CONTEXT 187 : MARCH 2026 31 INFRASTRUCTURE a spa town. Thus began the development of the Bath and deliberate creation of a beautiful city. Several ingredients came together at the same time. Principally, in the beginning this involved an ambitious, local young architect, John Wood the Elder, with a vision of creating a classical city that looked outwards, exploiting the landscape, and planting the city within it. This was a self-conscious approach to town planning and a departure from the existing inward-looking and enclosed city of Bath. The other crucial element was Ralph Allen, a wealthy entrepreneur who had made his fortune from the establishment of a modern postal service. Allen used this wealth to develop Bath stone mines just to the south of the city, in Combe Down. The awareness of the aesthetic of Bath stone as a high-quality building stone was not new, but the commercial exploitation of it was. The Wood/Allen relationship was instrumental in starting what was to be over a century of development of a homogenous, classical city, involving successive architects who shared and understood the vision. Critical to understanding the Woods’, and successive architects’, approach to the development and spatial town planning of Bath is the contemporary concept of beauty. A key influence was Edmund Burke’s 1757 work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. This manifesto for romanticism advocated the concept of architectural and landscape beauty coming together to create an aesthetic experience of drama and awe to produce an emotional response in the viewer.This was in stark contrast to the more formal, geometric and intimate design approach of calming, small-scale beauty fashionable in the preceding decades of the 1700s and before. The Circus, Grove Street and the Royal Crescent as an ensemble exemplify this approach: the demarcation between urban and natural landscapes. From the 1730s Bath enjoyed huge success as a fashionable city where the wealthy and famous of the day flocked to see and be seen, and to enjoy everything that Bath had to offer as a place of pleasure. However, towards the end of the Georgian era in the early 19th century, Bath’s fashionable status began to decline in the wake of the burgeoning interest and development of coastal resorts. This change in focus and fashion was exemplified by the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, built for the Prince of Wales, who became Prince Regent in 1811, and King George IV in 1820. Bath changed to a place of genteel residence. It was at this time that the villas started to appear on the green slopes of the surrounding hills overlooking the city. The decline of Bath as a spa resort continued throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. Bath’s high-quality building stone is a key to the city’s aesthetic. (Photo: Jonathan Taylor) WESSEX In the second world war, the so-called German Baedeker bombing raids of 1942 resulted in around 19,000 buildings being damaged, with the total loss of over 1,100. Science had caught up with the long-held claims that the natural thermal waters possessed healing properties, and its health benefits were proven to be no more beneficial than tap water. In the years after the war, the Georgian city fell into a period of abandonment and neglect, and the infamous and shameful Sack of Bath period witnessed the demolition of architecturally marginal and modest unlisted buildings and terraces, with an emphasis on retaining only the celebrated set-pieces. This era in the city’s history was characterised by a lack of interest and valuing of this deliberately beautiful city, with the historic buildings viewed as outdated, drafty, damp and in need of costly repair. This was exacerbated by the fact that the once-glorious, honey-coloured limestone was now black from centuries of coal burning and 20th-century traffic pollution. In the 1980s Bath’s fortunes turned a corner. Grants were provided by the then city council for stone cleaning; the property market became buoyant; and there was a renewed interest in the Georgian city and its elegant houses as fashionable places to live. Despite the city having suffered considerable losses and having been blighted by the usual unsympathetic development in the post-war years, especially in the 1970s, its Georgian splendour remained intact. In 1987 the City of Bath was inscribed on the
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=