Let Me Count The Ways

Patchway looks a lot more modern than it actually is.  A station first opened in the 19th century, it has upgraded lifts and a footbridge, as though someone actually cares about it as a destination.  The reason for all this up to date tech is simple: electrification.  The Great Western Main Line got wired in the 2010s, meaning that the footbridge here had to be rebuilt higher up, and inadvertently making it a much nicer place to visit.  It's yet another argument for electric trains across the entire nation, which is why it isn't happening.  Making sense isn't a good enough reason I'm afraid.

The station's main claim to fame is that it serves the Rolls-Royce manufacturing complex, and they even have their own entrance from the platform.  Looking at the acres of vacant land I wondered if this was going to be another part of the Brabazon new town, but apparently not.  Rolls-Royce are still doing well here, producing aircraft components, and probably also some terrifying murder machines that we'd rather not think about.  

I left the station by the car park, where a group of men in their sixties were meeting up for a trip into town, manfully shaking hands and being polite to one another.  Absolutely no hugs here.  Station Road is a small, narrow country-esque lane which, judging by the speed of the drivers who passed me, is used as a rat run.  There's an estate the other side of the trees, but they're weirdly kept separate, in case they go mad and decide to use public transport.

At the end is Gypsy Patch Lane.  Is that okay?  I don't know if that's okay.  It's a wide road that forms part of a chain crossing the top of the city, lined with corporation homes set back behind gardens and front gates.  I followed an elderly man returning home; he absent-mindedly picked a piece of litter out of his hedge before going into his home.  

Across the way was a pub called Stokers which, unlike a lot of estate pubs, still seemed to be thriving.  A quick look at their Facebook page revealed the reason for this:

SCOTCH EGG FRIDAY.  I repeat: SCOTCH EGG FRIDAY.  What a concept.  While other pubs are branching out into gourmet eats or tapas, Stokers is slapping down eighty scotch eggs and doing a roaring trade.  That's what you want with your pint, not some padron peppers or a croqueta or two: an egg wrapped in meat with maybe a bit of pickle chucked in as well.  I'm writing this from nearly two hundred miles away, and I'm furious I'm not there.  Admittedly, I'd probably get my head kicked in - it doesn't look like the kind of pub that welcomes fat train station spotters - but so long as I got one of those cheese and cracked black pepper bites first I'd be happy.  

Stokers also had a bonus claim to fame in the car park.  Computer, zoom and enhance.

Waiting to feed the students later that day was the legendary Jason Donervan.  I felt quite starstruck seeing it across the road, like when I went to Sunderland and saw Amy's Winehouse.  Also Jason Donervan never sued anyone for saying it was gay so it's already one-up on the Aussie soap star.

I was quite happily wandering around, hoping that those clouds wouldn't get any darker or more rainy, when I saw a bus stop.  The problem was, this bus stop was so good, I actually told it to fuck off.  Out loud.  Look at it.

It would appear that Bristol has a network called metrobus (no caps needed, it's the future).  This is an actual Bus Rapid Transit network, with four express services running around the city.  

The bus stops themselves incorporate dispense the tickets, so you can buy before you board, plus seating and a next bus indicator.

Obviously buses are rubbish, in the main.  However, part of the reason they're rubbish is they're easy to get rid of - how many "this stop is not in use" signs have you noticed? - plus they're slow and get caught up in traffic.  If you give them their own dedicated lanes and busways and modern vehicles that are easy to use and understand, people will be all over them.  I was wildly impressed (although a bit of reading up has shown me that they're not necessarily all they should be; bus lane provision has been spotty, meaning the vehicles get caught up in the traffic with everything else).

It's not the only bit of Bristol's transport planning that surprised me.  While I was reading up on the stations I discovered that there are actual local government plans for an underground railway service.  

