Last month we reported on the ‘official’ opening of the Kings Weston Iron Bridge, but on Sunday 14th July the community celebration very much in the earlier event to shade! The event enjoyed a lovely sunny afternoon and attracted around 200 guests who were serenaded by the Bristol Ukulele Band as they gathered at the Kings Weston end of the bridge. Proceedings began with the 126th Scouts (Sea Mills) parading over the newly open bridge with their troop banners arriving in the informal arena at the west side.
Janet Poole receives flowers in thanks on behalf of KWAG. (Bob Pitchford)
Sea Mills Scouts parade their banners over the bridge.
Janet Poole, who has been so instrumental in promoting and championing the repair of the bridge took a stand on the newly finished steps and addressed the crowd. She undertook to thank everyone involved with the project including the construction workers and support from KWAG during the lengthy process getting it reinstated. In gratitude for her tireless work, KWAG’s chair presented a bouquet of flowers on behalf of everyone who’d missed the bridge over the last nine years. Finally a ribbon was strung between the railings and ceremonially cut to re-inaugurate the historic structure.
A collection held during the event raised £121 towards KWAG’s Big Bulb Plant this October, for planting of daffodils either side of the bridge. The bridge was in very active use during event, with many guests taking their first opportunity to cross the bridge in its new raised location. Louis, a twelve year old drummer, closed proceedings with a rousing session in the sun. At the generous invitation of John Barbey of Kings Weston house, many people sauntered back to the vaulted coffee shop where complementary drinks and cake rounded off a beautiful and memorable celebration, a fit conclusion to a long-running saga.
We’ve noted before that the summer months make working parties much harder, and last month was no exception. Despite a good turnout and a couple of welcome new faces we didn’t manage to finish off the area as planned. This was more to do with the amount of work left being more than we first judged. Nevertheless, the last few months have seen a significant erosion of the cherry laurel’s dominance in this area.
The change in the view east, back towards the house, between May and this month.
It’s clear from historic maps of Penpole Wood where the problem stems. The area we’ve been tackling is just outside, to the east, of the historic boundary of Penpole Wood. Here the Southwell family sought to blend the landscaped parkland into the natural ancient woodland by planting specimen trees and between them fashionable laurel bushes. They were, it is believed, intended to create a continuous blanket of evergreens below the picturesquely scattered specimen trees. Some of those trees are likely to be those that still surround the area, but the cherry laurel has since grown wild, suffocating anything else in the area and even obscuring historic paths.
Diagram showing the 1772 estate survey with current features of the felling area annotated.
The slope now looks bare and barren where we’ve passed through, a legacy of around 250 years of laurel suffocating the area. We intend to replant trees in this area this autumn, to better integrate it back into the native woodland. So, back again this month to try and finish this tricky area! Thank you to everyone who came out to help last month and we hope to see you all again this weekend. Perhaps we will finally get it finished…
A big oak at the top of the slope remains as laurels retract over the last four months. The view up-slope from the middle path thorough Penpole Woods.
Oddly, views of the main front of Kings Weston house looking up the avenue from The Circle are rare, so, we’re celebrating on hunting down this copy of an early 20th Century postcard. The familiar lime avenue on the left is today accompanied by replacement trees we planted in 2014, but here the house is framed by some of the originals. In the 1760s the rigid formality of the linear avenues had become old fashioned, and the third Edward Southwell who owned the estate took to deformalizing it, creating a more natural landscaped parkland setting for the mansion. Rather than getting rid of all the trees he kept one side of the avenue and thinned-out the south side leaving just a handful scattered in the open grassland. The postcard shows that these survivors were still growing in the 1900s, but must have succumbed soon after.
The recently acquired early 1900s postcard showing the view of the house from The Circle.
It’s also worth noting the grassy carpet leading the eye towards the house is absolutely crammed with flowers, perhaps buttercups or ox-eye daisies. Sadly, a black and white photo does no justice to what the photographer enjoyed on this sunny summer day in the Edwardian era.
The approach to the house from Shirehampton was once dominated by views towards the house, something that the architect Sir John Vanbrugh was keen to emphasise in its design. The arcade of chimneys on the roof were once the first thing seen across the brow of the hill as the rest of the façade gradually revealed itself. By the time the visitor was stood on The Circle the house was perfectly framed by trees, the open circle providing a theatrical open space from which to admire it from.
Drawn by Samuel Loxton in 1920, this view shows on the right the cedar tree on The Circle that’s just been lost. In the foreground the ha-ha with its sunken fence that once surrounded the Circle is seen before being infilled after WWII.
