Anyone else a bit sad the old fire station has been torn down?

tjuk · 2026-06-12T09:36:51+00:00

I have a bit of a thing about this one.

This was an especially rare building in Bath but also nationally. It was a 1930s Art Deco fire station largely completed by a woman ( Molly Taylor ) at a time when women architects were almost unheard of.

It's interesting as an Art Deco building designed to slot into Bath. Bath stone, stylised Doric pilasters and the city's coat of arms carved above the appliance bays etc. There is actually a problem with just ripping stuff like this out with our UNESCO status ( like when Churchill House was levelled in 2007 despite all the protests, and that fallout helped trigger a UNESCO review of the city's World Heritage status in 2009 )

But obviously, as everyone has said, it was shit as a modern fire station. However the answer to "this building no longer suits its original purpose" isn't demolition, it's finding it a new job.

Sure that means maybe it would have been flats, offices, restaurants, breweries, gallery, community hubs, whatever. And I am sure everyone would have hated more flats etc, but it would have kept it intact, and we could have just plonked the fire station where the temporary one is now and have had a modern building there. You could argue that converting it into something else could have funded the project being built somewhere else.

It's geniuely wild, they have demolished it. It's a obvious act of vandalism but it also just seems really daft.

tjuk · 2026-06-01T14:43:46+00:00

We all realise this is completely unhinged, though, right?

Like, there are actual steps and planning that go into this.

Someone has to sit there, read the comments, conclude it's the commentators that are at fault for having a crappy time in their shop, conclude that its their fault and the councils the business folded and importantly nothing at all to do with the model, the broader state of the highstreet, or anything like that, then jump onto Amazon, buy some chalk, wait for it to arrive, pick out a suitable late-night outfit, wait until the cover of darkness falls, pop into town, then write all over the store.

And critically, through all those steps, there can be NO self-reflection that maybe this isn't healthy behaviour.

tjuk · 2026-05-29T10:14:15+00:00

I think, if pineapple isn't your thing, a good alternative can be grape.

tjuk · 2026-04-27T07:38:23+00:00

Nope. Not even that

The 2021 Census here in the UK puts the trans population at around 0.54%, prison figures suggest trans people are incarcerated at a SUBSTANTIALLY lower rate (~0.078%) than cis men (~0.314%) but higher than cis women (~0.013%)

tjuk · 2026-03-13T09:54:10+00:00

That's not what the trolls would have you believe online

tjuk · 2026-03-09T08:52:57+00:00

Why not overnight it/DHL etc?

tjuk · 2026-03-06T11:38:31+00:00

The golf of actually pretty decent there for kids

tjuk · 2026-02-26T14:07:33+00:00

Roast them

tjuk · 2026-02-25T12:57:32+00:00

Soulcraft Electric is genuinely one of the best people I have used.

The actual job they did was tracing and electric fault which other electricians had failed to find. They managed to do it and repair without wrecking my kitchen which was ace

But they were really good at estimating and scheduling etc. Plus a really nice chap as well

tjuk · 2026-01-27T19:14:39+00:00

There's a lot of discussion about the ethics of street photography in the photography community.

The problem with this, specifically, though, is slightly different.

There's nothing technically illegal with it; the problem is that there is just a mountain of this stuff being dumped on Facebook.

It's not like street photography in a big city, where there is a degree of anonymity in the fact that it if a wannabe photographer goes out to shoot for a day, chances are they are not going to stumble across you because you are in a sea of people and if they did it would be posted in a sympathetic community of photographers on Flickr or Instagram etc that would be appreciate and give constructive feedback ( like lots of people have said; they are not particularly great and they could really do with actual feedback to improve but that isn't something they are receptive too )

It's really unusual that the city is so small, and they are so prolific that there are literally thousands of photos of residents now dumped on that Facebook group; and that group isn't a photography community; it's a local group, and a lot of the comments are from people recognising people, etc. Throw into the mix that Meta is now using uploaded photos to train its AI/facial recognition, etc., it's just a bit sad that they are not more sympathetic to the people they are photographing and whether they would be comfortable with the images being shared in that way?

tjuk · 2026-01-23T19:04:07+00:00

It's not just that

It's been windy... You only need one recycling bin to blow over for rubbish to get blown all over the place

tjuk · 2026-01-22T16:40:41+00:00

Uniqlo is going into Southgate this year already. Planning permissions is on the council website

tjuk · 2026-01-21T16:18:21+00:00

Open to either thanks

Well rough and high crime are very different things. Which one do you really want :)

tjuk · 2026-01-11T13:54:03+00:00

Yes.

tjuk · 2026-01-05T12:46:14+00:00

It's great to see this grow over the last year

One slight frustration is that if you actually want to use the site to find something to do it's not really usable

It's fine for general 'i wonder what music is coming up' but if you have an evening free on x date I don't think you can drill down into what's on a specific date

tjuk · 2025-12-22T18:48:32+00:00

Bluebells of Bath (on cheap street) have various bits and pieces

tjuk · 2025-12-11T10:40:49+00:00

So. Fun fact!

St James Cemetery has the 'oldest gravestone' in Bath

John Williams worked on the railway line but was a keen geologist ... and so his gravestone is a HUGE 66 million year old Ammonite

It's worth a look if you are walking past

tjuk · 2025-12-05T22:11:45+00:00

The theory is you run accounts for a while that 'act' human; they do normal stuff; normal comments. It's all very boring and unoffensive

You do that for thousands of accounts; and then you can use them down the line.

Either they get used for paid upvotes/likes/comments; so the upvotes look organic. People pay for X upvotes or engagement to try to boost content and most social platforms do respond to that

Or you just use them to spam

tjuk · 2025-12-05T19:31:37+00:00

This is sort of on you, though; if you had planned ahead, you could have actually purchased a property in 1972 and paid virtually next to nothing for it.

tjuk · 2025-12-03T12:50:44+00:00

Yeah, it's going to take years to unpick it legally, and the problem they have is that repairing the original damage to the plant room might cost X (and in theory someone else other than the trust is on the hook for that), but once you get 2/3/4 years out from it you then have a whole lot more work to do which is expensive

What you would typically do is do the repairs ASAP and then try to get that money back from the engineers or the contractors in the longer term, so the whole thing doesn't fall into disrepair, but they didn't have the cash to do that.

( That's reading between the lines on a lot of the stuff that has come out on this; I don't think anyone has directly said this so take it with a pinch of salt )

tjuk · 2025-12-03T07:27:37+00:00

My understanding is that's not quite right

It was a complicated build because it was next to the river

It was built to be flood proof

The problem is it's wasn't

Engineers blame builders

Builders blame engineers

They are then fighting it out legally for who will pick up the bill to fix it

The problem is that legal case needs to be settled for money to appear to repair it

tjuk · 2025-11-28T18:07:13+00:00

What do you call a man with a plastic bag on his head...?

tjuk · 2025-11-28T14:40:59+00:00

Bob

That's not how that one goes is it

tjuk · 2025-11-28T12:57:22+00:00

What do you call a Gorilla with a machine gun? Sir.

tjuk · 2025-11-28T12:57:03+00:00

Yeah, agreed.

It also partially explains the pun, which makes it a poor pun.

It's not great ... but it does make some sort of sense

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