Obviously this is all heavily caveated.  They're talking about it being possibly a mix of over- and underground services, so it might be a tram network with a couple of tunnels rather than a full metro.  The proposal came from Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, who's now in the House of Lords and his position has been abolished entirely (there's a Metro Mayor for the West of England instead).  Funding was allocated to look into the proposals, with a suggestion of four lines, each of which costs one billion pounds.  That sounds like far too low an amount to me (Line 4 of the Milan Metro, which opened in 2024, cost €1.7 billion) and the amount will be rising every moment there aren't spades in the ground.

None the less, I'm thrilled by the optimism.  This is exactly what the regional mayors should be doing.  Not monkeying around with the odd station or new bendy buses; big, transformative projects that will comprehensively change the city.  Even Andy Burnham - perhaps the most powerful city leader in the country - only tentatively talks about an underground system for Manchester, even though Manchester should've got one about, oooh, a hundred years ago.  The idea that there is a city in the United Kingdom actually pushing for modern, transformative public transport is thrilling, and gives me a little bit of hope for the future.  I look forward to riding on the Bristol Tube one day.  I'll probably be in an oxygen tent by then but that's not the point.

I turned off Gipsy Patch Lane - nope, still not okay - and onto a fast road running between parkland.  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I started to spot rooftops appearing behind the trees, as a housing estate quietly surrounded me.  Unlike the corporation works I'd been walking by before now, this was very private, a network of cul-de-sacs hidden away.  It turned its back on the main roads, showing them blank walls.  It didn't feel welcoming at all; it viewed strangers with suspicion.

I negotiated another roundabout, and paused in the Tesco Express for a bottle of Coke; the staff were loudly complaining about a fellow worker and his laziness, shouting across the aisles.  Beyond that was another pub, though this one was extemely closed.  They clearly hadn't got the memo about Scotch Egg Fridays.

The road sloped down and there was the entrance to what was, in its own way, one of the most significant railway stations in the UK.  

Motorways were springing up all over the UK in the 1960s and 70s.  While they had ordinary, boring official numbers, they also often acquired other names in planning, names designed to capture the imagination of the locals and distract them from the six lanes of viaduct crashing through their neighbourhoods.  Linguists looked to America, because in the 1970s everyone wanted Britain to me more like thrusting, exciting, everyone driving everywhere America, and they alit on the term "parkway" - a term for a fast road that is usually scenic and surrounded by trees.  It might be a lie - if you've ever got a cab from JFK into Manhattan you will have travelled along a series of Parkways, and it's about as scenic as the bottom of a wheelie bin - but it sounds nice, particularly to naive British people who didn't know much about these new roads and heard the word "park" and thought of ducks and lakes and grass.  As such, the M32 motorway, which goes from the M4 into the centre of the city, was dubbed the "Bristol Parkway" and then, a few years later, when a new station was opened quite close to junction one, it was also called "Bristol Parkway," to let people know that it was conveniently located for that great motorway.

Something strange then happened.  People forgot that the M32 was called the Bristol Parkway at all, and instead associated the name with the station.  They thought that Parkway meant there was a place to park, because the new station had, in fact, been built with a large car park to enable commuting.  In a rare example of 1970s British Rail actually capitalising on some good publicity, they started using Parkway as a generic term meaning "we've got a large car park you know".  Hence Liverpool South Parkway, Tiverton Parkway, Oxford Parkway, and a load of other stations across the UK that don't have a big motorway next door.  It's a strange story of the British public being told a word means one thing and deciding, comprehensively, that it absolutely doesn't.  I still think Parkway is an incredibly boring thing to stick on the end of a railway station name, and I object to it every time I see it, but that's not Bristol Parkway's fault.

The station has proved so popular it's been repeatedly expanded over the years, with the latest rebuild coming in 2001 and looking very turn of the millennium.  A metal roof and plenty of circulation space, though not many actual seats, plus the obligatory branch of Costa.  There were originally two platforms - there's now four - and the car park has been upgraded to a multi-storey, with a further satellite car park up the road.  It's a roaring success, so I shouldn't be sniffy about it, but I have to admit I'm not a fan.

