I went on a tour of the still working tower when a schoolboy in the 60s. We were warned then not to handle the shot - quantities of which lay loosely around the place - because of the arsenic used in the process. This didn't stop me pocketing handfuls of shot of different sizes from the many open barrels. I left with my pockets sagging conspicuously . For weeks afterwards, having heard that a symptom of arsenic poisoning was hair loss, I was examining my comb very anxiously.
Another great video mate. A brutalist tour of bristol would be amazing to see in the future! i’ve always liked the Castlemead Tower so would be interesting to see it featured in a video
Great vid again. Lead shot was used by fisherman to weigh down the line. Two or three split lead shot would be squeezed over a line before casting. They would be positioned below the float and above the hook & bait. Hope that helps a wee bit and no, I am not a fishing nerd, tried it once aged 10 and never again.
Not “somewhere infront the pub” but, the front wall of the shot tower sat right on the line of the central reservation railings of the dual carriageway
I used to work in the Medical School and the lab had a view across the city. I had wondered what the new shot tower was. I had imagined it was some kind of harbour master's control point. But now, the mystery is solved. Thanks for helping to bring sense to the naive 8 years of my early to late twenties dwelling in Bristol.
Worth a visit of Redcliffe Cave on one of their open days. Before the second war the caves extended up to the new cut and Redcliffe church, under William Watts shot tower. So his tower went up four levels and down three. The caves were really quarries where the sand was extracted for glass, leaving a handy storage location, whose floor could be levelled with the waste from the lead shot tower. Interestingly Mendip lead has a lot of Arsenic in it, which makes it ball up nicely and therefore requires a shorter tower.
yes would love to see the caves and maybe even do a vid if allowed, havent seen an opportunity yet (albeit I'm so disorganised I usually only discover these things after they happen)
Superb! Such a shame the shot tower along with the rest of the street was demolished for little gain. Agree about the replacement building - it’s simply dull. I do however like the 1960s shot tower and look forward to your Brutalist Bristol vid. Maybe you can include the overhead walkway network that materialised to some degree around Lewins Meed 😉👍
It's so wonderful to have stumbled upon your channel! I have lived in the West of England for 30 years (Town Planning degree at UWE!) - so I am a relative newcomer.
Just another of the many unfortunate (with hindsight) decisions made by Bristol City or the County Councils. In my twenties, I was a service engineer for a burglar alarm company, and one of the premises I visited was the 'new' Sheldon Bush works. I didn't get the opportunity to go up the shot tower, but I doubt I'd have wanted to. Despite the modern, clean appearance of the outside of the tower, the interior of the building, certainly down at ground level where I was working, was disgusting. Covered in a layer of grey dust, which combined with lubricating oil to because a sticky paste. Considering the effect of both lead an arsenic on the human body, I can't imagine it was a pleasant place to work continuously. By the way, that 'unassuming' Mercure Hotel used to be an office building - Standard Life Assurance or Chelsea Building Society, if I recall, and it was bland and unpleasant to look at then.
@@PedestrianDiversions I'm sure your videos will trigger many more memories, from when my family arrived in Almondsbury in 1961, when I was 4, until I returned to the midlands as an adult in 1997, having lived in Horfield, Yate and Horfield again in between. I may not like Bristol much now, but I loved it back then, and I'm happy to share those memories.
Excellently informative! I've been interested in the shot tower before and this video proved that interest right and more info besides. Thanks! Do you have a Patreon?
Watching and reading about he duel carriage way running through queens square always confuses me because I always question myself in "what were there they thinking when the did this". But it would be nice to have a video on this because it isn't talked about much now and it isn't even on the Queens square history board
Yeah I would love to cover it, but my main problem is I could find zero public domain/creative commons photos of it. In fact I couldn't find many photos of it, full stop (let alone video). There's one or two shots on flickr I might be able to message to ask permission but beyond that I've got absolutely nothing to illustrate it. On which note, if anyone out there has old photos of Queen Square with the road through it, or indeed old photos of anywhere local, that you wouldn't mind me using, get in touch! :)
@@PedestrianDiversions I actually find it odd that it is also not mentioned in the sign of Queen square history, almost like they're ashamed of it. Can't possibly wonder why
@@PedestrianDiversions Hi, I've just found my old book that St Mary 6th form hand out and on the back of it I believe is the old road lay out of the centre as there are many more roads running through the centre and the road through queens square
Thank you for another informative video. Back in the 60s when I was thinking of a career one option was highways engineer / town planner. No doubt influenced by Buchanan and his report "Environment and the Problem of Traffic in 1960s Britain". I recall taking a street map of Southampton where I lived, and drawing vast network of new highways all over! So glad I didn't do that and end up planning schemes like a dual carriageway across Queens Square. Crazy!
