IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Claverham Road, BRISTOL, BS16 2HT

Open space with bijoux houses

Equine resident of suburbia

This establishment began life in September, 1853, as the Gloucester and Bristol Diocesan Training School for school mistresses - a female only college. As proper schooling became more enshrined in statute law, it was necessary to develop and supply qualified teachers to the Church of England's voluntary elementary schools. Discipline was strict and rigorous, as was the Anglican way, and was largely self-funded - allowing it to remain clear of state controls. The school became the College of St Matthias in 1955 and was part of the new approach to education. In 1972 it merged with Bristol Polytechnic, later to move from the site to a new one in Frenchay. By 2010 the St Matthias Campus was run down and finally sold off in 2014. It is now the Avanti Gardens School, an independent organisation.

As in common with many churches, the drains and guttering bears a date. In this instance of the old Diocesan Training College (later St Matthias, then Bristol Polytechnic), the chapel was built about the same time as the rest of the site. Also note the mesh lining the gutters, stopping things from dropping below.

The chapel was part of the old Diocesan Training College of the mid-nineteenth century, which trained women to become headmistresses in Church of England schools. It has a few small details on the roof ridgeline, including this crown and sword design.

Occupying the former Diocesan Training College of St Matthias, the school in an independent trust. The chapel with the small belfry is St Mattias, which became used as the college's later name.

An 1847 visitor to Fishponds wrote of the spire that "they have constructed a lightning conductor, which is ingeniously carried down outside the edifice from apex to base - a somewhat singular circumstance, from which I conclude that the parish authorities - apprehensive lest the electric fluid, in envy of so fair a structure, should entertain a pointed and particular spite against the spire of Fishponds - have taken every possible means in their power to protect so sublime and symmetrical an object from the effects of "oak-cleaving thunderbolts". However since the church was upgraded from a chapel in 1869 I am not sure whether this is the same spire or not. The whole account is worth reading http://fishponds.org.uk/fish1847.html

Hannah More (1745-1833) was born here in what was once a school (headed by her father) beside to the entrance to Fishponds parish church. She was a poet, playwright, novelist and educationalist but her main claim to lasting fame was her support for the abolition of slavery. See http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/more.htm

A small decorative feature on the ridge of the chapel roof.

A multitude of small identical graves: I wonder if they mark the graves of the Stapleton workhouse inhabitants who used to worship here? (I cannot find confirmation of this.) Update: thanks to Hazel, who contacted me with a link to the history of Fishponds, it appears that this is indeed the case. A visitor to the church in 1847 was dismayed by the sight of the wretched workhouse children that filled the pews, and of their graves that filled the churchyard: "The churchyard seems to be almost wholly used as a Golgotha for the neighbouring poor-house, as the long ranks of little red clay-mounds, with a small inscribed footstone to each, indicated. I seldom saw a more desolate and cheerless looking resting place for the dead in my life; not a shrub or altar-tomb, that I could see, rose to vary the dismal and monotonous dreariness and flatness of the place." See http://fishponds.org.uk/fish1847.html for the rest of the contemporary account - it deserves to be read.