Details
CHURCH STREET Widcombe
(East side)
The Garden House with
attached boundary walls
12/06/50
GV II*
Garden room. Mid C18, altered. Possibly designed by Richard Jones, but see below.
MATERIALS: Limestone ashlar, slate roof.
PLAN: Small square garden building, formerly with open loggia to ground floor, with rooms above, built across boundary wall retaining south side to churchyard of Church of St Thomas(qv).
EXTERIOR: Two storey. Main facade faces south, into gardens, and has at upper level twelve-pane sash to sill band, flanked by Ionic columns with pulvinated frieze, cornice, and high blocking course, above triple arched arcade containing two-light casements with arched lights, above ashlar breast walls, with moulded architraves, keystones, and imposts, with four unfluted Doric columns to full entablature, broken over columns, this arcading returned, complete with paired Doric columns, at each end in one bay, left return has former eighteen-pane sash, modified in lower sash, at first floor, to left, with blocked opening to right. Right return plain at upper level, and an C18 door in retaining wall to right. Small central stack, another to rear. Upper parts of rear of building appear in churchyard. East side plain, with full entablature including pulvinated frieze, at north-east corner attached cylindrical unit with stone slate conical roof, on rubble base, with grilled opening, and blind oculus to base. Rear wall, continuing right, has lofty central stack in coursed rubble with ashlar trim, with one offset.
INTERIOR: Ground floor loggia has three fine ashlar arched niches to rear wall, stone fielded panelling between and to returns.
SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: Attached on either side at mid-depth to pavilion high retaining walls in coursed stone, with coping, sloping steeply down to left and up to right, following slope of garden, forming boundary between church and garden.
HISTORY: Ison includes drawing of possible original appearance of building. A mid C18 sketch by Thomas Robins of Widcombe Manor shows the building¿s original appearance, straddling the graveyard wall and forming part of the Widcombe Manor gardens; it was probably used as a banqueting house. Richard Jones in his often unreliable notebooks (Bath City Library) refers to `drawings of the other piece at Widcombe, done for one Squire Bennet, and his summer house in his garden'.
SOURCES: (Ison W: The Georgian Buildings of Bath: Bath: 1980-: 111-112; The Buildings of England: Pevsner N: North Somerset and Bristol: London: 1958-: 126; Colvin H: A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects. 1600-1840: London: 1978-: 475; M. Scott, Discovering Widcombe and Lyncombe, Bath (2nd ed 1993), 29-43).
Listing NGR: ST7598863870
