1970s shopping and office developments!

Every now and then you get a glimpse of the way things used to be centuries ago.

One  thing you won't see, however, is a sign declaring its former name.  This is because in mediaeval times it was known as Gropecunt Lane.  The mediaeval topographer, William Wyrcestre, tells us how many paces long it was, but not what went on there. It's probably as well.