XX.
BATH OR BOURNEMOUTH?
Bath is our one architectural city. Sufficient of it, that is to say, has been built on an harmonious plan and with harmonious architecture to give it a unity no other town in Great Britain or Ireland possesses. Dublin, before the recent fighting, was nearest to it in this respect. When the fighting is really finished and rebuilding starts in earnest, it will probably fall a little further behind, for to-day there is nowhere any canon of taste sufficiently strong to force any sort of uniformity on new buildings. That is where we differ most strongly from the 18th century. Bath was not built by one architect, though one was responsible for most of the lay-out as must always be the case where there is any plan at all. The actual buildings of Bath were built by a group of architects no more closely connected, except in general ideas and taste, than are modern architects. Yet how different the result! Think of Bath with its stately procession of noble streets, squares, circuses, crescents and other architectural forms and the modern town which most nearly answers to the same requirements—Bournemouth. The contrast could not be greater and in itself is a good measure of the difference in ideals which separates the builders of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from those of the latter half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In the place of a dignified neighbourliness and sense of solidarity which led folk to live in terraces of houses, which externally did not differ from one another, we have, as exhibited in Bournemouth, or in any other modern recreational town for the matter of that, the evidence of a desire to live as far removed as possible from one’s neighbours in a house which differs in shape as much as possible from theirs. In Bath in the eighteenth century one did not show one’s superiority by any outward display. The greatest in the land were ready to live cheek by jowl with the least famous. A circus or crescent might house for the time being, at any rate, great ministers of state, dignitaries of the Church, members of the aristocracy and retired tradesmen in houses whose exteriors were identical. We often pride ourselves a little superficially on the superior democratic tendencies of the age in which we live, yet if architecture is used as a test we see at once how much more really democratic a city layed out on the lines of Bath is to one on the lines, or rather one like Bournemouth, for the latter has no lines at all in an architectural sense. I do not want to say that the garden city idea of which Bournemouth is an early, if unconscious example, has not beauties of its own. I only desire to point out what a very different ideal of beauty the two towns and the two centuries they stand for exhibit.
Another difference, which is really involved and implied in the two different conceptions of what a town for rest and recuperation should be, is to be noted in the way each town approaches the country. The modern town has always its indefinite region surrounding it, which is neither town nor country, but an ugly and generally an untidy overlapping of each. The whole of a town of the type of Bournemouth is suburban. That is involved in its idea, but there are parts of it on its outskirts where its suburban qualities lapse into meanness. In eighteenth century Bath there was nothing of the sort. The town and country did not mix and consequently neither spoilt the other. There was perfect town and perfect country co-existing side by side. The proof of this is still to be seen to-day in Great Pulternay Street,—the most dignified and perfect town street I know. As you walk down it you feel that you are, at any rate for the time being, a citizen of no mean city. Its urban flavour is of the most refined and exquisite kind. It has its proper climax in Sydney House, and there are no loose ends to distract the view in any direction. It might be a street in Paris, but devoid of Parisian noise and push and with statelier architecture. Yet a hundred yards to the right, through New Sydney Place, you have to-day open fields and completely unspoilt country. On the opposite side is the modern suburb of Bathwick, and you can note the difference. When Pulternay Street was built, however, it ran straight out into the open country, and its four-storied town houses must have backed on to the fields. Portland Place and the Bloomsbury Squares must have been very much the same when they were first laid out. The creeping of the modern town by means of inferior houses growing up higgledy-piggledy or in long dull streets leading nowhere, with all the squalor and discomfort to everyone such a condition implies, is, I am afraid, a modern conception, or rather the absence of any conception at all. When in the eighteenth century, owing to its sudden rise in fashion, Bath burst its medieval walls, as did so many English towns, it did it deliberately according to an architectural plan. The result was, instead of the area of muddle through which one drives as quickly as possible in approaching a modern town, no muddle at all, but fine trees and stately country adjacent to fine houses and stately streets, each enhancing the other. Let us consider a little more closely this method of town building and town planning as exemplified in Bath.
