Bristol

  • Planning for clichés

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics, Social Media

    The inspiration to write this post was what an old friend referred to on social media as the Town Planners’ Little Book of Tired Clichés.

    We were discussing a press report on long-term plans for Bristol Temple Meads, the city’s main railway station and its environs.

    The report itself was written up from a press release issued by the literary geniuses employed in the Bristol City Council Newsroom down the Counts Louse (which some people now call City Hall. Ed.).

    Bristol Temple Meads railway station
    Bristol Temple Meads. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    Whilst avoiding clichés has long been a given as advice for good creative writing, the various actors quoted in the Temple Meads piece seem to relish in their use.

    Thus the surrounding area “will be rejuvenated with housing, shops and hospitality outlets creating a new area of the city where people can live, shop, visit and socialise”.

    Note the exemplary use of rejuvenated.

    In addition, how a new area of the city can be created by covering an existing but derelict city area in architecturally contrived arrangements of building materials is beyond me. If you have any clues, dear reader, please enlighten me via the comments.

    Then there’s that essential element for anything involving urban planning – the vision thing. This is ably provided in this case in a quotation by Network Rail’s spokesperson: “We are delighted to be working with our partners on this significant regeneration project and Bristol Temple Meads station is at the heart of this vision.”

    Helmut Schmidt, who served as the West German chancellor from 1974 to 1982, had a thing to say about visions: “Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen“. In English: People who have visions should go to the doctor. Genau! Sie haben Recht, Herr Schmidt.

    Needless to the whole glossary of hackneyed phraseology seems to have been upended into the phraseology mixing bowl to create something not only unappetising, but indigestible: ambitious; innovative; rejuvenate/rejuvenation; regeneration; gateway; transformation/transformative; integrate; blueprint; showcase.

    And on the clichés go, marching tediously across and down the page.

    There are nevertheless a couple of absolute gems in the piece to compensate for all this guff.

    Firstly,there’s the timescale for the plans. We are are informed that “work is not expected to start for another decade with the expected completion not until 2041 at the earliest“. Thus all that hot air is being expended on something whose actual implementation is two decades in the future; if not more.

    A well-known adage springs to mind: pigs might fly.

    Secondly, there’s the promise of an integrated transport hub. Basically this means creating a major public transport interchange (as seen in sensible city’s where the local bus/tram serve the railway station). To my knowledge, there’s been talk of a transport hub/interchange at Temple Meads for at least 3 decades already, so for it actually to become a reality within 5 decades would entail the city’s infrastructure planning process moving at more than their usual slower than tectonic plates speed.

  • Around the block history lesson

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    Walls made of stone blocks are not unknown in Bristol. Since medieval times the local grey Pennant sandstone has been a common building material, as in the wall shown below, which is situated in All Hallows Road in the Easton area.

    Slag block in stone wall, All Hallows Road, Easton

    Please note the second block down in the centre of the photograph; the purply-black one that isn’t Pennant sandstone.

    It’s a by-product of a formerly common industry in Bristol and the surrounding area that only ceased in the 1920s – copper and brass smelting. Brass goods in particular were mass-produced locally and traded extensively, especially as part of the triangular trade during when Bristol grew rich on slavery.

    Indeed it’s a block of slag left over from the smelting process. When brass working was a major industry in the Bristol area, the slag was often poured into block-shaped moulds and used as a building material when cooled and hardened.

    Stone walls were frequently capped with a decorative slag coping stones, as can be seen below on one of the walls of Saint Peter & St Paul Greek Orthodox Church in Lower Ashley Road. Otherwise the blocks were just used like ordinary stone blocks in masonry as above. In some instances, the blocks have been used as vertical decorative features in masonry.

    Greek Orthodox Curch wall with slag copings

    The finest example of the use of slag as a building material within the Bristol area is Brislington’s Grade I listed Black Castle pub (originally a folly. Ed.), where slag has been used extensively.

    Black Castle, Brislington
    Black Castle, Brislington, Bristol. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    So if you see any slag blocks in a wall in Bristol, you can be sure it usually dates to the 18th or 19th century, more usually the latter, when Bristol underwent a massive expansion.

