Bristol

The Bristol Corn Exchange

Members of the STONE-WORK team visited Bristol on 25 July 2024 to meet representatives from Bristol City Council who kindly gave us a tour of the Bristol Corn Exchange of 1741-3 by John Wood the Elder of Bath. The Exchange is one of the finest surviving examples of the use of Bath stone and has carved ornament by local builder and stone carver Thomas Paty. We were keen to get a sense of the extent of restoration that had been carried out and the ways the stone detailing had been worked around the facades.

The lavishly enriched north elevation, overlooking Corn Street, has a rusticated ground floor of v-jointed ashlar. A giant Corinthian order articulates the first floor, the centre emphasised by three-quarter engaged columns under a pediment and reduced to pilasters in the outer bays. A jubilant chain of festoons runs between the capitals. Squared Corinthian pilaster jambs frame the first-floor windows of all eleven bays, which have alternating triangular and segmental pediments. In his account of the building published in 1743, Wood referred to these as ‘rich Tabernacles’. There have been various phases of conservation on the front, but the age of the building can still be appreciated in the much-eroded stonework along the side elevations that face onto All Saints Lane and Exchange Avenue to the east and west.

Royal Fort House, now part of the University of Bristol

Royal Fort House sits a top the most prominent vantage point of Bristol, a former residence by local architect James Bridges and builder/carver Thomas Paty for banker Thomas Tyndall in 1761. The entrance front is very restrained, with the smooth finished closely jointed ashlar so familiar in eighteenth-century Bath. The major elaboration is on the pedimented south front overlooking the city, where the ground floor has a rusticated arcade in the advanced central three bays. The windows of the upper floors have shouldered architraves, those on the first floor pedimented.

The tympanum of the pediment is carved with a coat-of-arms. The east elevation, defined by its three-storey canted centre, has curiously squat doorcases in the outer bays with highly enriched carving.

Andrew Tierney