Architecture of Bath
The Building of Bath. By Bryan Little. (Collins. 15s.)
IT is possible to misunderstand the architecture of Bath equally by overvaluing it and undervaluing it. The overvaluers are those who try to persuade themselves that the entire city is a masterpiece „ of planning and design ; the undervaluers are those who, selecting the Circus, the Crescent and a few other monuments as "high spots," class the rest of the place as a grey Georgian sprawl of rather uneven charm. The truth is that Bath's buildings must be studied on two planes of performance. That tin-form creation of the Woods which begins at Queen Square, rises to the Circus and then swings with so fine a gesture into the Crescent really is an achievement of great mark. It is the first (and almost the only) creative act of English town- planning ; and if the history of our architecture were to be written on a postage-stamp, it would still be inexcusable to omit this. Then, on a lower plane, there are hundreds of little things which give one enormous pleasure to discover and rediscover, but which should never be dragged, even metaphorically, from the habitat which they colour and where they shine in delicate seclusion.
It is the great merit of this miniature survey of Bath that the author neither overvalues nor undervalues his subject. In the large time-span he has taken it would have been fatal to do so, for in 150 pages he reviews no less than a thousand years of Bath archi- tecture, and so has had to be very exact in his perspective. He begins with the Roman city, disposing of any notion which may yet linger about a provincial Rome, peopled with olive-skinned emigres complaining about the British climate. Then he goes on to the Middle Ages, and gives us a realistic interpretation of the Abbey church, showing Bishop Oliver King's work as something in the nature of a rationalisation—an attempt to solve, from inside, those problems which Henry VIII and Cromwell were to solve on less thoughtful lines a few years later.
The seventeenth century has remarkably little to say for itself, but by 1700 Bath's "industrial revolution," as Mr. Little, with apt impropriety, describes it, had begun. Bath caught the rhythm of London, and soon became as national, as unique, as the capital itself. The industry of health and pleasure once established, the architecture of Palladian London came down, bag and baggage, and joined the movement, ruling the itreets as Richard Nash ruled the assemblies. John Wood the elder, an intellectual innocent with a marked capacity for inventing history and an obsession about reviving
the glories of Imperial Bath, threw himself into the work. Dying at an early age, he left the continuation to hisI son who, having completed his father's Circus, built the detni-colosseum which we know as the Crescent. Mr. Little would have this great building remind us of Bemini and the colonnades before St. Peter's ; and he is not the only writer who has sniffed Baroque in the air of Bath. But the truth is, surely, much simpler. If the Circus is, as one of Smolletes characters declared, " Vespasian's amphitheatre turned outside in," the Crescent is simply the same phenomenon halved, with the elliptical curvature of the Roman original retained and Inigo Jones's familiar London house canon for its elevation. Vatican interference may be confidently discounted.
In chapters headed The Town of Builders and Grecian and Gothic, Mr. Little makes his way from 1775 to 1850, dealing with a mass of architecture hitherto largely ignored, and dealing with it in a way which does the greatest credit to his knowledge, his judgement and his pen. The whole book is readable, and it remains readable to the end, which, incidentally, takes the form of an appreciation of the 1945 Plan for the city. The 130 excellent photographs combine with the author's unfailing lucidity to make the book as enjoyable to those who do not know their Bath as to those who know it, as Mr. Little obviously does, street by street. JOHN SUMMERSON.
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