    Moreover, these blocks are apparently referred to as “Bristol Blacks“.

    There’s a link between Bristol’s brass industry and my home county of Shropshire in the shape of Abraham Darby I.

    In 1702 local Quakers, including Abraham Darby, established the Baptist Mills brass works of the Bristol Brass Company not far from the site of today’s Greek Orthodox Church on the site of an old grist (i.e. flour) mill on the now culverted River Frome. The site was chosen because of:

    1. water-power from the Frome;
    2. both charcoal and coal were available locally;
    3. Baptist Mills was close to Bristol and its port;
    4. there was room for expansion (the site eventually covered 13 acres. Ed.).

    In 1708-9 Darby leaves the Baptist Mills works and Bristol, moving to Coalbrookdale in Shropshire’s Ironbridge Gorge, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. In Coalbrookdale, Darby together with two business partners bought an unused iron furnace and forges. Here Darby eventually establishes a joint works – running copper, brass, iron and steel works side by side.

    Below is the site of Darby’s furnace in Coalbrookdale today.

    Darby's blast furnace in Coalbrookdale
    Darby’s blast furnace in Coalbrookdale. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

    By contrast, here is what occupies the site of the brass works in Baptist Mills – junction 3 of the M32.

    M32 roundabout
    The site of the Bristol Brass Company’s Baptist Mills works. Image courtesy of OpenStreetMap.

  • Going, going…

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    Here’s a wee update on the bike I reported on Lawrence Hill (posts passim).

    Since reporting, a member of Bristol Waste staff has been out and affixed a removal notice to the bike, giving the owner – if any – a fixed period, in this case 21 days (3 weeks), in which to recover their property before it is removed.

    Abandoned bike on Lawrence Hill with Bristol Waste removal notice attached
    Abandoned bike with removal notice attached to its top tube

    I trust when it is removed, the 2 redundant D-locks also affixed to the stand are likewise removed at the same time. 😀

     

  • Footways, footpaths and pavements

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

    How many of us pay that much attention to road signs when out and about on our daily business on foot as pedestrians?

    I mean really pay attention, not just to the instruction being given or the advice being offered by the road sign itself, but the actual words used.

    Take the two examples below, both taken during this past week on the streets of Bristol. Both are on a part of the highway used by pedestrians and generally referred to by the general public as the pavement (on which more anon. Ed.). But which – if any – is the correct term? Are footways and footpaths the same?

    Composite image showing 'Diverted Footway' and 'Footpath Closed' road signs
    Left, Newfoundland Road = correct. Right, Lansdown Road, Easton = incorrect.

    To answer the second question first, no; they are not the same.

    If there’s one thing many decades of being a linguist has taught me, it is that terminology is important – the correct word used in the right context.

    One generally has be a legislator, highway engineer or transport campaigner to know the difference between a footway and a footpath.

    Fortunately, it is clearly defined in legislation, in this case the Highways Act 1980, which provides the following definitions:

    “footpath” means a highway over which the public have a right of way on foot only, not being a footway;
    “footway” means a way comprised in a highway which also comprises a carriageway, being a way over which the public have a right of way on foot only.

    In addition, Cheshire East Council provides the following information on its webpage entitled “What Are Public Rights of Way?“

    You should be careful to distinguish between ‘public footpaths’ and ‘footways’. Pavements beside public roads are not public footpaths – it is better to refer to them as footways or simply pavements.
    Footways are not recorded on the Definitive Map as Public Rights of Way. A footway is really a part of the main highway which has been set apart for pedestrians.

    Nevertheless, a caveat needs to be added to the clause where Cheshire East Council advises that “it is better to refer to them as footways or simply pavements“.

    The caveat is that there’s a world of difference between what “pavement” denotes to ordinary mortals and professionals such as civil and highway engineers: for the former it’s the footway; for the latter more specialised use, Britannica gives the following definition:

    Pavement, in civil engineering, durable surfacing of a road, airstrip, or similar area. The primary function of a pavement is to transmit loads to the sub-base and underlying soil.

