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Hello.
You may have noticed that I haven't posted any videos in over 2 years.
I considered posting a video rambling on about exactly why, but I decided that was self-indulgent navel-gazing, so instead I'll just summarise: firstly, I got a bit burnt out by trying to make videos too frequently, because the youtube algorithm heavily rewards you for posting often and regularly, and despite telling myself that I wasn't going to get sucked into chasing the algorithm, I suppose I stupidly did. I was only going to take a couple of weeks or maybe months off, but then a bunch of personal stuff occurred which is none of your business, and the next thing I know, it's two years later.
But I've got a load of footage going wasted, so here are some of the videos that I didn't make.
Did you know about the SECRET, little-known HIDDEN GEM that MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW ABOUT - which is, um, so busy that you can't find a parking space, and so overwhelmed with visitors it was basically impossible to film without a bazillion people walking in front of the camera every 5 seconds?
Well, yes, you probably did know about it, because umpteen other youtubers have already made in-depth videos about it. How am I supposed to find a new angle? Well, as you just heard, I settled on the angle of mocking all of the clickbait websites and content-creators who insist on describing things as ‘secret' and ‘hidden' when they're nothing of the sort, but how far can you really milk that? Not very far.
Also, even if you didn't know about it already, you only have to type ‘Tyneham' into Google and AI will helpfully tell you all about it. I mean, you could have just skimmed the wikipedia page, without needing to waste the annual electricity usage of Norway, but people using their own basic literacy wouldn't let kleptocratic far-right billionaires fire another several million people and replace them with glorified predictive text engines necessitating planet-destroying data centres in order to fund their third super-yacht, so, you can have AI whether you like it or not.
Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah: this is Tyneham. It was a village in Dorset that got forcibly evacuated in World War 2 because the War Office wanted to use the whole area as a military training zone, which was kind of forgivable given that there was a war on, and then, despite promising to give it back afterwards, they never did, which is… arguably less so.
The area is still MOD land, called Lulworth Ranges, which is why it's completely impossible to visit it to this day, apart from all the times you are allowed to visit, which is pretty much every weekend. That's why the school is preserved in time, and the ruined cottages are empty and desolate, and the church remains hauntingly unperturbed by human activity, apart from the tens of thousands of tourists.
Speaking of abandoned churches, this is Temple Church, Bristol; the place which put the Temple into Temple Meads. So called because it is built on top of a 12th century round church of the Knights Templar; the current building was mostly built between the 13th and 15th centuries.
It's a ruin because it was heavily bombed during the Bristol Blitz of World War 2. It's also notable for the extreme lean of its tower, and you could be forgiven for thinking this is also a result of the bomb damage, but in fact photographs from before the war show it already having this pronounced tilt. It's thought to be a result of the earth compressing under the weight of the tower, the earth in question being very soft alluvial clay on account of it being built in the floodplain of the River Avon.
This video was going to be an exciting ‘first' for me, in that I was emailed by a viewer of the channel who works as a specialist stonemason, at that time contracted to oversee some restoration works. He offered to give me unique access inside the building (which is, or at least was at the time, inaccessible for safety reasons) and possibly even be interviewed on camera. I'd always just turned up and filmed things from public spaces or public rights of way before, and regurgitated Wikipedia for commentary. Exclusive access and expert interviewees was going to be a whole new level.
Sadly the day we were due to meet he was ill so he had to cancel on me, and we were going to reschedule but for one reason or another that never happened either. It's a shame, but I should stress, just in case he happens to be watching this, that I certainly don't blame you for getting ill, I thoroughly appreciated the offer and bear no hard feelings that it never panned out. These things happen.
This is the Matthew. It's a replica of a ship that John Cabot sailed across the Atlantic in 1497, becoming the first European to discover North America. At least, that was the story prior to 1960, when people were happy to dismiss the Norse sagas of Vinland as mythological, but then they went and found archaeological evidence that the Vikings had got to the Americas almost 500 years earlier than Columbus or Cabot, which is inconvenient because "not the first by a long shot, but the first that led to any continuity of contact and ongoing settlement and trade" isn't a very catchy epithet.
