Bristol

Take a large bowl of over-cooked spaghetti, not the al dente kind, the really slippery soft stuff, hold the bowl above your head, quickly turn it upside down and let the pasta splatter all over the floor.

You have now created a noodle replica of the road pattern of Bristol.

Modern cities are laid out in grids, but medieval and even older cities like Bristol are not. They twist and turn around long-demolished castles, through no-longer-existing city gates, along long ago filled in rivers, past paved over markets.

That’s why navigating a modern medieval city like Bristol is so interesting.

And confusing.

Full of cars, full of buses, but still working with a street pattern originally intended for pedestrians and horsecarts, it has taken me some time to get my bearings, accustomed as I am to streets that run in pretty straight lines and run pretty well north/south or east/west.

Take Bristol’s Victoria Street, which dates back……..well, nobody knows for sure.

I often walk northwards along Victoria Street from the train station, where it starts off as Temple Gate, then becomes Victoria, then becomes High Street, which transforms into Wine Street and veers east, then changes to Newgate, then Broad Weir, and finally turns north and becomes Bond Street South, which dead-ends at, what else, Bond Street, which, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, turns into Rupert St, then St Augustine’s Parade……you get the idea.

Last week I was looking for an address on a street called Temple Street. (Why? Tell you later.) I was at No. 34 looking for No. 100

Piece of cake, I thought.

Wrong.

At 46, Temple slammed at right angles into another street and came to a complete dead end.

Confusion!

Fortunately, I had a handy medieval device, Ye Olde iPhone, to get me to my destination.

Sure enough, it told me to turn left, follow another unrelated road for 2 blocks, veer right along what looked like a driveway and there, magically, as if from a mountain cleaved in two by a sorcerer’s wand, Temple Street reappeared at my feet from the mists, and I proceeded along to my destination.

Lesson 1: don’t assume continuity.

Lesson 2: never forget your iPhone.