The 18th century was the major period of redevelopment of what had previously been a small medieval country town. Because of the unique hot water springs, Bath became a major destination for wealthy Georgians, drawn by the high society life centred on venues such as the Spa, Pump Rooms and Assembly Rooms.
Most of the buildings were built from the honey-coloured Bath stone quarried locally, which forms a uniform collection of architecture set within the green bowl of the surrounding hills. Today the Georgian style is admired for its symmetry, decoration and careful sense of proportion.
Unusually, it’s not Bath’s grand public buildings that are the key to its charm – it’s the ordinary houses from this period. These homes built for wealthy visitors to Bath form grand crescents and boulevards such as The Royal Crescent, The Circus and Great Pulteney Street. Bath is one of the best places to see the Georgian idea of creating a row of houses as if they were all one grand palace, with columns along the frontage, like the buildings in Queen Square.
Elsewhere in the city, speculative developers wanted to squeeze as many houses into one small patch of land as possible – so Bath features some of Britain’s earliest terraces of houses, albeit hidden behind the classical facades of Bath stone.
This is why a typical Bath Georgian town house was tall and narrow. They had a narrow garden or courtyard behind, usually containing a primitive toilet arrangement in an outbuilding built over a hole in the ground. All houses had a basement where servants worked in a kitchen and various storerooms. These were generally accessed via tradesmen’s steps down from the pavement into a small open area leading to the kitchen. Today these are often attractive front gardens for basement flats – 250 years ago they were the domain of servants and deliverymen only.
The main architects of this Georgian construction boom in Bath were the father and son team, John Wood the Elder and Younger. Under their direction, large areas of the city were redesigned and developed within a short time, so Bath must have resembled a busy building site for many years.