Walcot

The above is a street bollard (with a hat and eyeballs added by a local wag) in the largest parish of Bath known as Walcot. The name Walcot denotes that it was a a small hamlet set outside the medieval walls, and it ran both sides of the main route into the city from London and the east, the last stretch of which is called Walcot Street. Some years ago, my workshop was there, and I had many neighbors with similar workshops, all making things with their hands.

I was amongst the last of the artisans to move out of the area make way for a dismal, London-based group of property developers, and now that we have all gone, the city fathers have designated the street 'Bath's Artisan Quarter'.

True, there is an abundance of picture-framers dotted up and down the road, some very good food outlets and a smattering of photographers and ceramic artists, but - generally speaking -the place has lost the buzz that it used to have when it centered around the internationally famous 'Walcot Reclamation', when celebrities and dealers from around the globe would turn up to buy fittings and fixtures for their latest housing or garden project.

I used to have conversations with people like Barbara Streisand (who we once pretended worked there as a Saturday Girl to make a few extra bucks to an awe-struck passer-by who believed us!), Gary Lineker, Prince Charles, Jennifer Saunders, Paul Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Manolo Blahnik, etc. etc. (that's enough name-dropping), in Walcot's heyday, but now the old Yard has gone forever, and many other yards across the country are following it.

By the time Bath realised what they had as an asset, it was too late - but that didn't stop them from trying to art-up the area by installing quirky bollards like the one above, bicycle racks, funky signage, etc. The younger lot were not born when Walcot was at it's quirkiest, and now the old hippies are councillors.

They even managed to install that bollard the wrong way round - the 'mouth' is a reflector, and it's facing away from the traffic.