Tag Archives: Brislington Brook

The Newcomen Engine of Brislington Engine House

May 8, 2016 Andrea Gibbons 5 Comments

In our long-ago epic quest to wander the path of Brislington brook, we walked past a most wonderful narrow house. A stone carved in the wall calls it the Engine House, dated 1790:

I was recounting this — I can’t quite remember why — to the folks on the farm where I was working, and oh the happiness in finding they actually knew much more about it. Along with the sheep and the orchards, they also work on mining reports for Bristol, telling homebuyers just what old shafts and workings and mineral deposits might lie beneath their homes. In their possession was a masters thesis on this precise house, though I am ashamed to say I did not note the author.

Very highly ashamed.

I shall continue nonetheless. The Old Fire Engine House! Not built in 1790 after all, but to house one of the first Newcomen Atmospheric Engines, and almost certainly built before 1741.

From a google search, this drawing gives a good idea of what the engine house once looked like.

He argues this based on a ‘report of a visit by representatives of Chelsea Water Works’ come to Bristol to look at water pumps (they call them fire engines) for Hyde Park. They visited an engine house, almost certainly this engine house in Brislington used to pump water from coal pits, on 29 October 1741. There is an amazing document from the London Metropolitan Archives detailing their mission and findings…they said it was too complicated to make ‘an exact Plan of the Construction and Building of the Engines (a Work of great Time…)’ This particular engine was made by Mr John Wise of Coventry, and they describe its workings as follows:

The Fire heats the Water in a Boiler, which Water makes Steam, the Steam rises into a Cylinder of Cast Iron, that Steam is instantly condensed by letting in of Cold Water, whereby a Vacuum is made, which (according to the known Maxim in Philosophy) Nature abhorring, that End of the Beam which works into the Cylindar with a piston, hastens, by the Pressure of the Atmosphere, to fill up the vacuum and thereby the other End of the Beam raises the Water.

Amazing. It uses an immense amount of coal. Bushels and bushels. It was invented in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen (wikipedia has a lovely animated schematic of the engine here), and James Watt’s more famous steam engine was a refinement and improvement upon its workings.

There are also some wonderful pictures from Bristol, which I did not copy, but some of Thomas Rowbotham’s (1782–1853) drawings of the view of the engine house are online, already stripped of the engine by the late 1820s:

And another view, from people after my own heart.

Walking here now, you could hardly imagine the existence of a coal field…

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City Unseen, Dérives, Environment & Justice, The Wilds

The Zone, Bristol

July 10, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 2 Comments

The forest invites, sun dappling leaves and winds softly blowing, heat driving you deeper and deeper into shade.

The brook gurgles now on your right, it will follow you throughout, or you will follow it, bending back on your tracks, crossing and recrossing it and snaking alongside it through the trees.

Then the ruins come, singly, in brick

then stone and iron

Then enshrined mystery without a visible guardian god.

Gaping mouth that cannot speak.

Cannot warn of incipient destruction.

Hollow but for stone.

The same stone shaped into bridge form in the medieval age.

The same stone built to mark a holy well, once venerated, cared for by St Anne who welcomed pilgrims and believers. These stones now fill it, there is no room for wishes or prayers now. Something still crowds the gaps and crevices, ignoring the iron bars that attempt to hold the ethereal prisoner.

Goats most domestic are followed by Victorian devil-may-care power imposing straight lines and railways and bridges in the air.

You stumble across rusting memories of a more modest aspect of some decade of our modern age, flaking paint of white.

The woods end, spitting you out into sunlight and fumes and paved roads once again. Unsure of where or when you are.

Until you suddenly remember. Time resumes its flow towards our ending.

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City Unseen, Dérives, Environment & Justice

Finding Bristol’s Brislington Brook

June 9, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 3 Comments

We needed an adventure this Sunday, stared at the map trying to find it and we did — in the form of the Brislington Brook, a winding piece of water that starts and ends abruptly and not too far away in a little loop of the Avon.

Without wellies we couldn’t jump in and follow it — a bit sad perhaps. But we did our best, starting from a small footpath leading off the giant Tesco parking lot that led into an unexpectedly beautiful path and brought us to the water.

Looking up towards the far end of the brook that we didn’t quite reach from a little bridge:

And looking down towards the long stretch we would seek to follow that very afternoon, and a rare bit of natural bank here:

It is beautiful, as is the path leading up to Water Lane, but so soon you hit asphalt and fences. Roads. The brook is channeled beneath them, almost invisible to cars I should imagine:

From Water Lane you look down the next stretch…but you cannot follow it:

So we walked down Hulse Rd to Kenneth Road, and another little footpath that crosses it there:

Looking back where we’d come, the concrete canalisation method is not quite as nice, but it looks as though this is one of the places water might busily be carving away at the bank were it left to its own devices. Instead it goes exactly where we tell it, for now…

We turned around, had to leave the brook again and trace it in parallel back down Kenneth Rd to the Bath Rd where it disappears for a short distance under this large-traffic filled way, though we found an old pub if only we’d been crawling:

The only wildlife we saw apart from the giant bird soaring in the skies above us:

More privatised space. Sadness. I hate these signs. I hate that they have taken the name of badgers in vain. But this tall and very thin engine house with the church up a curving road behind it was amazing:

These cottages lovely:

Imagine this place in the 1700s, pub and engine house and cottages, church, a little village here now swallowed by the city. And then we find another glimpse of the brook, a sedate trickle now:

Another pub, a memory of this part of England as a place of pilgrimage to St Anne’s Well:

Perhaps that is partly why it has such a lovely feel here, we reached a series of streets I would be so happy to live in, they are somehow removed from the city and have an openness to them:

An alley took us back to the Brislington, beautiful stone walls draped in flowers though the brook looks so much sadder and smaller in its bed of concrete and we couldn’t really hear it — there seems to be little babbling with this configuration:

A dead end, but a picturesque one:

Back to Jean Rd (my grandmother’s name, I think she would have loved this place too), a look back down the brook here with a house overhanging it, beautiful, though possibly a bit damp.

School Rd to Clayfield Road and an estate that we thought brought us to the end, but we found a long remembrance of a public right of way, fenced and a little unfriendly but still taking you back to Brislington Brook:

It is beautiful here:

the brook flows on, still channeled behind high walls

We cast around, thought about heading back, headed uphill a bit but realised it would take us round too long a way. Still, it is beautiful, still doesn’t feel too much like city: