Bits and pieces, news, views, reviews and stuff
In July 2005 we went up in the air on a tethered helium balloon in Castle Park in Bristol.
This was before Cabot Circus and the Quakers Friar redevelopment.
Broadmead was less tired than it is now.
Quakers Friar was a car park.
We now have the Castle Bridge crossing the water and much of the old brewery has now been developed.
Though John Lewis had gone to Cribbs, what is now Primark was House of Fraser back in 2005.
This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.
I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.
I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart. The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.
It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!
The Clifton Suspension Bridge is an iconic image of Bristol, however these photographs were taken from the southern end of the bridge looking down the Avon Gorge.
This was the shot I took back in August 2006.
This is the same view nine years later in August 2015
Then there is another shot of the same view, taken in August 2018.
I did enjoy this pumpkin display in Quakers Friar in Bristol today. I thought it was very clever and colourful. Helped to brighten up an otherwise grey day. I liked the use of baskets and carts as well.
One of the things we missed this year (not that it happens every year) was doing a statue trail.
Back in 2015 we did the Shaun in the City trail across Bristol, the wider area and finished off seeing them all at Covent Garden. We managed to see 62 out of the 70.
In 2018 we did the Gromit Unleashed 2 trail which as well as Shaun the Sheep and Gromit, also had Wallace getting in on the act as well. This time we did manage to capture all 67 sculptures.
So it was quite nice on a visit to the Mall at Cribbs Causeway to see a few sculptures in the Gromit Unleased shop.
There was the vanilla Shaun the Sheep.
There were a few Chinese inspired sculptures as well, including Kansashi
Then we had Year of the Gromit.
Also Shanghai Shaun.
I quite enjoyed seeing Caractacus Paws again, which was one of my favourite Gromit from the Gromit Unleashed 2, though Bristol’s Own was probably my actual top sculpture.
The other Gromit there as The Sea of Hope.
Though not a Gromit or a Shaun, I did quite enjoy seeing the huge Morph as well.
