SEPTEMBER 2022 · ROAM
Bath
Bath, Somerset, England
Bath is a city built to be looked at. The honey-coloured stone — oolitic limestone from Combe Down — does everything the architects needed it to do and keeps doing it three hundred years on. The colour shifts with the light: pale and almost cream at noon, warm amber in late afternoon. The Georgian streets were designed as unified compositions, whole terraces conceived as single facades. What they didn't design was how the ironwork, the balustrades, the carved decoration would accumulate into something you can spend an hour working through with a camera and not exhaust.
The stone statues in Bath appear in unexpected places — on plinths, in niches, above doorways. One appears framed through ornate black ironwork, the ironwork itself in front of a honey-stone wall. Three planes of material: iron, stone, stone. Each frame contains the next. The camera finds this and keeps finding it.
The camera finds this and keeps finding it.
Bath — September 2022
The Royal Crescent is the obvious subject. The curved facade, the period street sign mounted against it, the proportions of the windows — it earns the attention it gets. Bath Abbey is harder. The Gothic detailing on the west front — flying buttresses, fan vaulting visible through the large windows, the scale of the nave wall — doesn't reduce to a single image. You end up with fragments: a section of balustrade, a detail of carved stone, the relationship between the towers and the garden greenery in front.
What the photography kept returning to was ornament as geometry. A carved balustrade throws a pattern of shadow on the stone behind it. A Georgian townhouse has arched windows that create a rhythm across the facade. Bath's design is thorough enough that even the secondary elements — the ironwork, the door surrounds, the decorative mouldings — hold their own as subjects.
The arched windows in one terrace are framed by stone mouldings, which are framed by the building's string course, which is framed by the street. Everything is contained within something else.
Stone statue framed through ornate black ironwork and Bath's honey-stone architecture
Royal Crescent's curved Georgian facade with honey-stone terraces and period street sign
Bath Abbey's Gothic towers framed by garden greenery and flowering plants
Georgian townhouses with arched windows and decorative stone detailing, honey-stone facade
Bath Abbey's ornate stone facade with massive Gothic windows and flying buttresses
Carved stone statues and ornamental balustrade against Georgian honey-stone building