The man who transformed Bath from a small medieval town surrounded by its walls and with its two main, though irregular, streets running roughly at right angles towards its four gates, after the pattern of a Roman camp on which, no doubt in this case, it was based, was a young Yorkshireman of twenty-one years of age, named John Wood. He was born in 1704 and employed as a surveyor of roads in his native county. He appears to have been introduced to Bath by Ralph Allen, the post-boy who rose to be the great merchant prince of the town, owner and developer of the quarries of the famous Bath Stone on Coombe Down from which the town is built. In “An Essay towards a Description of Bath,” which Wood published in 1742, he says “In 1724 a subscription was opened by a deal merchant of Bristol for carrying the navigation of the river into execution, so that when I found the work was likely to go on I began to turn my thoughts towards the improvements of the City of Bath by building, and for the purpose I procured a plan of the town, which was sent me into Yorkshire in the summer of the year 1725, where I, at my leisure hours, formed one design for the ground at the north-west corner of the city and another at the north-east side of the town and river.” This latter was afterwards laid out by Thomas Baldwin, and includes Pulternay Street and part of the Bathwich estate. “After my return to London,” Wood continues, “I imparted my first design to Mr. Gay, an eminent surgeon in Hatton Garden and proprietor of the land, and our first conference was upon the last day of December, 1725.” Wood must obviously have been an extraordinary young man, not only to have conceived at the age of twenty-one in his leisure hours, a plan for developing a strange town on what were then very novel lines, but to have had the energy and capacity to convince the owners of the land and push the major part of it through to completion. “On the 31st of March following” he says, “I communicated my second design to the Earl of Essex, to whom the land on which it was proposed to be executed then belonged, and in each design I proposed to make a grand plan of assembly to be called the Royal Forum of Bath; another place no less magnificent for the exhibition of sports, to be called the Grand Circus; and a third place of equal state with either of the former, for the practice of medicinal exercises, to be called the Imperial Gymnasium of the City.” In the November of the same year Wood fixed his preliminary articles with Mr. Gay, who then empowered him to engage anyone that he could bring into the scheme for the building of a street, 1025 feet long north and south by fifty feet wide east and west, for an approach to the grand part of the design. In this way Gay Street, leading to the Circus, was eventually formed and Wood launched on his numerous schemes for the betterment of Bath, which even included a canal from Bristol to that city. For the canal he obtained men from the Chelsea waterworks, and he says “till that time the real use of the spade was unknown in and about the city.” “I likewise provided,” he adds, “masons in Yorkshire, carpenters, joiners and plasterers in London and other places, and from time to time sent such as were necessary down to Bath to carry on the building that I had undertaken”; for this astonishing young man was not only an architect and town planner but his own contractor as well. “It was not till then,” he goes on to say, “that the lever, the pulley, and the windlass were introduced among the artificers in the upper part of Somersetshire, before which time the masons made use of no other method to hoist up their heavy stones than that of dragging them up with small ropes against the side of a ladder.” There may be some exaggeration in this statement of Wood’s—there probably is—but it is sufficient evidence of the primitive state of affairs in the city when Wood found it, and it makes more remarkable still the work which this young genius achieved. Not only, apparently, did he transform a medieval town into one of metropolitan and even Roman dignity, but he displaced medieval methods of handling materials and workmanship with modern ones.[[1]]
[1]. For the above facts and dates concerning Wood and his work, as well as for much else, I am indebted to Mr. Mowbray Green’s excellent volume entitled “The Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath” which will be found a mine of information as to architects and owners of most of the 18th century work in the city.
Let us now take a walk through the formal portion of Bath, which Wood laid out, and on which he and his son built their famous groups of houses. Starting at the top of Barton Street we enter Queen Square, the first of Wood’s formal conceptions of a group of houses to be actually carried out. Queen Square was designed by Wood in 1728, and is roughly a hundred yards either way. It consists of four blocks of seven large houses on each side, combined into four architectural compositions. Wood claimed that he was the first architect in England to unite into one design a number of separate houses, but Inigo Jones had forestalled him in Covent Garden and other places. However, Wood was clearly the first to do it on this scale, and what is more important, first to combine one fine shape, like Queen Square, with other fine shapes like the Circus and Royal Crescent, and in this way to present the idea of an architecturally conceived town. The north side of the Square consists of a Corinthian composition with a central pediment over six columns and two square end projections with four columns and flat Corinthian pilasters in the links between. The order stands on a finely rusticated basement with moulded heads to the piers between the windows. The whole is strong Roman work but not lacking in refinement. The east and west sides of the square are conceived as the wings of a palace of which the north side is the main front. In the centre house of this north side under the pediment, Wood lived for a time, and died there in 1754, king of the domain he had created. The east side of the square was completed in accordance with Wood’s design and has richly moulded and curiously carved doorways. In one of these houses, Dr. Oliver, of biscuit fame, lived. The west side, however, had to be altered to meet the difficulty of securing building owners and was not finished till after Wood’s death. The central block, with an Ionic Order in the Neo-Grec style, was added about 1830. All the houses of Wood’s have fine interiors and well shaped and finished rooms and rich staircases with turned or twisted balusters and panelled dado. The staircase of No. 15 is perhaps the finest in Bath. Its alternate twisted and fluted balusters and handrail are all in Spanish mahogany. Above is some baroque plaster work very much like similar Italian work in the Georgian houses of Dublin.