    Who would have thought two words on two such simple temporary road signs deployed for road works could be such a terminological minefield? 😉

  • More enforcement officers for Bristol

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics

    In the middle of the week, Bristol City Council held its annual budget setting meeting.

    As usual, it was riven with the traditional partisan ill feeling and rancour, as well as a rift over council housing rent increases within the ruling Labour group.

    However, there was one glimmer of hope amongst the gloom. As a result of an amendment put forward by a group of Labour councillors, the council will be funding more enforcement officers to tackle the city’s seemingly insuperable environmental crime problems.

    As Bristol Live reported:

    Later in the meeting, the original budget, with a Labour amendment for seven additional litter and fly-tipping enforcement officers, passed by just one vote 33-32.

    Seven additional officers is a substantial increase in the complement of the enforcement team and one would hope that these additional resources will make a significant contribution to reducing levels of environmental crime within the city, as well as an increase in the woefully low number of prosecutions carried out, together with the issuing of more fixed penalty notices (FPNs).

    Fly-tipping in Morton Street, Barton Hill
    Fly-tipping in Morton Street

    Fly-tipping in particular seems to have burgeoned during the lockdowns of the last year, fuelled in part by lower numbers of people on the street (and hence less casual surveillance/deterrence. Ed.), plus the twin booms of DIY projects and online shopping (the latter has also given rise to an increase in cardboard presented for recycling, according to Bristol Waste. Ed.).

    In the meantime, keep reporting fly-tipping, litter and other environmental crimes to Bristol City Council, Bristolians. It does make a difference.

    PS: I’ve been informed the work I do in the local area was mentioned in the meeting when the amendment was discussed.

    Update 14/07/21: Yesterday evening’s Bristol Clean Streets Forum meeting was informed that all the additional enforcement officers will be in post by the start of August.

  • Fast food litter petition

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Social Media

    in 10 years of campaigning for less litter and fly-tipping in east Bristol’s Lawrence Hill and Easton wards, one constant factor has been litter generated by takeaways, particularly the major franchises like Burger King, KFC and the like.

    A petition has now been started on change.org to help tackle part of the problem, namely littering by their motorised customers, some of whom seem to have no compunction at just pitching the packaging their meal came in out of the vehicle window once their appetites have been sated.

    Fast food litter
    Fast food litter. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    The back streets of Easton and Lawrence Hill are a good mile of so from the nearest McDonalds, Burger King or KFC, but that does not stop litter from those outlets blighting the neighbourhood.

    The relevant petition is entitled “Fast food restaurants to print vehicle reg on takeaway packaging to discourage littering” and reads as follows:

    The recent break in fast food companies business has given us time to be able to start to clean up the streets once littered with empty McDonald’s bags, KFC boxes and other takeaway restaurant litter.
    KFC has been back open merely a couple of days and already pictures of carelessly discarded boxes are circulating on the internet. Let’s not slip back to where we were in terms of litter before the Covid lockdown. Let’s make compulsory that all drive through restaurants, who sell takeaway food, have to print the purchasers vehicle registration onto their bags or boxes. This will make it much easier to trace the litter back to the purchaser and result in a fine or preferably litter picking duties. I am proposing the idea of 3-4 stickers around the size of the bottom of the restaurants cup, printed with date/time and car registration, placed onto the bottom of the bags, cups and boxes to make it difficult for repeat litterers to remove their details without spilling the remaining contents into their cars/vans. The restaurants CCTV will back up this evidence with pictures of the driver and vehicle to provide solid evidence that they were the purchaser of said litter. The fine or community hours need to be big enough to cover costs of enforcement officers investigation times, resulting in nobody “slipping the net”.
    If we can reach 100,000 signatures I can show clear public interest and go straight to the Secretary of state for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and demand change. As this could result in a fine for the offenders this will make it much more appealing to the government to pass as law and thus resulting in a cleaner environment for everyone to enjoy.
    Please help your local and national environment by merely signing this petition and sharing on social media platforms and as many large groups as you can, making a small but very needed step in the right direction.
    Thank you good citizens.