Still, you have to admit that Cabot's voyage was historically significant, which is explains why he's commemorated all over Bristol, with the Cabot Tower being a prominent example, begun in 1897 to mark the 400th anniversary, plus of course Cabot Circus and many more things I can't be bothered to list.
Despite that, I'm not sure I'd ever actually heard of him and his voyages until I moved to Bristol, so I reckon this video could have been a good one in terms of hitting that sweet spot of history that's a big enough deal for people to care about, whilst being slightly under-reported enough that people don't feel bored of having heard the story umpteen times already.
As well as interesting history, it also presented the opportunity to explore some interesting historiography, for those who like that sort of thing. See, a historian called Alwyn Ruddock claimed to find documentation overturning the accepted story in several regards. She claimed Cabot had found financing for his voyage in Italy and London before coming to Bristol. She suggested that one of the brokers of his funding, an Augustinian Friar named Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, who historians previously believed sailed with Cabot only as far as Ireland, actually accompanied him all the way to Newfoundland. And not only that, she believed he stayed there and founded a Christian mission. And while most historians believed Cabot to have died during his follow-up voyage that left Bristol in 1498, Ruddock claimed to have evidence he returned successfully to Europe in 1500.
Perhaps most radical of all, Ruddock said she had found evidence that Bristolian seafarers had actually reached North American soil prior to 1470 - decades before Columbus and Cabot. If that's not big news then I don't know what is.
Unfortunately, she spent 25 years promising to publish the full details in a book about Cabot, without ever actually doing so, and upon her death in 2005 left instructions in her will to destroy all of her research papers. This is something I find completely inexplicable, and frankly I'm tempted to use rather more negative words than that, but I don't want to speak ill of the dead.
The University of Bristol founded a Cabot Project to investigate her claims, confirming some of them, but some still remain a mystery. I thought it could be cool to get in touch with them and maybe present some genuinely cutting-edge historical research on the channel, but I'm a nobody with no academic affiliation and a pretty tiny subscriber count, so I felt a bit too sheepish to do so, although I did keep filming the Matthew just in case one day I worked up the courage. That day never came.
Did you know that Bristol has its very own version of the New York High Line? That's right, a disused railway converted into an elevated linear park. It's called the Royate Hill viaduct, or Roy-aht, or Roy-ate, I don't really know, cos I'm not from round here, am I?
It was built as part of the Clifton Extension Railway, which let trains from Clifton and Montpelier connect to what is now the Bristol and Bath Railway Path, but it was closed in the 1960s. The viaduct now features a diverse array of bushes. and gravel, and graffiti, and would make a great video, except for the fact you can't really see it to film because it's behind all those trees.
I was going to come back in winter hoping it would be more visible, but on account of all the railways being closed and Bristol stubbornly refusing to build any sort of meaningful replacement public transport in the past 60 years despite both Westminster and Brussels repeatedly throwing approvals and money at them to do so, it was a right faff to get there. The rental e-scooters were my best option and since some genius decided to forbid them from using the ginormous cycle path that goes directly there I had to take busy roads, where I was nearly squished by a driver who felt that red lights didn't apply to him, so I wasn't in any great hurry to go back.
I don't need to rhetorically ask if you know about this building, because you definitely do. Well, the Bristol-based portion of my subscriber base anyway, which I think is most of you. One of the most famous landmarks in the city, the Wills Memorial Building, more casually known as the Wills Tower, is part of the University of Bristol.
I was mildly surprised to discover that it was completed in 1925, because its gothic style looks so much older. I grew up near Cambridge, so without wanting to sound too smug or gatekeepy, I do recognise bona fide medieval university gothic architecture when I see it, and yet I never once thought to myself, ‘oh god, what a cringey modern pastiche that is, how unauthentic it looks'. I'm sure if anyone had actually put me on the spot and asked me when I thought it was built, I would have realised that Bristol Uni isn't that old, so it clearly can't be 15th century or whatever, but I would have happily assumed it to be Victorian at least.
I'll be honest, in the ongoing debate about architecture, I spent most of my life sympathising with the idea that we should design for our own era, and that attempting recreations of what people built centuries ago isn't a great idea, because they turn out looking like naff parodies. This building is a great counter-example, and the older I get the more I find myself leaning the other way: whilst I do still love some standout examples of contemporary architecture, be that modernist, high-tech, deconstructionist or whatever else, I'm increasingly becoming a grumpy old man who thinks that the vast majority of it is terrible, so perhaps we would better off doing neo-Georgian or gothic revival revival instead.
