24 C O N T E X T 9 9 : M A Y 2 0 0 7 a regular spot in the routine English Heritage visits to Bath, something not afforded to any single project before. The planning department, representing both client and initial controlling authority, found itself with divided loyalty.To prevent any criticism of special treatment, it divided its planning and listed building teams into two. One had the express task of helping. The other had with the task of being objective as controlling authority. They were not supposed to talk to each other at the water cooler. A ‘bamboo screen’ was supposed to exist. Whether it did or not, the arrangement seemed to be effective, even frustratingly so at times. A conservation area study was carried out by Grimshaw and ourselves. It would have been meaningless for us to have carried it out without Grimshaw buying into its message. It benefited the design significantly. The study analysed aspects of urban grain, as well as significances of historic development and specific buildings. For example, the qualities of the Hot Bath had been developed from scratch by John Wood, adjacent to its primary spring (the Hetling Spring) as part of an urban clearance and road-widening access improvement of the mid-1700s. (The Grimshaw team had considerable sympathy for Wood, who had complained at the indignity of having to submit his plans regularly for open criticism by the general public.) Nevertheless, these studies led Grimshaw to the deferential concept of adopting the cube-within-a-cube form of JohnWood’s elegant classical and symmetrical design. This became the generating concept for the scheme, with the key principles of clarity and disengagement repeatedly called on, for example in articulating the old and new by strips of glazing. The massing and bulk of the building took its lead from the height of the terrace, to which it is attached at the rear, so as to complete a backdrop to the Hot Bath.This infilled a gap in the urban texture left by the previous single-storey early 20th century Beau Street Baths swimming pool. There were issues that fell between the two schools of approach, for example replacing the shop-front to the west curved return of the Grade I 7/7a Bath Street. We were never comfortable with it. Resolving the plan for the Cross Bath was another matter altogether. After having been rebuilt by the great Thomas Baldwin within its tight medieval triangular site, it became the focal link of the bold and impressive colonnaded Bath Street he designed and planned ten years later.This left it exposed and looking the wrong way, with one shoulder turned to the King and Queen’s Baths entrance of the now-known Roman Bath complex. Baldwin fell foul of political intrigue and was dismissed in disgrace. John Palmer took over and resolved the geometry brilliantly. He rebuilt the fine south-east elevation to face straight down Bath Street but with a chimney added above the blanked-off front door that hid fires for the changing rooms behind. By the time we approached the project, the Victorians had altered it nearly beyond recognition. First, the north colonnade had been infilled for coal storage, then restored again. Baldwin’s pool, retained by Palmer, had been extended and then completely obliterated when stabilising works were carried out to the shell (as it is all built over the spring mouth its support is subject to considerable erosion.) We needed to reconnect the building to the space around and especially to Bath Street, to which the blind door posed a barrier. By reopening this as a transparent screen with translucent panel, and placing the primary spring feature (beautifully framed by a Bill Pye sculpture), on axis, a visual stimulus is created to draw people away from the commercial end of Bath Street. Once there, the main entrance to the complex is clearly visible in the ground floor of 7/7a.The Hot Bath has a similarly transparent/translucent axial opening. Since its opening to the public in August 2006, it has proved more popular than the best predictions, averaging over 10,000 visitors a month. The whole area is now alive again. The debate on new building in the centre of Bath has only just begun, with the current replacement of Owen Luder’s 1960s shopping centre with a neo‑Georgian scheme by Chapman Taylor, and within this the replacement of the early 20th century neoGeorgian development opposite with a contemporary, non-referential structure byWilkinson Eyre. With massive developments planned at Western Riverside and elsewhere, it can only be hoped that the lessons of extreme care, rigorous control and cooperation between the parties will be the legacy of the Spa. Peter Carey is an architect with Donald Insall Associates. A view from the new pool to the Hot Bath. In the new building the rigorous aesthetic of the cube is softened by the curves of the pools and the giant columns.
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