It might be that it felt a bit tired.  Twenty-five years is usually about the length of time railway companies can go without doing any maintenance to a station - "it's still new!" - and the building and public areas all felt cluttered and in need of a good scrub.  It needed to be stripped back of all the extras that had arrived over the years and restored to its clean lines.

I went down to the platform, where I learned that Bristol Parkway is Home of UWE Bristol, and got on a train to Temple Meads.  There were still a couple of stations left in the city for me to visit, on the south side, but I didn't like the look of those clouds, and I didn't have a coat.  Plus I fancied a pint.  You're a great city Bristol.  I hope to revisit you very soon.

Brizzle Kicks

For reasons far too dull to go into here, I found myself in Bristol with some hours to kill.  How many hours?  I didn't really know.  It could be two, it could be four, it all depended on when I got a phone call.  I needed something to keep me busy but not an extreme voyage of discovery.

Readers with long memories might remember that I've been to Bristol before, back in 2016, when I was thinking of turning this blog into a book of some kind.  That didn't happen.  I did travel round the country, though, and one of the lines I visited was the Severn Beach Line, which goes from Temple Meads along the coast.  This is what the line diagram looked when I visited:

And this is what it looks like now:

Why, there's a whole new station on there!  (And also Weston-Super-Mare, but for the purposes of this blog, we're ignoring that).  Portway Park & Ride opened in 2023, which meant if I visited there, I'd complete the whole line once again.  (I repeat: ignore Weston-Super-Mare.  It's got a thinner green line, if you notice, because it doesn't count.  I decided.)

This meant travelling from Bristol Temple Meads, which I've never really got on board with.  I know it's an extremely important station, both from an engineering perspective and architecturally, but it doesn't fly for me.  It may be because it's largely a through station.  A terminus has a grand feeling of arrival, of being a destination in itself, while a through station is simply a stop on the way to somewhere else.  It also makes the station lopsided; the facilities all end up to the side.

Big fan of the Isambard Kingdom Brunel statue outside though.  I had no idea he was so dinky, barely scraping five feet.  He looks like he should be playing the Artful Dodger.  We love a Short King.  

It was fun catching up with stations out the window of the train, remembering where I'd gone and what I'd done.  I have a strangely powerful memory about railway stations - I get a glimpse and I can remember the day, the weather, where I went and what I did.  This doesn't extend to railway station names, by the way.  Those all blur together.  Show me a platform though and I can tell you some stupid fact about my visit, every time.

Portway won't win any architecture awards, not least because there's nothing there you could really call architecture.  A single platform, an off the shelf shelter, some lamp posts.  The line's single track here so there isn't even a need for a footbridge.  It's the most perfunctory of new developments.

Its real purpose is clear once you've followed a pathway lined with pictures of newts drawn by local schoolchildren.  Apparently this is to commemorate the newt crossing that was installed when they built the station.  As with all children's art on the railways, I have no time for it.  Pay a proper artist.  Still, I suppose we are now entering an era of AI art, and soon there will be illustrations of chubby cartoon characters with a yellow piss-wash to distract us all over the network.  Then I'll be desperate for a poorly scrawled daubing by Candace, age 9.

Portway has been gifted with a wide car park and a bus exchange, both of which were well used when I visited.  In fact, there was a double decker waiting at the top of the footpath as I approached from the station, only to pull away when I got within a few metres; I imagine that amused him greatly for the rest of the day, thinking that he had deprived a commuter of a bus ride.  What larks.  

It's interesting to note that the actual name of the station is Portway Park & Ride.  Firstly, urgh.  How demeaning.  Secondly, I'm not sure I've ever seen the words Park & Ride actually incorporated into the name before (I'm sure I'm wrong).  The usual format would be to call this a Parkway, which would then make it Portway Parkway, which I think is brilliant but I'm sure the council thought was unnecessarily flippant for a major transport investment.  

The reason for the station's existence can be seen soaring over your head: the M5 viaduct over the River Avon.  Junction 18 is down the road, and the hope is this station will pull some people away from driving directly into the city.  The car park looked busy so it must be working.

