Time to try defying gravity

Thomas the Tank Engine, van Gogh’s head, a pair of Levi’s and a Tyrannosaurus Rex: Cameron Balloons has made them all fly in the form of hot-air balloons, finds Julie Harding

- Julie Harding

OH! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings,’ wrote John Gillespie Magee in his sonnet High Flight. The Second World War pilot may have flown lark-like in a Spitfire, but that feeling of liberation, lift and those ‘wind-swept heights’ conveyed can equally be applied to ballooning.

‘That’s a poetic way of looking at it,’ acknowledges 82-year-old Don Cameron, a ballooning pioneer both in the air and in his business, Cameron Balloons, which is half a century old this year. ‘Ballooning has a beauty to it, a magic and a mystery—you are defying gravity and you never quite know where you will end up.’

On cloud-free, still mornings and evenings, balloons take to the troposphere, turning the uniform blue to a kaleidoscope of color. Many of these vibrant envelopes (the technical term for the balloon’s fabric element) will have been given life within Cameron Balloons’s 42,000sq ft factory in Bedminster, Bristol, the most prolific producer of balloons in the world.

First, the nylon fabric, in varying thicknesses and a potential rainbow of colors, will be cut out, either by machine or by hand, in the latter case following a paper template. Then, on the second floor, the sections are joined and sewn, the semi-finished envelopes cascading waterfall-like from machine tables and swathing the floor in their voluminous folds. After eight weeks, a completed envelope containing more than 3,000ft of fabric will be ready for inspection, as well as partial inflation on the near-empty first floor. Finally, on a clement day, the balloon-to-be will be taken to nearby Ashton Court Park for total inflation, the last before it takes to the skies in earnest with a basket beneath.