If you actually want to walk through a shot tower - fly to Melbourne, Australia, catch a train to the Melbourne Central shopping centre. There is a shot tower in the middle of the shopping centre. The shot tower exists because is was a listed building when the shopping centre was constructed…
Hard to believe that a listed building of genuine historic value might be swept away with such little consideration when Plymouth is lumbered with its Civic Centre eyesore, primarily because it's the last surviving example by a particular architect. One might reasonably assume that if all other examples were worthy of the wrecking ball, the final one should meet the same fate. Apparently, that's not how it works. An additional slap in the face is that the architect's plans weren't fully implemented.
Post war, Britain was bankrupt, many thousands of Houses etc,had been destroyed by the war, countrywide. Money was short, Everything was rushed and made on the cheap, with very few creations worth a positive glance.Just look at Broadmead, A real hotchpotch of mixed ideas. In the early 60's, Bristol still had levelled bombsites used as temporary carparks. It was the same country -wide, Look at Birmingham----best not.
Excellent, you should watch Ed Nash's military matters, only that you two have the same dry humour, voice, and attention to the subject matter. Ps glad I stumbled across your site, amusing and Informative.
God that's depressing, the whole replacement is just bland, hostile and therefore lifeless, the swansong of the 1960s great "automobile economy". In large swathes of Europe they rebuilt their towns like-for-like after the destruction of WWII, perhaps we as a people should do the same for the large scale destruction created by the 1960s (into the 1970s) from that misguided macro-economic agenda. No doubt contemporary automobile owners will think it is some sort of personal assualt on them though.
I think it is too easy to forget the context, Modernist reductionist boxes were well before the war, but every architect's university course was full of them. There had been a baby boom and there was a shortage of housing, and probably more importantly new management techniques were much more accountant led and short term cost reduction focused. Concrete system built boxes are cheap, that and everyone wanted change.
@@BitTwisted1 it was focussed on replicating the US car economy (in itself an utter misreading of why post war USA was doing so well ie it was more about their superior business management skills and missing out on the destruction of WWII). The irony is if the modernist inspired governing bodies and building industry had instead just replicated US suburban sprawl by turbo-charging the 1920s suburban sprawl here for updating the housing most inner cities would have been unscathed. The larger irony is modernist housing projects and large public campus style projects were actually less dense than industrial revolution urban mass housing and cultural projects (the early 20th C modernist ideals of green space were either hijacked by car space in the post war agenda or treated as a token gesture on budget priorities especially over time with upkeep) . This is because modernism was married to mass car ownership and introduced the inefficient space required for that. It went hand in hand with the concept of speed around the building. This meant massive public investment in completing reconfiguring inner cities for the inefficiency of a) mass car ownership and freight moved away from rail b) speed of transit around buildings. The scale of destruction was immense and the UKs cities are still reeling from the long term damage from the knock on impact of moving that long term investment away from mass transit for 50 years to being perceived as generally "ugly" and the loss of a middle income population for long term stability, something the industrial cities suffered from as a double whammy. I think this specific case in Bristol highlights the absurdity quite well ie its not really about the look of the building but everything else. I get the idea of cultural context but I find it interesting that we as a nation are still unable to really look our recent past in the eye, we all know what we don't like about our cities and we all know what we miss from history and we all know what we like in other countries yet we cling onto the failed compromised post war experiment that was ultimately abandoned after the global oil crisis in the 1970s and thus was never ever realised and never will be. But look how political things get now when anyone tries to correct the past grand mistake. Most modern large scale developments are just buildings replacing the footprint of the post war modernist or post modernist blocks that are still defined by the hostile car based infrastructure surrounding them.
I went on a tour of the still working tower when a schoolboy in the 60s. We were warned then not to handle the shot - quantities of which lay loosely around the place - because of the arsenic used in the process. This didn't stop me pocketing handfuls of shot of different sizes from the many open barrels. I left with my pockets sagging conspicuously . For weeks afterwards, having heard that a symptom of arsenic poisoning was hair loss, I was examining my comb very anxiously.
Another great video mate. A brutalist tour of bristol would be amazing to see in the future! i’ve always liked the Castlemead Tower so would be interesting to see it featured in a video
As an ex-Bristolian, I am delighted to watch your excellent videos. I do miss the old green-painted Bristol buses of my childhood.
