Bath
On the 24th of July 2024 the STONE-WORK team made a brief visit to Bath to photograph a number of the finer surviving early eighteenth-century houses in the city. Our first stop was Ralph Allen’s Town House, 1727, York Street with its narrow but magisterial engaged Corinthian facade, intended by Allen to show off the promise of the stone from his nearby quarries.
Much more eccentric is Rosewell House, c. 1735 , 14 Kingsmead Square, a veritable shopwindow of architectural devices and motifs, leaning towards the Rococo in its flamboyant central window, the surrounding architrave peeled back like the scrolled edges of a cartouche.
Rosewell House, c. 1735, 14 Kingsmead Square, Bath
At General Wade’s House, c. 1720, 14 Abbey Churchyard, we get to see how Bath stone has performed over the centuries, its light-touch conservation leaving the weathered elements of its giant Ionic pilasters in situ. Few Bath stone facades retain so lived-in a character and despite the erosion there is still much to enjoy in the bolection window architraves and ragged carved festoons.
General Wolfe’s House, c. 1720 at 5 Trim St, though less elaborate a facade, provides a similarly well-conserved example of early eighteenth-century Bath stonework. There have been a number of modest interventions to prevent the wholesale replacement of key elements, but on the building reflects its three hundred years, most notably in the worn-down Corinthian pilaster capital flanking the left side of the central window. It is possible of course that some of the weathered stonework here is but the remnant of earlier restorations. What is most noticeable is the fact that stone weathers variably according to its position on the facade and its degree of exposure to the elements.
Andrew Tierney