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Pulteney Bridge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Jean Manco
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Extract

Bridges lined with shops have always been rarities, but Robert Adam’s creation in Bath has more than novelty value. His restrained composition of curves and rectangles was one of the visual delights of English Neo-classicism. The uncluttered lines of the river façades were designed to be effective at a distance, while the elevations to the road provided an interesting play of light and shadow for passers-by.

Paradoxically, the success of the concept destroyed the architecture. Within twenty years of its building, commercial pressures on this prime shop site dictated an expansion upwards, with a butchery of those graceful elevations which fortunately Adam was not alive to witness. Then in the nineteenth century, individual leaseholders enlarged their shop windows or cantilevered out over the river as the fancy took them. Storms and road widening also took their toll. By 1948 the buildings had ‘become pathetic travesties of the original design.’ In that very year, Bath City Council removed a wooden structure from the back of one shop; the tide had turned. From then on the story has been one of gradual restoration.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 38 , 1995 , pp. 129 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1995

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References

Notes

1 Ison, Walter, The Georgian Buildings of Bath (London, 1948), p. 66 Google Scholar.

2 BL K. 37.29. a: A Survey of The Manor of Bathwick belonging to the Honble Willm Pulteney Esqur., 1727.

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4 BCL PEP MS 1809.

5 Neue, R. S., Bath: A Social History 1680-1S50 (London, 1981), pp. 227-28Google Scholar; BCL, PEP Bundle 3, MS 1750: Act of Parliament 1769 gives the date of death of General Pulteney.

6 BRO Council Minutes 6 February 1768.

7 BCL PEP AL 1788: Letter to Lord Darlington 23 August 1769.

8 BCL PEP MS 1750.

9 BCL Hemmings, Philip, ‘Bath: A Study in Planning and Development’ 3 vols (Thesis 1982), 2, between pp. 5 and 6Google Scholar. The original is now missing from PEP.

10 BCL PEP AL 1788: Letter to Lord Darlington 23 August 1769.

11 HL PU 4: Letter from James Adam to William Johnstone Pulteney.

12 BCL PEP MS 1811; Sir John Soane Museum, Adam drawings vol. 38, discussed in Ison, Walter, The Georgian Buildings of Bath 2nd edn (Bath 1980), p. 200 Google Scholar.

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19 HL PU 57: Letter from the Mayor and Corporation of Bath to William Pulteney.

20 BCL PEP, bundle 6, MSS 1751, 1815.

21 BCL PEP, bundle 6, MSS 1811, 1818/1, 1820.

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34 Bath Journal Sept. 30 1799.

35 Bath Chronicle 19 December 1799, p. 3, col. 3.

36 Bath Herald 15 Nov. 1800, p. 3.

37 Bath Chronicle 20 Nov. 1800, p. 3., col. 2.

38 Bath Chronicle 19 March 1801, p. 3, col. 2; BRO Cotterell and Spackman map of Bath 1:500 1852-54; Wood-engraving of the Northgate Brewery in George Measom, Official Illustrated Guide to the Great Western Railway [1860].

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45 Illustrated London News 24.9.1864, p. 308.

46 BCL Pulteney Bridge cuttings file, sheet stamped Lewis bequest 1934 (collection of William Lewis’s son Egbert); BRO, Minutes Urban Sanitary Committee 1872-1885, pp. 3, 50.

47 OS map 1886; BRO Bathwick Papers 1889 plan of Duck, Son and Pinker’s premises, Building Control Plans 1223; Avon Central Library drawing of Pulteney Bridge by Samuel Loxton c. 1900.

48 Daily Chronicle and Argus 6 April 1903; These advertisements are visible in Green, Eighteenth Century Architecture, pl. cv.

49 Bath Herald 11 April 1902.

50 BRO Deed Pk 2702B.

51 BRO Gill and Morris plans July 1904.

52 BRO Deed Pk 2750E; Plans M: 12 March 1937 J. F. Bevanjones proposed alterations to nos 9 and 10 Pulteney Bridge.

53 BRO Plans M: J. F. Bevanjones: tracings of Adam’s plans in the Soane Museum, elevations of 1937/8, revision 3.10.50 and sections for mouldings 1951.

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57 BRO Building Control Plans C31, E106-7; Bath Directories.

58 BRO Bathwick Estate Papers, bundles of leases and particulars of leases fallen in hand.

59 BRO Bathwick Estate Papers Particulars of Sale; Deed Pk 2702A: Draft conveyance of 1-8, 11-16 Pulteney Bridge to Bath Corporation 1936.

60 Bath City Council Building Regulation Application no. 750636, 13 August 1975; Evening Chronicle 18.3.76: letter to the editor from John Vivian.