Bath in November II

     Tuesday and our final day in the city.  The morning was spent mainly shopping; the afternoon, however, was spent visiting the city's art collections.

     Our first stop was the Victoria Art Gallery, the municipal gallery and collection.  It is housed in a splendid turn-of-the-century building by the Scots architect J M Brydon (1840-1901).  Eclectic and lavish - the detailing is very fine.  On a corner site with a circular, rather French vestibule linking (like a hinge) the staircase etc. with the first floor gallery.  The latter is a single, long top lit space with a coved ceiling and walls coloured blue, which makes a welcome and splendid foil to the pictures.  (Such a contrast to the dreary grey and white colour scheme at the Glynn Vivian Gallery, here in the infernal city.  Both art and architecture deserve better.) 
    Pictures are displayed 'skied', as they would have been in the past, and anti-clockwise around the room chronologically (?).  The overall effect is very confident.  Highlights are work by the local artists Rosemary & Clifford Ellis, and the portrait of the furniture maker Charles Baker by George Frederick Swaish (no, I haven't heard of him either).

     Later, as the light began to fade we walked up Great Pulteney St. to the Holburne Museum.  I've talked about the building briefly before. The collection, as we soon found out, is a marvel, of national standard.  It is the work of Sir Thomas William Holburne, 5th Baronet Menstrie (1793-1874).  Sir Thomas lived in Cavendish Crescent with his three sisters.  At the time of his death his collection numbered some 4,000 objects.  In 1882 his sister, Mary, bequeathed the collection to the city.

    The second home of the collection was the splendid former Bath Savings Bank in Charlotte St. (George Alexander, 1841).   In 1911, however, the collection trustees bought the former Sydney Hotel at the far end of Great Pulteney St., and employed Sir Reginald Blomfield to convert the building into a gallery.  The result, unsurprisingly, is rather and unnecessarily Frenchified - he was, after all, the author of the two volume 'A History of French Architecture'.  The museum opened to the public in 1916, in the midst of WWI.

    The collection, which now numbers some 13,000 objects, is, as I have said, quite spectacular.  There are objets d'art, ceramics, textiles, furniture and paintings.  Artists include Guardi, Zoffany, Brangwyn, and Gainsborough.  In particular there is a room dedicated to the Northern Renaissance, and it is utterly splendid.  A real Schatzkammer.  Some stunning panel paintings.  I was particularly impressed by a portrait 'Unknown Man' attributed to Jan Cornelis Vermeyen.

Bath in November I

       To celebrate a significant birthday we have been to Bath for a few days, and it has been a lovely treat.  I feel revived.  Those few days I felt re-integrated.  We arrived Saturday lunchtime and stayed in the same hotel - The Kennard, in Bathwick - as we did on our previous visit.  That evening with the fireworks thundering over our heads we ate at Cote Brasserie.  It was a pleasant surprise. Boeuf Bourguignon, Crème Brûlée, and a decent glass of Malbec.

     Sunday morning, our first full day, and, for what must have been a good two hours, the city air was filled with the joyous sound of church bells - Bath Abbey, St Mary Bathwick and St John the Divine, I believe.  How I have missed that sound in these past few years.  For the first time in far too long I went to church, to St Mary Bathwick - my sort of place, and I took Holy Communion.  I think it maybe the first church I have worshipped in with galleries.  Sunday lunch at The Architect, part of the Imperial Hotel.  In the afternoon a walk up to the Georgian Garden behind the Circus, and then back to the hotel via Walcot.

     Photos from my walk around the city before church.

The Counter Project

     It is now over 24 hours since an acquaintance of mine, the Irish classical architect and fellow member of RIBA TAG, Conor K Lynch tweeted four images of a counter proposal by 'Apollodorus Architects' for the new rugby stadium in Bath.  In those 19 hours the response has extraordinary: 18,800 likes and counting; 1,948 retweets; 472 comments. The latter have been overwhelmingly positive.  It has certainly caught the public imagination, on Twitter at least.  Of course, there had to be the snarky comment about Albert Speer, Hitler's favourite architect from a practicing modernist(?) architect.  Ah yes, that go to criticism of modern classicism. It really is a tired-out old trope.  It's not even a criticism of the architecture as such, but guilt by association.  Not only is it such a bore, but says much about the intellectual vacuity of the mainstream architectural profession that they should trot some old garbage like that.