I left the station through a scrappy back exit that took me directly under the bridge, to a level crossing that blocked access to a section of industry.  I stood politely at the closed gate, trying not to catch the eye of the driver in the car waiting with me, trying to quiet the voice in my head that said look, you can nip right across, it's only single track and you can see if the train's coming.  

Eventually the Bristol-bound train passed through and we were allowed to cross.  I diverted to the side, into a small patch of gravel and through a gate into the Lamplighter's Marsh, a stretch of open country on a bend in the river cut off from the town by the railway.  Above me, the trucks on the viaduct made a tinny, metallic sound as they crossed.

I was almost immediately assaulted from all sides.  I'm not sure what's happening this year, but I have been suffering with the worst hay fever of my life.  I can't take a stroll past a single bush without sneezing, and as I walked across the marsh my eyes were streaming and my nose was running.  Nature seems to be particularly vindictive this spring and I'm not a fan.

I bravely pushed on, passing joggers and dog walkers, taking in the sunshine and the clear blue sky.  It was wonderful to be out on my own, strolling without a jacket, feeling the sun on me.  It was a slow rejuvenation.  I absolutely felt as though I was sloughing off my winter burdens.  

The Lamplighter's Inn was still there, and seemingly still open, which pleased me.  Ten years later that's not a guarantee with a pub.  As with my previous visit, I was too early for a pint, but that's good in a way - a decade long piece of symmetry.  I climbed up through the village, where the houses were painted; I remembered them as being gentle pastels before but now they were stark primary colours.  I much preferred this colour scheme, particularly the purple one; brave and bold, shaming the boring semis over the road.

Shirehampton station was still tucked under the railway bridge, opposite the Daisy Field, and I took another sign pic.  It's a GWR station now, not First Great Western, but while the font may have changed my dopey expression remains the same.

The question was, where to next, and I decided to take a trip to another new (to me) station, Ashley Down.  This opened on the line north out of Temple Meads in September 2024, barely 18 months after construction started, which may be some kind of record.  I've never known a railway station project go so smoothly.  (How's Liverpool Baltic coming along Steve?  Never mind).

It's not a looker, I'll give you that; two platforms, a bridge, lifts.  No sign of a ticket office.  But it's been neatly done, with a bit of landscaping outside and easy access to a cycle path.  A perfectly decent suburban station in a district that could do with fast efficient transport into town, forcing you to once again wonder why there was that sixty year gap between the closing of the old Ashley Hill station and the new one opening.  

There was now a steep walk uphill to the main road.  I'd forgotten how hilly Bristol is.  While Sheffield, say, has a reputation as a slog to get round, Bristol has a breezy, happy vibe to it that belies the absolute nightmare that is getting from one district to another.  I pushed up the slope to the top, where a block of new build flats barely concealed the floodlighting rig for Gloucestershire County Cricket ground.  Bristol Rovers' home ground is also within a mile of here; I repeat, why wasn't the station opened before?

It was bin day, apparently, and in Bristol there seems to be a mix of wheelies, crates and bags for their recycling and rubbish.  I looked at it with a slight feeling of dread.  At the moment Wirral has one wheelie for rubbish and one for recycling, but there's a promise to introduce food caddies at some point, and I imagine our free and easy days of chucking paper and glass all in the one bin will soon be over.  Our neighbours once wandered off with one of our bins, which we had to reclaim when they put it out again a couple of weeks later, so I get anxious about disappearing receptacles.  Surely the wind will blow a bag away?  Or those crates will prove tempting for teenagers to chuck about?

That was an awful lot of Bin Chat.  This is how you know you're a middle aged man.  The bins assume an importance entirely out of step with reality.

Up and round the block, descending to a pair of retail parks with a Lidl and an Aldi side by side; I didn't think that was allowed.  It feels slightly dangerous.  Maybe they all roll out at eight o'clock for rumbles in the car park, with the staff of Home and Bargain coming between them shouting "no, it's not worth it!".

