Gerry Brooke looks back on a Royal Wedding, Fishponds Lido, and office blocks

The front page news this week, as it was throughout the world, was the Westminster Abbey wedding of Captain Mark Phillips to Princess Anne.

The Phillips family had made their home in the picturesque village of Great Somerford, near Chippenham, and this was where the Post’s reporters were gathered.

The nation’s favourite BBC personality, Cliff Michelmore, was in the village presenting 200 youngsters with wedding mugs.

Individually inscribed with each child’s name they had been designed and made by local craftsman Tony Fursman.

Three other mugs, said the Post, were being delivered personally to Mr and Mrs Phillips and their daughter Sarah.

But villager’s 450 inhabitants were also out to enjoy themselves that special day with a replica wedding cake, a buffet lunch, a tea party, fireworks and a barbecue complete with roast suckling pig.

They also gathered round a large colour TV to watch the Royal occasion.

In Bristol, however, there was a row brewing as Fishponds residents saw their beloved lido shrink before their very eyes.

The reason? It was being used as a tip.

The owners, Catadella, had put in a planning application for 43 houses and 92 flats on the site as part of a £1 million development.

These plans meant filling in half of the four acre lake and reducing its depth from 44 feet to just eight.

Residents were complaining, not only about the loss of the amenity, but about dawn to dusk tipping which was creating noise, dust and pollution.

A spokesman for Catadella told the Post that, despite the shrunken lake, there would still be facilities for boating and other leisure pursuits.

“We also have plans for a heated swimming pool” he added optimistically

The lake, which had been used as a very popular lido for about 30 years, was originally a quarry providing clay for a local brickworks.

Unfortunately the public pool and boating never materialised and what is left of the lake is now used by anglers.

And whatever happened to the promised bar, ski slope, shop and showrooms?

Another planning row was brewing over plans to turn Canons’ Marsh into a new bus terminal for the city.

Alongside a shortage of staff - Bristol Omnibus needed an extra 100 drivers and 20 conductors - there had been many complaints about the quality of the service.

And the number of passengers using the buses, it was noted by a new Joint Transport Committee, was also falling.

Something, they said, had to be done.

Office blocks, many planned in the boom 1960s, were still going up in Bristol.

The Temple Back area had been cleared in the early 1970s to make way for the new fire station and Norfolk House, next the Blitzed church, was being topped out.

The piles for this £500,000 development had been bored in, rather than driven, so that no damage was caused to the foundations of this historic church and its well known leaning tower.

In other news celestine, a rare and precious mineral used in the pyrotechnics industry (flares and explosives etc) and already mined near Yate, had been discovered in the Bitton area.

Locals were concerned that an planned extraction would be a threat to the surrounding countryside.

Finally, news that Elton John fans had queued for hours outside the Colston Hall, only to find that all the tickets for his show had already been sold, was leading to a review of how they were to be distributed.

If there was only to be one performance, said the hall manager Bob Muir, (two performances a night were still a regular thing in those days) then the rule of allowing 10 tickets per person would be changed.