    Now for some specifics: the Apollodorus Architects Classical proposal (here) stands counter to the Modernist one designed by Grimshaw (here) for Bath Rugby, who are in need of permanent stadium.  Bath Rugby play on the Recreation Ground - the 'Rec' - just over the river Avon from Bath city centre - in Bathwick, that large and unfinished late Georgian development by Thomas Baldwin I wrote about here.  So a particularly sensitive site then when any building on the 'Rec' could be seen from outside the e end of Bath Abbey.  One can also understand the reluctance of the club to leave - they have, after all, played there for decades.  On their website Bath Rugby claims of the Grimshaw design (here): We have created an iconic, yet sensitive design that will deliver an incredible match day experience.  I mean, who writes this guff? 'iconic yet sensitive'?  I'm not even sure what that means. In any case 'iconic', that hideously over used term, is not for Bath Rugby to claim.  I could go on as the Bath Rugby website and in particular their Development Brief, and which has now been formally submitted to Bath & North East Somerset Council, is full of such management speak, but I'll spare you.

     However the use of management speak isn't really the argument here, regrettable though its dominance of the discourse is.  Neither are the merits or otherwise of either scheme my concern, though as an associate member of TAG my sympathies are with the Classical design, which is based on the Roman Amphitheatre at Arles in Provence. Whatever my reservations about the design, and there are some, we have to honest at this juncture and admit it is very unlikely ever to be built if only for the 'mundane' reason that Bath Rugby is nearly an unsustainable £40,000,000 in debt.
     For me the response to this proposal highlights two interconnected phenomena.  Firstly, the growing appeal of Classical/Traditional architecture on social media.  All ready there are any number of twitter streams dedicated to traditional architecture & urbanism, and the culture necessary to sustain them.  Secondly, the continuing gulf between the public and the profession - a gulf that has lasted so far for some sixty plus years. We have a profession that is arrogant and unresponsive to the public.  It has attempted to establish itself as a secular priesthood of true believers. How long must this continue?

Own work: 'Archway, Bath'

     Welcome to the Salon des Refuses. I painted this specifically for an exhibition in London. Not something I usually do as living in south west Wales it is such a schlep. Anyway I was relieved of the hassle of getting it up to town and back by being rejected. Alas.

     The judging criteria meant that this isn't in my usual mixed media. I have had to work in water soluble media only. This has meant a change in my technique, and a little learning in the process. The composition is also slightly different in that I have included the urban context of the arch, which I usually play down or omit altogether.

     Perhaps this is not sort of architecture that one immediately thinks of in connection with Bath - it being Georgian and all that. This structure is however late Victorian, the work of the Scottish born architect J M Brydon, and illustrates how by the turn of twentieth century British architecture was swinging back to full blown Classicism. It forms part of his complex of civic buildings - Guildhall, Market and Art Gallery - in the centre of the city. The arch is merely the rear entrance to the site. I love its sculptural, mannerist qualities.

Holy Trinity, Bradford on Avon

     The churches of St Laurence and Holy Trinity sit low down by the river Avon and are separated from each other by the seriously attractive Church St. The churches could almost hold hands they are so close. That first visit in all an intense experience. The beauty almost too good to be true. I'd like to think that in the deep past when the church of St Laurence formed part of an Anglo-Saxon monastic complex founded by St Aldhelm it shared space with the predecessor of Holy Trinity; and that at the ending of the monastery the umbilical link between both churches was severed, St Laurence was secularised and Holy Trinity, being the parish church was rebuilt and enlarged so that now it is by far the larger of the two buildings. Alas, that may be wishful thinking, things being a little more complicated than they first appear.

    Holy Trinity stands on the north side of a long, thin lens of churchyard separating the church from the river; to the north it stands hard against Church St. There is a business-like west tower with blunt spire, a north aisle which is rather fine, but there is no corresponding aisle on the south (not matter what Pevsner implies in the Wiltshire edition of 'The Buildings of England'). The contrast between north and south sides couldn't be more telling or more interesting, for the north is in all a piece, competent Late Gothic, and south, though obviously rebuilt, is a palimpsest of styles, with projecting porch and transeptal chapel. In origin that S nave wall must be Norman (see the windows).

     The interior is surprisingly spacious but, rather like the tower, it's business-like. Not a place for the numinous. Sad to say. I'd  even go so far as to say it is somewhat forgettable. What I do remember are the large number of memorials in the church, the grandest being in the chancel - some in need of a clean. And there is the n aisle  arcade. It is is mainly Victorian - those scrolls! Originally the aisle was divided into chapels by solid walls, so the effect now is very different from that intended. According to Pevsner the arcade is the work of [John Elkington] Gill (never heard of him) and dates from 1864. Previously in 1858 the great Sir George Gilbert Scott himself had been called in an advisory role. The Vicar  of Bradford at the time was William Henry Jones, 1817-1885. He was also an antiquary and it was he who discovered the church of St Lawrence hidden in plain sight as it were among later buildings. His brother was Samuel Flood Jones who was a member of the Chapter of Westminster Abbey.