Of the Square garden, Wood says the ground was enclosed with a low stone wall bearing a balustrade with a wide gate and gate piers on the centre of each side. In the middle was a basin forty feet in diameter supplied by a spring, and the four quarters of the garden were enclosed with espaliered elm and lime trees, though, as Wood adds, these must have somewhat obstructed the view of the houses opposite. The interesting thing to note is that all this careful finish was added to a scheme essentially speculative in character. The same remark applies to the houses themselves which Wood built here and in the Circus. Though the work was speculative there was nothing jerry about it. Wood used the best materials, especially in stone, the proof of which is to be seen in the state of the houses to-day. With the prospect of wealthy clients taking up his leases, he was content and indeed too much of an artist in his work not to build well, in addition to designing well. There is something therefore to be said, unprofessional as it sounds to-day, for this combination in one person of architect, builder and owner, which is to be seen too in the case of the brothers Adam, who so closely followed Wood and his son at Bath and elsewhere.
Passing up Gay Street, named after Wood’s first Bath client, which has a number of the good houses in it, Bath accustoms us to, but nothing remarkable, unless it be the interior of No. 41 with its circular ended rooms, where John Wood, Jnr. lived, and “The Carved House,” No. 8 on the opposite side, we come to the Circus, which is the finest of all the elder Wood’s conceptions. The diameter of the Circus is about 100 yards and the height of the houses 42 feet. It is laid out with only three streets entering it and not four cross roads as at Oxford Circus or any of the other London ones. This at once gives it more solidity and a greater sense of enclosure as a circular court. It also enabled Wood to place opposite you as you pass up the gentle slope of Gay Street, a large unbroken segment of the curved façade, so providing an architectural finish to that street. In the Circus, Wood has departed from the strict Palladian manner as understood in England and, instead of great columns stretching over two stories and standing on a plain basement, he has provided a range of smaller coupled columns to each storey. Each of these rows of columns carries its full architrave, frieze and cornice and the top one a balustrade as well crowned with pine-apples. There is, therefore, a great profusion of strong horizontal lines which emphasize the curve in whichever direction the eye is cast, while the rounded surfaces of the numberless columns give a sense of richness and fine modelling, impressive in the way that the exterior of the Colosseum or any great Roman Amphitheatre was. Indeed, walking round the Circus, you cannot help feeling that you are in the Court of Honour of some magnificent palace, yet by the absolute similarity of treatment to each house there is no individual ostentation or vulgarity. The Court is to-day splendidly enhanced by the magnificent group of trees which rise from the lawn in the centre. No wonder rulers of Empires like Lord Chatham (No. 7) and Lord Clive (at No. 14) and artists like Thomas Gainsborough (at No. 24) once took houses in it, while to-day it is almost entirely inhabited by members of the medical profession who have a knack of settling in the best houses in any provincial town. This Circus took fifteen years to erect, and was therefore completed by Wood’s son, whose work was always in sympathy with that of his father. The exterior was, of course, determined once and for all with the first house built, but the interiors of the houses differ considerably and were probably designed to suit the requirements of the intending tenants.
From the Circus one passes by Brock Street, built by the younger Wood, to the Royal Crescent, another bold and magnificent conception on an even larger scale. It was commenced in 1767 and finished eight years later. Though the work of the son, it is in perfect keeping with the ideas of the father. It consists, too, of one continuous range of buildings with unbroken roof, forming in this case, a semi-ellipse, 538 feet long. Including the two terminal blocks, it contains a range of 114 great Ionic columns, here combining in the Palladian manner the first and second floors and standing on a plain base of the ground floor storey. The whole crescent, with its noble stretch of grass in front of it, looks south across the valley now containing the Victoria Gardens and has therefore, as it breasts the hill, one of the pleasantest outlooks in Bath. So successful was it in combining stately architecture with a fine prospect that it has been copied further up the hillside in other crescents, such as Lansdown and Camden Crescents. The individual houses in the Royal Crescent, being later than those in the Circus, depend more on plaster decoration for their interior finish, while the main doors are generally of veneered instead of solid mahogany. The ceilings of the chief rooms are particularly beautiful in a similar but rather stronger manner than that one is accustomed to connect with the name of Adam. It is again very like similar work in Dublin, and has like it in addition to the ordinary classical motifs an occasional touch of very effective naturalistic ornament, such as one finds in contemporary French work. The marble chimney pieces in the chief rooms are of the various eighteenth century types but with fine simplicity and restraint. Everything indeed was done to make these houses, while identical on the exterior, full of interest and refinement within. In this way they satisfied the ideals of the eighteenth century gentleman for whom they were designed.