A neat row of hire scooters were parked by a greenspace; unlike in Liverpool, where you are never more than eight seconds from being mown down by a student recklessly weaving on one, even though the city centre is about eight foot wide and entirely flat, I could actually see the point of them in steep Bristol.  It also helped that the scooter users seemed much more considerate, and there were plenty of cycle lanes for them to be segregated from the traffic.

In case you can't read that, it's a picture of Jesus under the slogan, When all hope is lost, remember some people still support Bristol Rovers.  One thing I dislike about Bristol is that Banksy has seemingly given graffiti artists carte blanche to fill every piece of wall with their nonsense.  We get it, you're an alternative city - I have never seen so many people with coloured dye jobs in my life - but 98% of the scrawl on the walls isn't art, it's just names and letters and the odd bit of swearing.  I'm not really a Banksy fan - oh, the police aren't necessarily on the side of the populace?  Please, deliver more astonishing truth to power, sir - but at least his stencil work has a certain amount of class and talent to it.  It's like the council are afraid to power wash away Holly McManus Is A Big Fat Slag And Nobody Will Touch Her With A Bargepoll - Donna in case Donna later uses her spraypainting skills to portray, I don't know, Gemma Collins as the Mona Lisa, and her "Treatise against Holly McManus, 2026" is suddenly worth eight hundred thousand pounds and the city can flog it to fund a library for another six months.

The road continued up and up, long stretches of semis, a lot of them undergoing building works to take away pesky front drives and add loft conversions.  A delivery driver did a frankly terrifying u-turn across both lanes of traffic, causing cars to slam on their brakes in both directions, and I don't think his cheery wave of thanks placated them.  I remember reading once that DHL's delivery programme in America never makes the vans do a left hand turn, preferring to send them round the block on the much easier right turn; clearly Amazon or Evri or whoever don't extend the same software to their UK drivers.

A crossroads and I was passing the Bristol Civil Service Social Club and a bus shelter filled with expectant riders.  Houses were To Let from the unfortunately named CJ Hole estate agency.  A small row of local shops, with the owners stood outside having a chat, then a clothes recycling bin surrounded by bags and bric-a-brac.  

More shops, mainly takeaways and beauty salons, the only businesses that can't go completely online.  A pub had been converted into a Tesco Express, while a restaurant promised English breakfasts and Indian meals, which I believe is the only food any British person ever needs.  Further up, a regeneration project had filled the back roads with new avenues of homes named after writers.  Shakespeare Avenue and Wordsworth Road?  Fine.  Beatrix Place?  Disrespectful; no surname, just because she's a woman?  (And all three Brontës get one Walk between them.)    Amis Walk and Dahl Walk?  Problematic. 

Still, it was better than the next bunch of streets that were all simply given numbers - Seventh Avenue and so on.  I imagine the intention was to give it a glamorous, American air, but it actually came off as unimaginative and impersonal.  

I'd left the city of Bristol at some point, into one of its neighbouring boroughs, and there'd been a definite social slide.  Filton had once been home to aircraft manufacturing, but it had been downsized over the years.  The Bristol Brabazon and Concorde were built here, but now the runway is being turned into a new town, also called Brabazon; there will be thousands of homes, offices, a new arena and a railway station on a former freight line to serve it all.  

Filton Abbey Wood station, meanwhile, has slowly grown over the years from a couple of platforms to four, though its facilities remain minimal - long ramps and stairs and a footbridge.  

I'd gone to the local Asda to get a bit of lunch - in a masterpiece of planning, even though it's right next door, there's no way to access it from the station, and it involved a twenty minute detour.  I bought three things, for the meal deal, and all three items were wrong.  I picked up Cherry Coke Zero: vile.  I got what I thought was a steak slice but turned out to be steak, cheese and Marmite - in the bin with that.  And the only wrap they had left was a disgusting "Southern Fried Chicken" concoction, that dripped a radioactive sauce on my jeans that stained them a frankly disturbing shade of brown.  I only managed one of the wraps before my gag reflex kicked in.

Still no phone call.  I guess a couple more stations wouldn't hurt?