But that question wasn't the focus of this video that I didn't make. Rather, I was going to look beyond the Wills Tower at the frankly incredible breadth of influence that the Wills family and Wills family business had on the city of Bristol.
The Wills Memorial Tower, you see, was specifically a memorial to Henry Overton Wills the third, of the major tobacco company W.D. and H.O. Wills. Founded in 1786 by Henry Overton Wills the first, whose tobacconist shop was in Castle Street, what is now Castle Park, it became the first British firm to mass-produce cigarettes, and made absolutely oodles of money doing so.
This is a video that I'm genuinely sad I didn't make, because it would have sat at the intersection of so many of the themes of this channel, with the somewhat rare advantage of offering plenty of interesting stuff to talk about, and also plenty of visually interesting things to put on screen whilst I waffled on. That was an ongoing struggle I found for this channel. My last video, for example, about the windmill on Windmill Hill - I liked the topic on paper, but with neither the windmill nor the medieval hospital it belonged to existing any more, it was a bit of a struggle to find footage.
Said medieval hospital, you may remember, ended up buried beneath a Wills Factory, now turned into apartments and branded as Factory No 1.
This factory was superseded by another red brick affair in Southville, since rejuvenated by architect and former Bristol Mayor George Ferguson to host a theatre, cafe, bar, offices and so forth.
Opposite that is a former cigar factory, and a fire station which I believe was built specifically by and for the tobacco factories. These were once the dominant employer in the area, with thousands of men and women working there - at one point up to 40% of the local population! - offering plenty of scope for social history. For example,
"Up until 1920, only women and girls were employed as cigar-makers. One clause in the women's contract stipulated: She shall not contract Matrimony within the said Term, nor play at Card or Dice Tables, or any other unlawful Games"
Just round the corner is this school, which was formerly company offices. Then of course you have the bond warehouses, which weren't built by Wills Tobacco, but one of their major roles was storing the imported tobacco.
And the architectural story wasn't even limited to these historic red brick affairs. The Lakeshore building in Hartcliffe and the modern-day Imperial Tobacco offices on Winterstoke Road bring us well into twentieth century modernism, but I never got as far as filming either of those because I was fretting a bit about security kicking off at me.
All told, I think it could have been a great video, but alas, not to be.
If the nonexistent windmill was an example of something with a good story but a lack of available relevant footage, the video about the cranes on Bristol docks was probably doomed to be the opposite. The cranes are visually iconic, but I'm not sure how much I could really have said about them.
The Fairbairn steam crane is historic and unique, but telling you it was built in the 1870s and is the only one left in the world takes about 10 seconds. So then I thought, let's not limit myself to that crane, let's talk about them all.
These ones, I was surprised to discover, are relatively modern. They date from 1951; I'd always sort of assumed they were pre-war, at least, but no, post-war, electric from day one. I was dead chuffed to get footage of them spinning around, and even footage of them spinning around while a steam train chuffed directly through their legs. But once I tell you when they were built, and then briefly recap how they were all going to be scrapped but a local pressure group successfully campaigned to save these four because they were such an iconic part of the city's skyline, I'd pretty much run out of material. I suppose I could have got into youtube shorts but I'd already filmed everything in landscape by that point so never mind.
This was a factory on Mead Street. Barts Spices, to be precise. This is a hole where the factory on Mead Street used to be, demolished in 2022. And this is a masterplan showing the midrise blocks of flats intended to be built as part of the enormous regeneration of this entire light-industrial zone into a dense new residential-led mixed-use area.
I mentioned in my Sylvia Crowe video that I like filming and photographing areas that are due for massive rebuilding or regeneration to serve as a sort of time capsule, so that once the rebuild is complete, people have some visual record other than streetview of what it used to look like. Historic streetview is a wonderful resource but it's not quite the same as deliberately composed shots.