    Sign the petition.

    If the petition is successful, that just leaves how to resolve the problem of those on foot who litter after eating their takeaways whilst walking home… 🙁

  • Abandoned cycle removal – a Bristol how-to

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    Cycling has undergone an upsurge in popularity in recent times due to it being a healthy and convenient mode of transport.

    Nevertheless, this increase in popularity does have some drawbacks, one of which is damaged or abandoned cycles  being left attached to cycle racks or other street furniture, like this typical example on Lawrence Hill by the station steps.

    Damaged, abandoned cycle attached to Sheffield stand

    Even though I’ve been involved for a decade with trying to stem the tide of litter and fly-tipping that blight our streets, I was uncertain of the procedure to follow to report dumped bikes and get them removed.

    I therefore turned to the Community Engagement Team of Bristol Waste, a council-owned company responsible for recycling and waste collections and street cleansing, for advice.

    The relevant part of their response is quoted below.

    The process is – logging a web form under street cleansing (https://www.bristol.gov.uk/streets-travel/street-that-needs-cleaning) and then provide the details of where the bike is. The crew will go and cut it off and dispose of it. If it looks like its owned by someone, then we put a notice on for 3 weeks and then go back and remove it if still there.

    That seems very simple indeed.

    Thanks, for your helpful reply, Bristol Waste!

    I now hope others will join me in keeping the streets free of abandoned clutter.

    NB:: as abandoned bikes are not specifically mentioned in the drop-down list of items that can be reported for attention, I chose to class it as ‘Litter‘. 😀

  • Insert word of choice

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics

    For many years the garage sitting at the apex of the junction of Russelltown Avenue, Cannon Street and Whitehall Road in BS5 has featured a changing sequence of slogans painted by Stan Jones, who lives in the house to which the garage belongs.

    It was 2017 when I first noticed it and, at that time, it focussed on the madness of Brexit.

    Garage wall featuring Exit Brexit slogan
    Exit Brexit

    In 2019 its message was still focussed on Brexit but had been repainted to featur the wording “Buck Foris” (fine use of a Spoonerism there. Ed.) and “Fromage not Farage“, so I think it’s fair to say Stan is not impressed with the right-leaning part of what passes for Britain’s political class.

    In 2019 Stan’s efforts accidentally suffered the attentions of Bristol City Council’s fight against graffit. There was, however, a happy outcome as Stan received an apology and some paint from the corporation, as the Bristol Post reported at the time.

    Below is Stan’s latest contribution, which really needs no further comment from me.

    Text on building reads What the [insert word of choice] is happening?
    Stan’s latest (shame about the tags)

     

  • The new benchmark – as long as you’re white

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    On a rare excursion into town, I happened to notice that Castlemead, the city’s tallest office block, is currently undergoing a refurbishment and is surrounded by site hoardings which have the usual aspirational developer’s blurb splashed across it, as can be seen below.

    General view of shuttering surrounding Castlemead site
    General view of the Castlemead site on Lower Castle Street

    Besides being the new benchmark, the refurbisher’s website describes Castlemead as follows:

    Castlemead is a city landmark office building and offers high quality refurbished open plan accommodation from 3,450 – 11,128 sq ft and the UK’s First Platinum Plus 100 Cyclingscore Accredited facilities.

    With 360 panoramic views over Bristol’s cityscape and Castlepark [sic] and with the Cabot Circus regional shopping, dining and leisure destination on your doorstep, why locate your business anywhere else?

    Nevertheless, a quick glance at the images chosen to illustrate this landmark office building’s quality reveals one glaringly obvious fact.

    This quality is only available to white people. All the figures shown are invariably Caucasian. There’s not a BAME face to be seen anywhere either on the site’s hoardings or in the CGIs used on the dedicated website.