Great vid again. Lead shot was used by fisherman to weigh down the line. Two or three split lead shot would be squeezed over a line before casting. They would be positioned below the float and above the hook & bait. Hope that helps a wee bit and no, I am not a fishing nerd, tried it once aged 10 and never again.
Not “somewhere infront the pub” but, the front wall of the shot tower sat right on the line of the central reservation railings of the dual carriageway
I used to work in the Medical School and the lab had a view across the city. I had wondered what the new shot tower was. I had imagined it was some kind of harbour master's control point. But now, the mystery is solved. Thanks for helping to bring sense to the naive 8 years of my early to late twenties dwelling in Bristol.
Small world. Spent a heap of time around that area in the mendips as a kid, didn’t know if was a mine!
Thanks for another cracking video.
Worth a visit of Redcliffe Cave on one of their open days. Before the second war the caves extended up to the new cut and Redcliffe church, under William Watts shot tower. So his tower went up four levels and down three. The caves were really quarries where the sand was extracted for glass, leaving a handy storage location, whose floor could be levelled with the waste from the lead shot tower. Interestingly Mendip lead has a lot of Arsenic in it, which makes it ball up nicely and therefore requires a shorter tower.
yes would love to see the caves and maybe even do a vid if allowed, havent seen an opportunity yet (albeit I'm so disorganised I usually only discover these things after they happen)
Superb! Such a shame the shot tower along with the rest of the street was demolished for little gain.
Agree about the replacement building - it’s simply dull.
I do however like the 1960s shot tower and look forward to your Brutalist Bristol vid.
Maybe you can include the overhead walkway network that materialised to some degree around Lewins Meed 😉👍
It's so wonderful to have stumbled upon your channel! I have lived in the West of England for 30 years (Town Planning degree at UWE!) - so I am a relative newcomer.
Interesting video, well produced. Subscribed.
There's still a complete shot tower behind the Cross Guns at Avonclif.
Just another of the many unfortunate (with hindsight) decisions made by Bristol City or the County Councils. In my twenties, I was a service engineer for a burglar alarm company, and one of the premises I visited was the 'new' Sheldon Bush works. I didn't get the opportunity to go up the shot tower, but I doubt I'd have wanted to. Despite the modern, clean appearance of the outside of the tower, the interior of the building, certainly down at ground level where I was working, was disgusting. Covered in a layer of grey dust, which combined with lubricating oil to because a sticky paste. Considering the effect of both lead an arsenic on the human body, I can't imagine it was a pleasant place to work continuously. By the way, that 'unassuming' Mercure Hotel used to be an office building - Standard Life Assurance or Chelsea Building Society, if I recall, and it was bland and unpleasant to look at then.
Thanks Simon, love getting comments from people who have 'been there' and seen things as they were
@@PedestrianDiversions I'm sure your videos will trigger many more memories, from when my family arrived in Almondsbury in 1961, when I was 4, until I returned to the midlands as an adult in 1997, having lived in Horfield, Yate and Horfield again in between. I may not like Bristol much now, but I loved it back then, and I'm happy to share those memories.
Excellently informative! I've been interested in the shot tower before and this video proved that interest right and more info besides. Thanks!
Do you have a Patreon?
Thanks! Nope, haven't sorted anything like that (yet)
The discussion of the road use is interesting. It reminds me of the ‘lane mathematics’ concept which pops up a lot for city skylines players.
Lead shot is sometimes used to fill up speaker stands, if you can get hold of it.
As a former bus driver I can confirm that I spent an inordinate amount of time simply queuing on redcliff hill anyway. Completely pointless.
Watching and reading about he duel carriage way running through queens square always confuses me because I always question myself in "what were there they thinking when the did this". But it would be nice to have a video on this because it isn't talked about much now and it isn't even on the Queens square history board
Yeah I would love to cover it, but my main problem is I could find zero public domain/creative commons photos of it. In fact I couldn't find many photos of it, full stop (let alone video). There's one or two shots on flickr I might be able to message to ask permission but beyond that I've got absolutely nothing to illustrate it. On which note, if anyone out there has old photos of Queen Square with the road through it, or indeed old photos of anywhere local, that you wouldn't mind me using, get in touch! :)
@@PedestrianDiversions I actually find it odd that it is also not mentioned in the sign of Queen square history, almost like they're ashamed of it. Can't possibly wonder why
@@PedestrianDiversions Hi, I've just found my old book that St Mary 6th form hand out and on the back of it I believe is the old road lay out of the centre as there are many more roads running through the centre and the road through queens square
New to your channel, but I love it. Your sardonic style is spot on.