Sadly, since WWII and the growth of self-seeded ash and sycamore, these once inspiring views have been lost, the result being a sense of disconnection between the house, its grounds, and Shirehampton.
Today views from the Circle are impacted by post-war tree growth.
The stair hall in Kings Weston house possesses some lush gilded trompe-l’oeil painted into its alcoves. These, we discovered some time ago, were inspired in about 1716 by printed images by the French architect Jean Lepautre. Edward Southwell who commissioned the house had copies of several volumes of his work, so appears to have set the painter the task of replicating them to decorate his new home. Until now, the origin of one of the paintings has remained a mystery, but one we think we’ve now solved.
The painting is small, occupying the arched head of a door on the first floor of the stair hall and looks less accomplished than those elsewhere. In incorporates weapons, canon, arrows, spears, a shield, banners and the paraphernalia of warfare. One of Lepautre’s designs came to our attention recently but looks rather different. The theme is similar but on a more extravagant scale. However, looking closely you can start to pick out the same various elements as the Kings Weston painting.
It appears that the painter has used the same image as the basis for his work, simplifying and adapting it to fit in the architectural setting he had to work with. Curiously, he seems not to have quite understood some of the things he was painting leading to some odd interpretation. The top of the shield, for example, has some strange bendy detail, and what on earth is the strange sun-shaped thing at the back? Is it supposed to be one of the epaulettes, feathers, or that oddity in Lepautre’s own engraving at the back-left side?
A collection of interesting drawings has caught our attention this month. They were all by the hand of Maria S. Miles (1826-1897) who grew up as Maria Hill at Henbury House to the east of Kingsweston Hill. As her married name suggests, she wed a member of the Miles family, Colonel Charles Miles, for whom Kings Weston was their dynastic home. This gave her private access to the family affairs, house, and parkland, some of which are featured amongst her artistic output.
The trees of Kings Weston seem to have suffered badly from heavy storms and wind, perhaps a bad mix of exposed location and shallow soils. A few months ago we covered the damage caused by a tornado in 1859, but the park was rattled again my a terrible storm in October 1877. Using the envelope for her letter to her husband, Maria Miles illustrated the sorry scene on Shirehampton Road where whole avenues of elm trees were thrown over.
Maria Miles’s drawing of fallen elms on Shirehampton Road, sketched on the envelope of a letter sent to her husband.
The event was reported widely in the local press:
“The full effects of the destructive fury of the gale and the havoc it made among trees can best be seen however Shirehampton Park. The whole line of noble elms on the left side of the road through the park is down. Many of these grand old trees had more than century’s growth in them, and as they lie prostrate present saddening spectacle. Their giant forms have for generations been the admiration of all lovers of well grown trees— now they are broken and torn as some malignant Aeolus had spent his last strength to wrench the favourites from the spot they adorned and fling them in heaps of ruinous wreck to wait for the prosaic attentions of the wood-cutter and the timber merchant. The owner of these fines trees is said to have remarked that he would have rather seen his house down than his trees, inasmuch as could have replaced the one but cannot restore the other, and the same kind of feeling— regret for the picturesque which has been destroyed in a single night—will be common all who have seen the extraordinary results of the storm as they are presented by the uprooted trees in Shirehampton Park. An old Cliftonian assures us that there has been no such scene as that now to be witnessed in the park during the last fifty years.”
The owner of the fine trees was Philip William Skinner Miles. Although he was the heir to the Kings Weston estate he allowed his mother, Clarissa, to continue living at the house until her death in 1868. Instead, he took up residence in Shirehampton where he fitted out Penpole House to his own specification. Maria captures her brother-in-law’s home in 1863 showing the spectacular view of the Severn enjoyed across the western lawn, and the rambling house and gardens in the foreground. Sadly, this house that once sat below Penpole Point, was demolished after WWII and is now the site of Penpole Close at the bottom of Penpole Lane.
Penpole House, looking north towards views of the Severn in 1863.
A short train passes along horseshoe Bend, below the parkland, in 1883.
Curiously, Maria appears to have had an interest in the family’s industrial exploits too. She records the SS Great Britain and SS Great Western, two ships in which the family held interests, and paints an early view of the Bristol Port and Pier Railway from the Powder House on the Avon. The view shows the massive slice of bank that was taken out of Shirehampton Park and a short train making its way towards Shirehampton in September 1883, eight years after the line opened. The tree-lined parkland setting above was to be assaulted twice again, once by the widening of the railway, and later the building of the Portway road, cutting the estate off from the river’s edge.