The trouble is, I don't really know what I believe about projects like this any more. I've always generally been in favour of replacing inner-city brownfield with dense residential, for all the usual youtube urbanist reasons you're probably bored of hearing. Making a bigger dent in the housing crisis, reducing car dependency by putting thousands of homes within easy walking or cycling distance of jobs, far better than carpeting the green belt with Barratt boxes, etc, etc. It all made sense to me in principle, even if I generally had some big reservations about the frequently lazy, generic and unappealing architecture of these mid-rises in practice.
OK, perhaps few people specifically WANT to live in a little tower block rabbit hutch compared to a nice house with a garden, given a completely free choice, but if it's a choice between a little rabbit hutch to call their own versus an HMO with a landlord cranking the rent up every five minutes, I know I'd prefer the former. And OK, maybe they're not ideal for families, but for childless twenty-somethings with no interest in gardening, what's the problem? Stop with all this NIMBYish hysterical hyperbole about ‘mini-Manhattan' just because it's a poxy 12 storeys high, and let's get some bloody homes built - is what I used to confidently think.
But I'm not quite so confident in that principle any more. The aforementioned stereotypical youtube urbanist always vaunts the ‘density' of these schemes, but they really don't deliver as much density as you might think.
To avoid their developments looking too much like Kowloon Walled City, architects always decide to set their mid-rise and high-rise towers spaciously far apart, immediately giving up most of the density achieved by building tall. Because none of the flats have private outdoor space per se, the developers aim to compensate by creating communal gardens, ‘pocket parks' or other supposed public spaces - which are more often actually quote-unquote public spaces, delivering essentially none of the benefits of genuine public space.
Try holding a political protest, an impromptu music jam or a game of football, or whatever else you might do in a proper park, in one of the little ‘plazas' attached to these schemes, and see how quickly the security come over to tell you that you can't do that. I've even been chased away just for doing a spot of photography. They tend to end up charmlessly deserted, or at best, just another space for capitalist extraction, colonised by tables of the cafes and coffee shops inhabiting the ground floor of these ‘mixed use' buildings, a pseudo-public space that you can't actually use unless you're prepared to spend six pounds fifty on an artisan Americano.
In most cases the end result is a masterplan which upsets all of the people who hate mid-to-high rise buildings - in this case, severing the views of central Bristol from Victoria Park - while delivering no more density at all than traditional terraces of four storey mansion blocks with back gardens would have done.
The other big problem is that the whole chain of ‘inner-city density' logic was founded on people needing to be within easy commuting reach of their jobs. An assumption that's somewhat less true, post-pandemic, than it used to be. Now I do realise not everybody can do their job remotely, and that even people who can still enjoy being walking distance from shops and restaurants, theatres and cinemas, and all the other amenities of a city centre. So a shift to remote work doesn't entirely destroy the logic, but it does at least dent it.
Maybe I'm guilty here of being a bit biased by my own circumstances, because the fact is, I realised at some point last year that I'm paying through the nose to live in a cramped and noisy flat which I selected when I first moved to Bristol almost entirely because it was within walking distance of my office. And yet ever since the lockdowns six years ago I have been to the office, two, maybe three times?
So, a couple of months ago, I moved to Devon. Which is the main reason the Mead St video won't ever happen. I filmed the ‘before', but I'm no longer in town to film the ‘during', let alone the ‘after'. And of course this is the main reason none of the other aforementioned videos are going to happen, either.
In deference to my mostly Bristolian subscriber base, I decided it was probably best to cut the 1000-word rant about all the ways Bristol was making me miserable, but I won't pretend to be sad about leaving, either. I feel in such a better place now, both literally and metaphorically, that I've even regained the appetite to make videos again.
Of course, given that mostly Bristolian subscriber base, and the analytics clearly showing me that the Bristol videos consistently outperformed the elsewhere-in-the-West-Country videos, I'm not terribly convinced anyone will want to watch the new things I may upload in future. To be honest I'm not even sure what kind of videos I want to make anymore. On the one hand I definitely don't want to fall into chasing the algorithm again, but on the other hand I wouldn't mind some of that sweet ad revenue to cushion the seemingly inevitable blow of losing my job to a glorified predictive text engine. We'll just have to see, but anyway, hopefully at some point in 2026 I'll have a new video or two for anyone left out there who's still interested.
Cheers
