Brock’s Bridge (bridge 9)

Walking to Fareshare by the river, I stopped to take this.  I’ve not been following up my project to blip all 45 bridges in Bristol for a while. I suppose in the summer I’ve mainly been blipping growing things. I’m going to get going on it again. 
Although it’s a blue bridge, it’s a white elephant. Built to take vehicles across the river to Arena Island - a brownfield site next to Temple Meads station where a 10,000 seat arena was going to be built. But no more. The arena was cancelled in 2018, and 4 years later the land is not used for anything - an awful waste. I can’t find out how much it cost; if I was the city council I think I would try to keep schtum about that too. It’s named for a Victorian builder, not in honour of badgers. 
The other thing in this picture is the incredibly high level of the water - it’s flowing upriver, and there’s still nearly an hour before high tide. And it’s nowhere near a spring tide either. 
At fareshare today I enjoyed my mornings work, we have a really friendly team of volunteers and it’s fun working with them. But the amount of food available to send out was  the worst I’d ever seen. Low in quantity, but also more or less zero protein. Anyone relying on a food bank to eat is going to be insufficiently nourished very soon. The fareshare warehouse in Plymouth was closed for two days last week because they didn’t have enough donations to operate. And that’s in one of the poorest cities in England. People who can’t afford to buy food and heat their homes, and people who have been ‘sanctioned’ i.e. their benefits stopped because of some error, or infringement of rules, on their part are going to be in severe difficulty.  Most food bank food comes from the supermarkets and food companies, both of which are being squeezed. Some comes from individuals who donate at collection points in the supermarket. They’re being squeezed even more.  I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen to people who aren’t rich.