The most interesting view as far as we are concerned, is one from Kings Weston house looking out towards Penpole Point and Portishead beyond. This little sketch dates from 1857 and shows the woods and tree-scattered park stretching unbroken as far as the estuary. The foreground is dominated by two lime trees, around which a rustic seat is positioned to take best advantage of the view. These lime trees survive today next to the house at the western end of the coffee shop terrace, though the bench is now a distant memory.
Looking across the park from the shade of the lime trees outside Kings Weston house in 1857.
The area before final preparation and digging-over.
Since we started work on the View Garden area alongside Napier Miles Road a number of people have asked what we were going to plant there. Our initial ambition was only to get on top of the undergrowth that was threatening the wall, but ongoing work allowed us to think more ambitiously. Over the following months, one of our volunteers, Mike, has been diligently forking through the whole area getting rid of roots and breaking up the ground ahead of a planned seeding of the area as wildflower meadow. He was joined last month in a final push to get the ground prepared for sowing.
Because of the wet weather this year things had been delayed a little, but we had a good turnout of volunteers on Saturday 13th of May to dig over the whole area again and get rid of the last of the nettle and bramble roots that would have quickly undone any work on the new planting.
Volunteers dig-in with the task alongside Napier Miles Road.
By the end of the day we’d managed to dig and rake-over most of the area, but not quite all. Everything was finally polished off the following weekend and a specialist mix of wildflower meadow, and hedge mix for the shadier areas, was sown. The weather since proved providential, and the seeds were quickly watered in by the rain, with seeds already starting to germinate just a week later!
Thank you to all our volunteers on this, and thanks to Avonmouth & Lawrence Weston Wind Turbine Fund for grant funding the seed. We’ll try and keep you update with the results of this project as it develops.
The tilled ground a few weeks later. Look closely and you can see the green shoots coming up.
Finally!! A major milestone in the iron bridge restoration was reached at the end of last month, with the return of the historic structure, albeit 1.1 metres higher. Contractors started work early in the morning of the 30th May, bringing in a crane, the bridge strapped to a flat-loader, and closing the footpaths nearby for safety. A group of campaigners and visitors gathered at the west abutment to watch proceedings.
With spectators beyond, contractors watch as the first half of the freshly restored and painted bridge is craned back into place.
The east half of the bridge returns to meet its partner half way.
The bridge looks resplendent in its new livery of dark green paint, a colour picked to match the original colouring found beneath old paint layers. Contractors from Dorothea Restoration and Griffiths were on hand to make sure that the components would fit back together in their new position; not an easy task with the bearing stones having to be raised and reset at their new level.
The first section, the west end, was gradually lowered into place, and proved the more troublesome of the parts. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing and cutting of the stonework it was eventually seated in position. The east end then followed, then the central plate that fastened the two ends of the bridge together. After some careful adjustment the whole structure was back in place and true.
Work will carry on now, touching up the new paintwork, erecting the steps either end, and fitting the handrails and railings to them. The road closure has been extended until the 15th to allow some of this work to be done, and the final completion is supposed to be the first week in July. Everyone is looking forward to being able to celebrate the reopening!
T he two halves back in place, awaiting the central joining connection.
Two years ago KWAG built a new set of steps on the northern edge of Penpole Wood where the pubic right of way from Mancroft Avenue enters the historic estate. We’re glad to say this has held up well and has been welcomed and well used since we finished it. It’s an important link for students from Lawrence Weston heading from school on Penpole Lane. But the condition of the path below them had become horrendous, particularly this year where rain and mud had rendered it virtually impassable.
Recognising the issue we decided to extend our step work to connect back to Mancroft with a new well-drained path. A special project team was put together under the organisation of Jim Ellis, and materials bought. The first task involved digging out the old path, which came out easily. There was the unusual discovery of long sections of old carpet three inches under the mud, no doubt thrown down at some point to try and improve the muddy conditions. After cutting out another few inches of soil we constructed a timber structure to contain a hardcore and rubble base that will hopefully promote drainage. Gullies either side are hoped to allow water to drain away without collecting on the path. Everything was finished with a good covering of self-binding gravel.
We’ve had some positive feedback since the project was completed, but the litmus test will be next winter. Thank you to Ian, Simon, John, Colin, and of course Jim, who successfully project managed the whole thing.
