Works undertaken by R. C. Demolition (Bristol) Ltd, telephone 0272 231320, and underneath in smaller red letters, SAFTEY HELMETS MUST BE WORN ON SITE. Someone painted that misspelling, someone else hung the board on the hoarding, and nobody along the way cared enough to fix it.

That number was renumbered out of existence on 16 April 1995, when PhONEday moved Bristol from 0272 to 0117 and stretched local subscriber numbers from six digits to seven. So 231320 became 923 1320 overnight. The digits survive the translation perfectly well. What doesn't survive is any sense of what they were printed to reach.

Behind the hoarding stands a hotel that opened in 1898 as the Grand Clifton Spa and Hydropathic Institution, back when Clifton was selling the water rather than the view; in August 2018 it reopened as Avon Gorge by Hotel du Vin, refurbished and rebranded. Somewhere between those dates sits the long low range on the gorge edge, roof already stripped back to bare joists, cones out, orange tape strung across the pavement, and I can find no account anywhere of what came down or why.

Which leaves the cars to do the dating. The Mercedes on the left carries a D-plate, issued between August 1986 and July 1987. Further down the hill, the concrete Bristol of that same decade got hated, then argued over, then written about at length. This range got a board with a phone number and a spelling mistake on it, and that board is now the most complete document of the works I've been able to find.

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