    Happy office drones at Castlemead 1
    Spot the BAME face 1
    Happy office drones at Castlemead 2
    Spot the BAME face 2

    According to the city council’s website, 16% of the city’s population of 463,400 persons belongs to a black or minority ethnic group. That’s over 74,000 people.

    When will developers realise and start to portray a more accurate picture of our city in their very expensive fantasy doodlings?

    After all, this is not the first time the absence of non-white faces from new Bristol property developments has been pointed out. It is a phenomenon that was first highlighted back in 2009 by a fellow local blogger.

    One would have expected the city’s major property moguls to have learned something by now and made a start on accurately portraying all the kinds of people in the city who will ultimately be occupying their benchmark and landmark buildings.

    Sadly, nothing appears to have changed.

  • Focus on OCR

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Open Source, Tech

    The way a completed translation has been produced has changed markedly over the decades since my first days as a translator for Imperial Tobacco in Bedminster, Bristol.

    In those days I’d write out the translation in longhand from printed source material and take my manuscript to the typing pool where it would be transformed into typescript.

    The next big change came with my learning how to touch-type. By this time I was a freelance with no more access to a typing pool.

    In my early freelance days, it was rare to get editable copy that one could overkey with one’s usual word processor, spreadsheet or presentation package. The standard way of working was still from hard copy propped up in a copyholder alongside one’s keyboard.

    Then there came a large surge in the use of formats such as PDF – Portable Document Format. This format enables documents, including text formatting and images, to be presented in a manner independent of application software, hardware and operating systems.

    If the PDF was text-based, one could simply export the text as plain ASCII text or copy and paste it into a word processor.

    However, if I had an image-based PDF to work with, my usual answer was to print it out as hard copy to be propped up in a copyholder alongside my keyboard. This was very expensive in terms of paper and other consumables for the printer, even with a machine as parsimonious as my trusty mono laser printer, whose cartridge was good for printing 3,000 or so pages of copy.

    In addition to the expense of printing, there was a far greater drawback to bear in mind, i.e. one could easily miss a sentence or paragraph from the original text when keying in the translated from a hard copy original, with the consequent implications for the quality of the finished work and the client’s satisfaction with it.

    Then I discovered OCR – Optical Character Recognition – the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.

    Here’s a short video explaining the basics of OCR.

    My preferred OCR package is gImageReader and – as with the software I recommend for use by translators – is open source and available for both Linux and Windows.

    Gimagereader in action on Italian language PDF
    gImageReader in action on Italian language PDF

    gImageReader provides a simple graphical front-end to the tesseract OCR engine. The features of gImageReader include:

    • Importing PDF documents and images from disk, scanning devices, clipboard and screenshots;
    • Process multiple images and documents in one go;
    • Manual or automatic recognition area definition;
    • Recognising to plain text or to hOCR documents;
    • Recognized text displayed directly next to the image;
    • Post-processing of the recognised text, including spellchecking;
    • Generating PDF documents from hOCR documents.

    I generally just stick scanning the input file to plain text, which can then be fed into a regular office suite for translation. If your office suite can handle HTML that’s the format gImageReader outputs as its hOCR output.

    The tesseract OCR engine mentioned above can also be enhanced with language packs for post-recognition spellchecking, as mentioned in the features above. At present, tesseract can recognise over 100 different languages.

    In addition to GUI-based OCR, there are also Linux packages available which can perform OCR via the command line interface.

    My tool of choice here is OCRmyPDF.

    ocrmypdf in action in KDE Konsole terminal
    ocrmypdf being used in KDE’s Konsole terminal to add OCR layer to Spanish language PDF

    OCRmyPDF is a package written in Python 3 that adds OCR layers to PDFs and, like gImageReader, also uses the tesseract OCR engine.

    Using OCRmyPDF on the command line is simplicity itself (as shown in the screenshot above:

    ocrmypdf -l [language option] inputfile.pdf outputfile.pdf

    More complicated command options are possible, but after using that simple string above, you’ll be able to extract the text from your formerly image-based PDF ready for translation.

    By way of conclusion depending on the software itself, OCR packages can also extract text from images such as .jpg files.

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