     In writing this post I began to suspect that the church had undergone a Tractarian restoration at that time, influenced by such restorations undertaken in the weaving communities of the Cotswolds particularly by Tom Keble, vicar of Bisley and brother of John Keble. However the current re-ordering has been so radical that it was hard to tell from my photographs what had happened way back in the midst of the nineteenth century. It was only via an internet search that I found evidence of what was done and what was lost in the process. Judging by what I found that  restoration was a pretty thorough-going process, just as radical in its way as what has recently occurred, with the destruction of a west gallery and organ and the removal of two interesting looking post-Reformation plaster ceilings. Both nave and chancel now have attractive wooden barrel vaults that deserve to be coloured and gilded. So perhaps no great loss.  About the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of the current thorough-going re-ordering the least said the better, but what the hell. My heart lies with with the previous states of the church. It could be argued that the current re-ordering is just another example of a series of discontinuities that the church has suffered. And that is true but it cannot be used as a justification for such far reaching changes; neither is it an excuse for something quite so banal. 

 

Bath III: Early morning in the city

     On our final morning in Bath, I went out before breakfast just as dawn was breaking over the city to take some phots, it being the best time to catch architecture before the crowds and the bustle. Just a random selection really.

Bath II: Bathwick

     Our hotel was situated in Henrietta St, east over the river Avon from the city centre.  A sinuous street of tall pale stone terraces that flows north from Laura Place, following the line of the river.  It was our first visit to Bathwick, as this area of the City is called. The approach from the city is mightily impressive, relying on a sort of coup de theatre from the intimate to the spacious; from the picturesque to the formal; from bricolage to stylistic uniformity.  Chaos to serenity and clarity. Standing in Laura Place with Argyll St and Adam's Pulteney Bridge behind and Great Pulteney St, long and immensely wide, ahead of you, the contrast between the city and the new suburb could not be clearer.  In the distance is the Holburne of Menstrie Museum, set within a great hexagonal park.  It has to be said that the museum, originally built in 1796 as a hotel, is too small a structure for the scale of things - I can't decide whether that is a fault or a deliberate act to create the illusion of yet greater distance and scale.  In all though one of the greatest pieces of town planning in late Georgian Britain, the work of architect Thomas Baldwin (1750-1820).
      You might even want to call it Baroque, and why not?  Oh yes, I know that the style is Neo-classical - Bathwick was laid out 1788-1806 after all - but the facades are merely  decoration, the icing on a sort of urban form that only appears with the emergence of the Baroque.  It could be said to be one of the defining elements of the style.  I should add here that Robert Adam's original plan for Bathwick was even more Baroque owing something to Wren's plan for the rebuilding of the City of London, and to the sort of urban forms one associates with Grand Siècle France.  Styles do not die; they are not un-invented.  Sometimes think of Art and Architectural historians as taxonomists, rather like 19th century naturalists.  They might even throw in a few terminal dates too.  It's not as though these categories, such as Baroque and Neo-Classical, don't exist only that sometimes the definitions are understood as antithetical to one another, when in fact, there are always elements of continuity.  I would argue that this plan represents such a continuity, maybe even a revival. 
     I didn't realise until researching this post that the Holburne Museum is the focus of a 'patte d'oie' of three radiating streets.  Well, you can't get more Baroque than a 'patte d'oie'.  Baroque too in the sense of individual units, in this case the house, being subsumed into the greater whole for the sake of urban theatre.  And that, it could be argued, is also one of the tendencies of Modernity.  But, alas, for all that grandeur and social cachet the scheme, with its long 'palace fronts', was not completed. As with the rest of Bath, development ceased by 1820.  Terraces abruptly halt and the next buildings in the street date from the late 19th century. Only on Henrietta St, being that bit closer to the city centre, is there a sense of continuity with a line of early to mid Victorian villas on the west side of the street. Lovely they are too.

Addendum: The park, the Sydney Gardens, was originally developed as a Pleasure Garden on the lines of the famous Vauxhall Gardens in south London.  It is, apparently, the last remaining pleasure garden in the country.  The Museum building was originally larger, being built to house a ballroom and all sorts of facilities for visitors, but was shorn of its wings - had its wings clipped! (sorry) - when it became a museum and gallery.  The architect was Sir Reginald Blomfield.