Looking Over Bath

Christmas and New Year have come and gone. For much of the time – at least mentally – seasonal cheer had to take second place to the quarterly rush to publish the Wessex Chronicle. To this issue I contributed a six-page article on William Beckford, Regency rake, Jamaican slave-owner and pioneer Goth, best known as the builder of the now-lost Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.

With Fonthill a victim of self-implosion in 1825, the result of structural recklessness, Wiltshire has little to show of Beckford’s mania for building tall. On the north side of Bath, Somerset can offer Beckford’s Tower on Lansdown Hill. A splendidly idiosyncratic place it is too, its museum a fine introduction to the man and his works, the restored ‘Belvidere’ at its summit furnished as it was when it was Beckford’s sitting-room (above).

Beckford’s Plan A, after selling Fonthill to retire to Bath, was to buy Prior Park, on the southern outskirts of the city, but the price wasn’t right. On the first Sunday of 2011 I was at Prior Park to enjoy the landscape garden, now managed by the National Trust, which is busy restoring its 18th century architectural features. The garden tumbles down the hill from the house to a lake with a Palladian-style bridge (below), scratched over with antique graffiti. Regency lads presumably used penknives in place of spray-cans and they made sure they carved the serifs properly too. They wouldn’t have wanted to seem less than gentlemen, after all.

Palladian bridges of this design are especially rare. The Prior Park bridge was built in 1755, a generation after the prototype, at Wilton House near Salisbury, completed in 1737, and its contemporary copy at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The fourth and only other surviving example in the world is in Russia, at Tsarkoe Selo, near St Petersburg. There was a fifth, at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, but that has been demolished.

Prior Park itself, now a school, commands a fine view over the city. And the city can look back. It was an inspired piece of advertising, built by the Cornishman Ralph Allen, one of the men who created Georgian Bath. He made his money in running a postal franchise – the previous time the Royal Mail was privatised – and then sank it into the mines from which Bath stone is extracted. (Strange but true – Bath stone is mined, not quarried, which has left a legacy of problems for ground stability only recently resolved.) Allen’s house was built of his product and meant to be seen by all who wished to imitate it on a more modest scale.

Set into one of the hillsides are the well-concealed remains of an ice-house which during the Second World War was fitted out for use by the British Resistance, should things have come to that. Bath was also one of five English cities hit in the Baedeker raids of 1942, when heritage was targeted in retaliation for damage done to the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. An eye for an eye doesn’t only leave the whole world blind, but with nothing much to look at either.