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flaneursRight, so, spiralsheep gave me three old mill chimneys. Finding myself dog-sitting a hyperactive mutt on the appropriate side of the river for one of them, my glamorous assistant and I went for a walk. Twice. Because I can find my way back to anything but the getting to is sometimes an issue and I may have gone the opposite direction to where I thought I was going. I thus did it slightly backwards, but it was a nice meander round Pottinger Ward, and the dog made lots of new friends, so. This was my technical start point, Owen O'Cork Mill:
Because we were dead close already, I went for cutting from Woodstock onto Beersbridge - two main roads and some side streets over. First time I did this I failed to read the map properly and went the wrong way, heading over to the Ravenhill Road instead. The dog, however cute, was singularly useless as a navigator:
East Belfast is very much the industrial end of the city, where the flatter ground in the bend of the river attracted the mills and factories and the shipyard and docks were handy. This meant it was also the part of the city that got bombed to bits during the Blitz, which becomes very clear as you walk the side streets. On top of that, fifty years of industrial decline, civil unrest and neglect has not been kind to the area, and regeneration is slow. Starting from one of the little streets of late 19th century two-up-two-down terraces off the Woodstock, I came down onto Rosebery Gardens, where they replaced the old terraces with semis with gardens some time in the recent past. That took us down Imperial Drive, to the old bakery, which is now flats.
And from there, turning across Ravenhill Avenue (which should, on reflection, have been a clue about my direction) to an old chimney standing in cleared ground. It was obviously built in either two stages or with two different sets of brick, and nearby Rosebery Road was built in the same batch as the top, probably by the same mill-owner.
By the time I'd walked right out to Ravenhill Road, realised I was on it and turned back (and had a giggle at the unfortunate effect of the storms on the Free Presbyterians' signage), it was sunset. Got two lovely shots while the dog mugged shamelessly for a little old lady; the lone chimney and looking into the sun down one of the entries between the streets. The greenery at the bottom of the entry there is lilac. It grows wild everywhere in the city and is the bane of my next-door neighbour's life.
The next evening, I went the right way, going off Woodstock over Euston Parade to Castlereagh Road and down Wayland and Channing Street where on one side the little two-up two-downs have fancy scrollwork over the doors down and on the other there are gaps with rebuilds dating from the 50s through to the 80s (as I went past, two men were going through Blitz photos with their elderly neighbour, figuring out who had lived where). Over then onto Grove and Fashoda Streets where the Housing Executive and Habitat For Humanity are replacing the worst of the old back-to-back terraces to the Beersbridge Road, past Elmgrove Primary School where Van Morrison went, up to the mill at the turn of road off the lights. Sadly by this point my camera was having one of it's periodic 'cannot detect card' moments, and I had to resort to the phone.
I turned down the side of the mill, Bloomfield Drive, looking straight down to the top of one of Harland & Wolff's pair of huge gantry cranes, the biggest in the world when they went in and still the biggest working dry dock in the world. Even when I was a child in the 80s, most of the men in these streets would have been working in the shipyard. When the siren goes to warn that they're moving the cranes, you can hear it all the way back up here. There's also the small run of the very old classic two-up-two-down terraces on the turn of Avonorr Drive, surrounded by 80s Housing Executive replacements, and down Bloomfield Parade, where the terraces are newer, some of them 30s, others 50s and in the turn of the crescent 90s maisonettes and flats. This was where Alana captivated a small girl and very large Newfoundland, and the adult in charge ended up towing them both away by their collars.
There is, when you go along the crescent, a path that takes you out onto the playing fields, round to a small river and little patch of woods between the roads.
By then, it was dark enough for the streetlights to come on, and we pottered home by the time honoured method of going left at all turns until we hit a main road again.
I have a mad plan for the other two, but that's for next week.
spiralsheep gave me three old mill chimneys. Finding myself dog-sitting a hyperactive mutt on the appropriate side of the river for one of them, my glamorous assistant and I went for a walk. Twice. Because I can find my way back to anything but the getting to is sometimes an issue and I may have gone the opposite direction to where I thought I was going. I thus did it slightly backwards, but it was a nice meander round Pottinger Ward, and the dog made lots of new friends, so. This was my technical start point, Owen O'Cork Mill:Because we were dead close already, I went for cutting from Woodstock onto Beersbridge - two main roads and some side streets over. First time I did this I failed to read the map properly and went the wrong way, heading over to the Ravenhill Road instead. The dog, however cute, was singularly useless as a navigator:
East Belfast is very much the industrial end of the city, where the flatter ground in the bend of the river attracted the mills and factories and the shipyard and docks were handy. This meant it was also the part of the city that got bombed to bits during the Blitz, which becomes very clear as you walk the side streets. On top of that, fifty years of industrial decline, civil unrest and neglect has not been kind to the area, and regeneration is slow. Starting from one of the little streets of late 19th century two-up-two-down terraces off the Woodstock, I came down onto Rosebery Gardens, where they replaced the old terraces with semis with gardens some time in the recent past. That took us down Imperial Drive, to the old bakery, which is now flats.
And from there, turning across Ravenhill Avenue (which should, on reflection, have been a clue about my direction) to an old chimney standing in cleared ground. It was obviously built in either two stages or with two different sets of brick, and nearby Rosebery Road was built in the same batch as the top, probably by the same mill-owner.
By the time I'd walked right out to Ravenhill Road, realised I was on it and turned back (and had a giggle at the unfortunate effect of the storms on the Free Presbyterians' signage), it was sunset. Got two lovely shots while the dog mugged shamelessly for a little old lady; the lone chimney and looking into the sun down one of the entries between the streets. The greenery at the bottom of the entry there is lilac. It grows wild everywhere in the city and is the bane of my next-door neighbour's life.
The next evening, I went the right way, going off Woodstock over Euston Parade to Castlereagh Road and down Wayland and Channing Street where on one side the little two-up two-downs have fancy scrollwork over the doors down and on the other there are gaps with rebuilds dating from the 50s through to the 80s (as I went past, two men were going through Blitz photos with their elderly neighbour, figuring out who had lived where). Over then onto Grove and Fashoda Streets where the Housing Executive and Habitat For Humanity are replacing the worst of the old back-to-back terraces to the Beersbridge Road, past Elmgrove Primary School where Van Morrison went, up to the mill at the turn of road off the lights. Sadly by this point my camera was having one of it's periodic 'cannot detect card' moments, and I had to resort to the phone.
I turned down the side of the mill, Bloomfield Drive, looking straight down to the top of one of Harland & Wolff's pair of huge gantry cranes, the biggest in the world when they went in and still the biggest working dry dock in the world. Even when I was a child in the 80s, most of the men in these streets would have been working in the shipyard. When the siren goes to warn that they're moving the cranes, you can hear it all the way back up here. There's also the small run of the very old classic two-up-two-down terraces on the turn of Avonorr Drive, surrounded by 80s Housing Executive replacements, and down Bloomfield Parade, where the terraces are newer, some of them 30s, others 50s and in the turn of the crescent 90s maisonettes and flats. This was where Alana captivated a small girl and very large Newfoundland, and the adult in charge ended up towing them both away by their collars.
There is, when you go along the crescent, a path that takes you out onto the playing fields, round to a small river and little patch of woods between the roads.
By then, it was dark enough for the streetlights to come on, and we pottered home by the time honoured method of going left at all turns until we hit a main road again.
I have a mad plan for the other two, but that's for next week.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 06:27 pm (UTC)(I do not sing in public as a kindness to the general public, but I can tune a guitar in under three minutes)