There’s something of a 1990s revival taking over culture right now; baggy combat trousers are back and raves are in again. Frightening to think that it was around 30 years ago! The 1990s was a bad time for the Kings Weston Estate. The house remained in use as the Avon & Somerset Constabulary police training school despite their aspirations to expand across the park being quashed. They already planned to move to Portishead and minimal maintenance was undertaken on house or grounds. The thin sloping strip of Shirehampton Park along Shirehampton Road, between Kingsweston Hill and Penpole Wood, was the only part of the main parkland controlled by the Council.
detail of the aerial photo survey flown over Kings Weston on 30th March 1990 capturing the funfair, tennis courts, and Fairways.
At the start of the decade the Ordnance Survey sent over its survey planes on one of its periodical photography missions. When it passed over Kings Weston in March it recorded an unusual visitor to the park: a funfair! The fair set up in a prime location on Shirehampton Road, between the Council tennis courts and the car park. It’s possible to pick out dodgems, carousel, and four other big rides as well as a small encampment of stalls, booths, and caravans. Newspapers reveal the fair was here for ten days from the 21st of March, open 6pm or 2pm on weekends, but no indication of which travelling fair it was. Does anyone remember other times the fair came to Kings Weston, or is this photo a chance record of the only visit?
A couple of years later some alternative entertainment was going down on the estate – a rave. Now emblematic of 90s youth culture and fondly remembered by many, raves became a huge civil order issue for the Government. Many were illegally held, but, going by a flyer publicising the event, this one looks to have been more legitimate. In the days before internet and mobile phones in everyone’s pockets, flyers, often handmade, were an essential way to get the message out but rarely survive. The Crank it Up One More Time session was held at Fairways pub in Feb 1992 and promoted by Beyond Control. On the decks were Vinyl Junkie, Luge+Perkz and MC Dope – where are they now? Guests were advised to dress to sweat. We’d love to hear from anyone who remembers going!
An alternative souvenir from the Kings Weston estate in the form of a rave flyer for Crank it UP One More Time 8.2.92
The Fairways pub was just opposite the war memorial, on the present Karakal site. It had begun in the 1972 as a social club for Portway Football club who used the pitch next to the cricket club on Penpole Lane. It was an unglamorous single-storey building erected on land purchased from Bristol Water Works. It can be picked out in the aerial photo to the south of the old covered reservoir. Its construction coincided with efforts to establish a sports centre in the old reservoir building. By 1988 it was being advertised as Fairways pub, so it appears the football club had relocated to more suitable pitches in Sea Mills by this time. Although planning consent for a replacement purpose-built pub was granted in 1992 the old buildings continued until 1995 when it closed, never to reopen. The run-down buildings were demolished shortly afterwards, but by the time the owners of the site made any move to rebuild it things had changed, the estate was now nationally recognised for its historic value, planning policies had changed, and their new proposals were refused.
1970s Architects drawings of the sports and social club on Penpole Lane that would become Fairways pub.
The most significant moment for Kings Weston in the 90s saw the future of the mansion and Home Park in the balance. Kings Weston house was put on the market by the police in 1995 with an asking price of £300,000. Ironically, this was £30,000 lower than the Council had purchased it for in 1970 before being forced to hand the property over to the police four years later when Avon County was formed. Initial reports in September that year suggested the police had accepted a £125,000 offer from “property tycoon” Hugh Parsons, but late bids were received from a developer seeking conversion to a nursing home, and another from the City Council keen to acquire the land and house for the public; A tussle ensued with legal threats flying. The battle over the bidding played out in the press for several months before it was announced in November that the council finally won with a bid of £300,000 and agreement that public access would be protected. Councillor Paul Smith, chairman of the city council’s land and building committee said: “The challenge for us now is to ensure it is properly looked after and the land kept open to the public”. How that came to pass is another story…
The Bristol press keenly followed the battle over ownership of Kings Weston house.
Another artwork with Kings Weston Interest has come our way recently. The panoramic views across the waters of the Severn to the north were matched by the rolling landscape framing the Avon and its gorge to the south. Both proved popular locations for picturesque paintings throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The recently uncovered work shows the view up the Avon from Shirehampton Park, a spot much-favoured by artists. Here, the view across Horseshoe Bend was attractively framed by trees along the parkland edge. Distant views of Cook’s Folly, a tower with romantic associations, added distant intrigue to the scene.
The painting is likely to date from the 1830s, before the twin towers of the Clifton Suspension bridge rose to punctuate the skyline. Our artist, whoever they might have been, has added a sentimental vignette as foreground interest. A young couple, the gent apparently an artist working on his own version of the same view, have been approached by a gentleman and his dog. It may be that, in his red tunic and walking stick, he is an old soldier begging for money, so adding a poignant human touch in the midst of such natural drama.
