My Kind of Town: Bath is embracing change with renewed confidence

Words
Jo Wright

Photos
David Iliff

I first came to Bath in 1983, to apply for a place to read chemical engineering at the university. Having ‘seen the light’ as I sat my A-levels, I managed to negotiate a late transfer to architecture, fortuitously stumbling into a radical model of multi-disciplinary education for the built environment established by Ted Happold, Michael Brawne and Patrick Hodgkinson in the image of Arup Associates, where more than 30 years later I took on the role of Group Leader. The School of Architecture & Building Engineering was thriving, with a posse of staff including David Gray, Rodrigo Perez de Arce and Peter and Alison Smithson – though I’m not sure any of us really appreciated at the time the wealth of talent that shaped us.

Bath in the 1980s felt moribund; the glory of the Georgian city persisted, but a rash of unfortunate mid-century interventions had left the place in fear of more of the same, strangling creative and contextual interpretation in favour of (often poorly executed) pastiche, driven by the planners’ antipathy for contemporary responses. From this era (though delivered much later) came the replacement of the desolate 1960s South Gate mall with a network of streets and squares framed by clumsily-rendered neo-Georgian black box retail masquerading as something John Wood, the Younger didn’t quite get around to completing.

Bath in the 1980s felt moribund; the glory of the Georgian city persisted, but a rash of unfortunate mid-century interventions had left the place in fear of more of the same”

John Darbourne arrived in the city in the late 1980s with a ‘design champion’ role, bringing a new intelligence to the dialogue around planning. There was still resistance to anything blatantly contemporary, but chinks appeared in the armour of the Bath Preservation Trust, which had blocked change for so long.

The Georgian city is undeniably gorgeous, though as a local it can be easy to take its quality for granted. The homogeneity of material (locally sourced!), craftsmanship, and designers’ evident delight in addressing the challenges of the city’s topography, together with the visionary creation of a network of streets, squares and belvederes, has created an overarching identity – a pattern book that encompasses both the intimate back routes and the iconic civic realm. The pragmatic Georgian townhouse model, with its well-proportioned spaces and excellent daylight and ventilation, is adapted to provide humble and undecorated terraces below Camden, but also the grandeur of the Crescents and Great Pulteney Street. Today these building are adapted in every imaginable way and their quality endures. Viewed from Queen Square the buildings of Gay Street dance up the hill to the Circus, their cornices swooping effortlessly to follow the gradient, and their chimney stacks marching.

Viewed from Queen Square the buildings of Gay Street dance up the hill to the Circus, their cornices swooping effortlessly to follow the gradient, and their chimney stacks marching.”

Over the last 20 years the city has embraced change with greater confidence. The experience of arriving by train is much improved by Wilkinson Eyre’s new square with its animated cafes, though the earlier ‘busometer’ has a disappointing could-be-anywhere look. Grimshaw’s Spa has been embraced by the city (for me, it pales in comparison with Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals, but that’s a very high bar). Eric Parry’s reimagining of the Holburne Museum, with its faience-clad, jewellery box extension into the park, has demonstrated to the doubters that old and new can sit harmoniously together, with the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Western Riverside, with its thousands of new homes, threatened the city’s status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but is good where it echoes the old city’s morphology without aping its details. Less successful are the novelty pieces, whose geometry and scale is alien to Bath.

As a RIBA Awards juror this year I visited a delightful project by James Grayley which extends a listed house in a contemporary fashion, while drawing on archival research into the eighteenth-century proposal for the site. This intelligent, contextual, minimalist structure, which appears to have been hewn from a single block of Bath stone, shows a deep understanding of the material and the place, and demonstrates how far the city has come in recent years.