Postcards from the Bristol Channel

Last weekend to escape our domestic disorder, we bunked off to the Bristol Channel. Our travels began in Weston-super-Mare where we found wide open beaches, mud flats, and a glorious sense of space.

We admired the Grand Pier…

…and its alluring cousin, Birnbeck Pier.

We also found much beautiful art in Weston-super-Mare. For example these fine rainbow wings…

…this mesmerising texture…

…and this arresting hen.

The vibrant town centre was bordered with pockets of calm.

Our journey continued onwards to Clevedon, where we saw the very beautiful Clevedon Pier – once a ferryport for ferries across the channel to Wales.

The maintenance of this beautiful heritage structure is enabled by many schemes, including a wonderful placard scheme, by which anyone can commission – and have mounted on the pier – a plaque. The patchwork of commemorations, sweet words and remembrances is very moving.

For the last leg of our travels we stopped off briefly in Portishead – home-town of the eponymous band whose dingy trip-hop musical textures had led me to believe this to be a rotting industrial hinterland.

In fact it is a beautiful leafy place with tree-clad hills a cricket green and a lido. Nearly all traces of the grimy industrial past seem to have been developed away around the marina area, leaving the fantasy Portishead of my imagination somewhere back in the 1990s where it probably belongs.

Around the Bristol channel we learnt much of mud and mud-flats; of the impracticalities of regular travel across the channel by boat; of wild tides; and of the many piers, waterways, estuaries and rivers that converge in this exciting corner of the UK. It was a very short trip and we literally just scooted around its surface, but I loved everything and want to go back soon.

On the way home to our kitchenless house, I found this beautiful ambient film that captures Portishead on the cusp of redevelopment, in 1987.

Until soon, yours in postcards –
Felix