Thank you for another informative video. Back in the 60s when I was thinking of a career one option was highways engineer / town planner. No doubt influenced by Buchanan and his report "Environment and the Problem of Traffic in 1960s Britain". I recall taking a street map of Southampton where I lived, and drawing vast network of new highways all over! So glad I didn't do that and end up planning schemes like a dual carriageway across Queens Square. Crazy!
I giggled throughout, please make more.
If you actually want to walk through a shot tower - fly to Melbourne, Australia, catch a train to the Melbourne Central shopping centre. There is a shot tower in the middle of the shopping centre.
The shot tower exists because is was a listed building when the shopping centre was constructed…
if anyone wants to pay my air fare I would be happy to visit Melbourne to do a video about it! ;)
Hard to believe that a listed building of genuine historic value might be swept away with such little consideration when Plymouth is lumbered with its Civic Centre eyesore, primarily because it's the last surviving example by a particular architect. One might reasonably assume that if all other examples were worthy of the wrecking ball, the final one should meet the same fate. Apparently, that's not how it works. An additional slap in the face is that the architect's plans weren't fully implemented.
all my homies hate 1960s urban planning
Post war, Britain was bankrupt, many thousands of Houses etc,had been destroyed by the war, countrywide. Money was short, Everything was rushed and made on the cheap, with very few creations worth a positive glance.Just look at Broadmead, A real hotchpotch of mixed ideas. In the early 60's, Bristol still had levelled bombsites used as temporary carparks. It was the same country -wide, Look at Birmingham----best not.
Excellent, you should watch Ed Nash's military matters, only that you two have the same dry humour, voice, and attention to the subject matter. Ps glad I stumbled across your site, amusing and Informative.
Confirms my long held belief in the maxim that “planners do it with their eyes shut” 😡
whats your opinion of the civic centre in swansea ?
had to look it up. from a glance at google images it looks like the sort of building i quite like somehow despite thinking i probably shouldnt
God that's depressing, the whole replacement is just bland, hostile and therefore lifeless, the swansong of the 1960s great "automobile economy". In large swathes of Europe they rebuilt their towns like-for-like after the destruction of WWII, perhaps we as a people should do the same for the large scale destruction created by the 1960s (into the 1970s) from that misguided macro-economic agenda. No doubt contemporary automobile owners will think it is some sort of personal assualt on them though.
I think it is too easy to forget the context, Modernist reductionist boxes were well before the war, but every architect's university course was full of them. There had been a baby boom and there was a shortage of housing, and probably more importantly new management techniques were much more accountant led and short term cost reduction focused. Concrete system built boxes are cheap, that and everyone wanted change.
@@BitTwisted1 it was focussed on replicating the US car economy (in itself an utter misreading of why post war USA was doing so well ie it was more about their superior business management skills and missing out on the destruction of WWII). The irony is if the modernist inspired governing bodies and building industry had instead just replicated US suburban sprawl by turbo-charging the 1920s suburban sprawl here for updating the housing most inner cities would have been unscathed.
The larger irony is modernist housing projects and large public campus style projects were actually less dense than industrial revolution urban mass housing and cultural projects (the early 20th C modernist ideals of green space were either hijacked by car space in the post war agenda or treated as a token gesture on budget priorities especially over time with upkeep) . This is because modernism was married to mass car ownership and introduced the inefficient space required for that. It went hand in hand with the concept of speed around the building. This meant massive public investment in completing reconfiguring inner cities for the inefficiency of a) mass car ownership and freight moved away from rail b) speed of transit around buildings. The scale of destruction was immense and the UKs cities are still reeling from the long term damage from the knock on impact of moving that long term investment away from mass transit for 50 years to being perceived as generally "ugly" and the loss of a middle income population for long term stability, something the industrial cities suffered from as a double whammy. I think this specific case in Bristol highlights the absurdity quite well ie its not really about the look of the building but everything else.
I get the idea of cultural context but I find it interesting that we as a nation are still unable to really look our recent past in the eye, we all know what we don't like about our cities and we all know what we miss from history and we all know what we like in other countries yet we cling onto the failed compromised post war experiment that was ultimately abandoned after the global oil crisis in the 1970s and thus was never ever realised and never will be. But look how political things get now when anyone tries to correct the past grand mistake. Most modern large scale developments are just buildings replacing the footprint of the post war modernist or post modernist blocks that are still defined by the hostile car based infrastructure surrounding them.