1692

EVOLUTION OF BATH

The maps on the margins of these pages are largely self-explanatory as they present the story of the structure of Bath as it extends outward over the region. To the familiar inward-looking, self-completing form of the medieval city with the Abbey shown in black (upper left), has been added in the map below an area of speculation building in which John Wood in 1728 has introduced a new sense of order and scale in the form of the green rectangle of Queen's Square with his new houses around it, shown in black. Thus John Wood was, according to Nikolaus Pevsner, "... the first after Inigo Jones to impose Palladian uniformity on an English square as a whole." As shown in the upper map on the opposite page, this design element provided the springboard for the outward extension of the houses lining the new Gay Street to the three-arc circus, which acted as a point from which a further angled extension occurred, thus providing the seminal form which fathered all that followed.

1735

1765

The map at the lower right shows the fully developed structure which the speculation, planning, and building of the Woods achieved or influenced. The tense, closed forms of the Circus burst apart, in a sense, in the free-flowing, open curve of the Royal Crescent to the west, which was probably the work of John Wood the Younger. St. James's Square, with its diagonal corner streets, extends the design structure outward and serves as a link to the curvilinear Lansdowne Crescent.

In the other direction the Avon River is spanned by Robert Adam's Pulteney Street Bridge, which leads into the highly architectural, straight avenue of formal design terminating in a building at the edge of a park.

The photograph of Lansdowne Crescent (above) conveys the feeling of the interaction of town and countryside, of the richness that is obtained, not when two opposite forces blend together in a tasteless mixture, but when one emphasizes the integral characteristics of the other.

1810

1:14000

PLATE 76

A: LONDON PARK CRESCENT PART OF JOHN NASH'S PLANNING SCHEME Courtesy British Information Services, New York

B: BATH ROYAL CRESCENT AND CIRCUS PLAN

From Triggs, *Town Planning*

C. BATH ROYAL CRESCENT

Photo Valentine and Sons, London

Figure 8.25 - Edinburgh, a section of the Ordnance Survey map of the centre of the city (north at the top), reproduced at the scale of 3 inches to one mile, showing the relationship of Craig's New Town, in solid block, to the old ridge city. The subsequent housing developments immediately to the north of Queen Street, the northern boundary of Craig's New Town, also have spacious, civilised qualities: compare however with the mean later nineteenth century by-law streets of working-class terraces in the north-western corner of the map.