As I walked down Midland Road in Bristol’s St Philips area this morning, all that remained of the Ebenezer Chapel (posts passim), East Bristol’s first Primitive Methodist place of worship, was a pile of rubble.
Built in 1849, the Ebenezer Chapel had been a landmark in East Bristol for 165 years.
Years of neglect by its owners and one week in the hands of demolition contractors have now ensured it is no more. 🙁
Last Friday, the Bedfordshire News website published a story of a visit by Defence Minister and Tory MP for Ludlow Philip Dunne to the hangars at Cardington, one of the major British sites historically involved in the development of airships.
From the screenshot below, the visit provided a photo opportunity.
The ministerial party looks like it’s been excreted from or is about to be crushed by a giant bottom. Don’t ministers and their civil service minders ever check behind them before smiling for the camera?
Despite the best efforts of campaigners (posts passim), east Bristol is losing another part of its dwindling number of buildings of historical interest as the former Ebenezer Chapel in Midland Road in the city’s St Philips area is currently being demolished by its owners, no doubt to make way for yet more soulless ‘apartments’ of zero architectural merit (like much of Bristol’s post-war architecture. Ed.).
The building itself has had a chequered history: it opened as a Primitive Methodist chapel in 1849. Henry Overton Wills II, from the local tobacco dynasty, laid its foundation stone. It closed as a Methodist chapel in 1938 but reopened as a Christadelphian hall in 1958 after WW2 bomb damage had been repaired. It was converted into business premises in the 1980s.
I feel that the demolition has been aided and abetted by a gutless local authority which could have stepped in and refused the demolition order. Bristol City Council justified its actions by giving two reasons:
The fact that the Ebenezer Chapel was neither listed nor included in the nearby Old Market Conservation Area is indicative of the abject failings of Bristol City Council as a local authority.
The chapel was the first Primitive Methodist chapel built in Bristol. Surely it deserved listing solely for that single reason?
Furthermore, unlike the more conventional Gothic style employed for chapel buildings at the time, the Ebenezer Chapel was designed with decorative round arched windows in a very rare bold Romanesque style. This should have been yet another reason for listing.
Regarding the chapel, Kathy Clark, conservation officer at the Victorian Society has said: “Ebenezer Chapel, or at least its distinctive front wall, should be reused and extended for a new use, whilst preserving a worthy piece of Bristol’s heritage. We urge Bristol Council to work for retention of the chapel.”
There’ll be no chance of that now that half the front wall has been demolished! 🙁
So, I’ll bid a sad farewell to the Ebenezer, as no doubt will the thousands of people that pass it every day, but I will end with a question to Bristol City Council: when will the historical and architectural heritage of east Bristol – traditionally a poorer and less prosperous part of the city – be given equal treatment with its counterpart in Bristol’s better-off districts?
Perhaps the city council would like to answer that question using the comment form below.
On Friday Linguist Lounge’s Facebook page carried a disturbing report on the abysmal quality of interpreters – or more specifically one interpreter – used by Capita Translation & interpreting. It is reproduced in its full horror below.
We’ve received a report that today Capita sent an unqualified Portuguese interpreter to a court in England. The linguist is reported to have summarised court proceedings, using English terms for unknown words such as “guardian”, “placement”, “local authority”. The judge was said to have been made aware of this after the hearing, however, the defendant was left stressed and anxious, without any understanding of what was going on inside the court room.
When is the Ministry of Justice going to terminate its failing contract with Crapita? Will that have to wait until a change of government next year?
In the meantime Crapita will continue to be rewarded for poor service and public money will continue to be wasted.
The phrase Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which is the national motto of both France and Haiti, has changed subtly since the former adopted it formally during the 3rd Republic at the end of the 19th century. 🙂
One perennial problem in the Easton district of Bristol where I live is fly-tipping, the illegal dumping of waste.
Some areas – such as Stapleton Road (see above picture) – have persistent problems and last night I gave a short presentation at the latest Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum meeting to try and encourage other residents and those who work in the area to get involved and make Easton a tidier place.
I’m pleased to say I received whole-hearted support from local councillor Marg Hickman, who is equally concerned about the amount of litter on the streets (are fly-tipping and littering related; does one attract the other? Ed.).
Flytipping can be reported online using the council’s dedicated report form. Some people use Twitter to do so too, whilst for those with a smartphone various third party applications are available, such as My Council.
If anyone does draw attention to fly-tipping or litter on Twitter, you might like to add the hashtag #tidybs5. If you live elsewhere in Bristol you might like to adapt the #tidybs* hashtag, replacing the asterisk with the first figure of your postcode.
Yesterday I did learn prior to the Neighbourhood Forum meeting that persistence pays off: via an email from the city council I learnt that several traders on Stapleton Road are or have been served with fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping by enforcement officers. It’s a start, but I get the impression that fly-tipping will be as hard to eradicate as a Hammer horror film vampire.
Bristol will be European Green Capital in 2015. Unless it sorts out fly-tipping and other environmental problems in Easton and the city’s other less prosperous areas (like the plague of flies, dust and other industrial pollution in Avonmouth. Ed.), the accolade should be amended to read European Greenwash Capital.
