Old Mother Shipton.

I noticed the really tall, external chimney in the centre of this photo the other day, then I remembered that I built it myself in the mid 1970s. Top left are the lower slopes of Solsbury Hill.

I did quite a lot to that building. It was constructed during the period when you were taxed according to how many windows you had in your house, so quite a few window openings were made and then filled neatly with stone ready for someone like me to turn up when the 'light tax' had been abolished. I fitted three windows in that place, but it is amazing how many remain blocked all these years after the 18th century. I suppose the 'blind' windows are now listed as historical features.

The house is situated in Hanover Street. We called it 'Hangover Street' back then, for obvious reasons. When I first arrived in Bath it was a place built of stone blackened by Victorian coal fires and its residents consisted mainly of the elderly and escapee hippies. Flats were cheap but generally sordid and people shared them. One such house in Hanover Street was shared by quite a few people I knew, including one girl who tried to keep warm one night by balancing a two-bar electric heater on the edge of the bath. It fell in, killing her instantly. She was a direct descendant of Old Mother Shipton, the benign witch from somewhere up North. You may have heard of her.