The Classical Buildings of Bath

Architect Mike Jenner describes Bath’s more notable classical buildings, explains the rules to which they were expected to conform, and tells how a few geniuses broke them to move European architecture and urban planning triumphantly forward. The book ranges from the Roman era through eighteenth-century showpieces such as John Wood’s Circus and Royal Crescent to the controversial late twentieth-century Cavendish Lodge. The author shows how the problem of designing buildings which fit harmoniously into their context is not new, and gives examples of eighteenth-century classical buildings in Bath which caused serious visual damage to the earlier ones around them. He explains how this reflected the see-saw of fashion, with the work of every generation despised and rejected by the next, and then brought back into esteem by a later one. The Classical Buildings of Bath demonstrates the pleasure to be obtained from looking at classical buildings with proper understanding and the benefit of Stephen Morris’ superlative photographs.