Bristol City Council is working with the Future Cities Catapult and the Connected Digital Economy Catapult on a new open data initiative that will help Bristolians improve their city with the help of local authority data.
The partners are working together to release Bristol civic data sets such as traffic management and land use databases to citizens. The collaboration will support developers to use the data to create new products and services to improve how the city of Bristol works, making it easier to get around, reduce waste, save energy or improve the city’s air quality.
Once the data sets are made available online in late summer, citizens and businesses will be invited to explore around one hundred data sets, supported by a series of Catapult-run events and competitions. Bristolians will be supported in testing, prototyping and commercialising their ideas.
Following a successful initial data release, the Catapults and the Council will then create a schedule to release further useful city data sets in consultation with the developer community. The programme’s outcomes will be shared with local authorities, developers and organisations in other UK cities to spread the benefits to the citizens of other cities.
News arrived via my inbox this morning that LibreUmbria‘s programme in schools (LibreUmbria@Scuola), which took place in recent months in collaboration with Perugia’s third teaching district (posts passim), has been nominated for this year’s Egov Prize. LibreUmbria is the project that is promoting the use of free and open source software amongst public sector organisations in Italy’s Umbria region.
The basic idea behind the Egov Prize has always been the fusion and sharing of good practice which other public sector organisations can use as an example and from which they can benefit. This will be the 10th year the prize will have been awarded.
LibreUmbria@Scuola aims to raise awareness and promote the use of free software in schools, from the primary level upwards by training parents and teachers who will in turn train others by acting as mentors.
The LibreUmbria@Scuola project has been implemented in arranging free seminars at schools for parents and teachers, on digital culture topics (the relationship between boys and technology, shared knowledge and free software, security, use of social media, cyberbullying). In addition to the seminars, computer courses in using the LibreOffice productivity suite running on Ubuntu Linux were also provided.
Being sloppy is one thing at which the Bristol Post consistently excels and the situation only looks to get worse following the announcement by David Montgomery of Local World – the owners of the Bristol Post – on the future direction of its titles and the role of journalists.
Today’s most glaring howler features photographs with the wrong captions in this article, as illustrated below.
That’s the first locomotive I’ve seen with blonde hair! 😉
The chaos continues with subsequent photographs in the series too.
How anyone can confuse a girl with a locomotive is anyone’s guess.
Is the Post employing visually-impaired journalists?
We should be told.
The Open Rights Group’s Blocked Project has revealed that nearly 20% of websites are blocked by web filters implemented by UK ISPs.
Those affected involve Porsche broker’s website and a political blogger/mum hoping to read an article about post pregnancy care, yet they still get blocked by filters ostensibly designed to protect young people from adult content (which apparently includes talking about alcohol, smoking, anorexia and hate speech. Ed.), indicating that ISPs are acting as censors and arbiters of what is acceptable content for their subscribers.
The extent of excessive blocking has been revealed by the Open Rights Group’s Blocked project, which is documenting the impact of filters. Web users can use a free checking tool where they can instantly check to see if a website has been blocked by filters. So far, the Open Rights Group has tested over 100,000 sites and found that over 19,000 are blocked by one ISP or another.
One of the blocked sites is the political blog, Guido Fawkes. It’s being blocked by ISP TalkTalk, which puts the latter on a par with the not exactly democratic government of the People’s Republic of China.
ISPs have also been criticised for the lack of information about how to get sites unblocked. Mum-of-one Marielle, said she was “humiliated” when she visited a shop run by mobile operator Three to find out how she could enable access to an article about post-partum care on her phone: “The manager told me that I couldn’t access filtered articles without entering a 4 digit PIN every time I wanted to read a filtered article because I had a PAYG plan” Marielle submitted a report to Three saying that the article had been incorrectly blocked, but didn’t get a response.
Other sites that have been incorrectly blocked by filters include:
www.sherights.com – this feminist rights blog was blocked by TalkTalk in April 2014. Its Editor-in-Chief says that as advertising revenue is generated by the number of site visitors and that being blocked, “directly impacts our bottom line. But, more than that, we are concerned with the message that blocking our site sends: that pro-woman, pro-equality, pro-human rights subject matter is somehow offensive, inappropriate or otherwise problematic.”
www.philipraby.co.uk – Philip Raby, who sells and services Porsches, only found out that his website was blocked by O2 when one of his customers told him. Philip says that it’s difficult to measure the financial impact of being blocked but, “we must have lost some business and, of course, it doesn’t look great telling people the site is not suitable for under 18s!”
Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group stated: “Through the Blocked project we wanted to find out about the impact of web filters. Already, our reports are showing that almost 1 in 5 websites tested are blocked, and that the problem of overblocking seems much bigger than we thought. Different ISPs are blocking different sites and the result is that many people, from businesses to bloggers, are being affected because people can’t access their websites.”
The original impetus for the introduction of filters came from Claire Perry, the Conservative MP for Devizes, a vociferous campaigner for protecting children from adult material. However, she should have been careful what she wished for, as her own website (which features many references to pr0n. Ed.) has also fallen victim to the ISPs’ filters.