Improvement

By the end of the seventeenth century, in the wake of the Civil War and the Restoration, a new balance of political interests occupied the towns of Great Britain — not only the metropolis of London, but provincial towns as well. Even as the monarchy retained its central symbolic role and considerable effective power, the increasing strength of civil authority had its expression in the development of towns. City corporations composed of aristocratic landowners, merchants, bankers, or freemen plotted the future course of their towns with a view of the new constellation of forces that would shape the development of urban settlements in Great Britain across the course of the eighteenth century: the mercantile system of imperial might that gave new priority to roadways and ports; the industries prompting the movement and consolidation of urban populations that spurred the construction of manufactures and warehouses; the technologies of illumination, water distribution, and print communication transforming the experience of the public spaces of the city. The role of architecture changed accordingly, in both its representational and its practical dimensions. The signification of monarchy — in the major cities at least — and the church — in even the most provincial of towns — remained central elements of architectural performance, but these were joined by novel manifestations of social endeavor, such as the club or the exchange, that were instances of an emerging public domain shaped by discourse and transactions conducted in public view. In the buildings that housed these new institutions, behind the facades that fronted private interiors, and in the streets that connected them together, social life in the metropolis began to assume the now-familiar contours of modernity.

Such transformations in the towns of Great Britain, though rapid, did not occur abruptly, or decisively. Even with considerable enthusiasm for "improvements," as they were generally known, a number of factors might act as obstacles to their realization. Theories of property, which had captured the legal and social imagination in Britain, segregated private and public domains such that physical changes to those domains might not parallel exactly the changing formulations of the civic sphere. The techniques and practices of design and construction, some long established and enforced formally by guilds or informally by habit, could constrain rather than encourage novelty. In general, improvements overlapped with prior circumstances — with older buildings, streets, and customary uses — so that the one threw the other into sharp relief. Architecture itself, a material endeavor, was in some ways less malleable than the ideas of civic space that architecture was asked to instantiate, and it was in this distinction that the role and purpose of the aesthetic register of architecture came decisively into view. In this transition from prior to future civic arrangements, the aesthetics of civic spaces began to be described in terms of beauty and ugliness, terms that — while of much older lineage and long employed in architectural discourse and poetical descriptions — served now in a particular manner to define an emerging civil constitution of towns and their society, with the concept of ugliness in particular serving to denote the uncertainties, the speculations, the difficulties of that emergence.

The Disorder of Bath

When the antiquarian William Stukeley visited the provincial city of Bath on his tour of notable sites in Great Britain, his observations conveyed a measured appreciation for some of its features tempered by a disdain for the state of its streets and buildings:

The [ground] level of the city is risen to the top of the first walls, through the negligence of the magistracy, in this and all other great towns, who suffer idle servants to throw all manner of dirt and ashes into the streets. ... The small compass of the city has made the inhabitants croud up the streets to an unseemly and inconvenient narrowness: it is handsomely built, mostly of new stone, which is very white and good; a disgrace to the architects they have there. The cathedral is a beautiful pile, though small; the roof of stone well wrought; much imagery in front, but of a sorry taste.

Handsomeness and beauty seem in Stukeley's view to have resided more in the material properties of the architecture of the city than in its expressive achievement. The quality of the stone embarrassed the accomplishment of the architects who used it, and the techniques used to work the stones of the cathedral roof surpassed the artistry of the sculptures and ornaments that adorned its facade. Stukeley was aware, as most visitors would have been, that Bath was shaped by diverse intentions and by contingency as well. Its geological surroundings produced the hot springs for which the town was named, and also provided the source of the local stone that he deemed "white and good"; its governance was in the hands of a city corporation, the magistracy to whom he assigned the blame for the misbehavior of the denizens of the town; its growth over time had been constrained by the older Roman walls, producing the crowded and irregular arrangement of streets and buildings. The outward appearance of all these aspects — simply, the aesthetic effect of the city — Stukeley judged deficient, and attributed that deficiency to the architects who were "disgraced" by an admirable stone whose qualities their own inadequate efforts at design failed to complement.

Though famous already for its medicinal baths, the city's transformation into a storied center of leisure commenced with the start of the eighteenth century. (Figure 1) A royal visit by Queen Anne in 1702 and her return the following year brought the court and courtiers, and with them the attention and notice of other well-to-do persons who gave Bath its place on the itinerary of fashionable destinations. The town became part of the winter tour, an attraction first and most famously for its baths and their supposed curative powers, but soon also for its entertainments, its elaborate balls, gambling, and gossip. Over the span of less than two decades at the beginning of the century, Bath attained an almost unrivaled popularity, highly favored by the fashionable set for the excitement of its social scene, which in comparison to London or other settings was unguarded and permissive. The success of this new attraction — a leisured urbanity — was due in part to the calculated efforts of Beau Nash, who, appointed by the city corporation as the master of ceremonies in 1705, governed the social life of the town for more than fifty years. Wealthy visitors arriving for months-long stays came with the expectation of a enjoyable and satisfying residence. It was the job of the master of ceremonies to provide this guarantee. Nash recorded each visitor of suitable social standing as a member of "the Company," a subscription list whose members could attend the entertainments held in the assembly rooms, be escorted to the baths, and be managed in every aspect of their social lives by the master of ceremonies.

While Nash administered the social life of the town's visitors, the mayor and the Bath Corporation governed its citizens and its economic and material condition. The thirty members of the corporation included representatives from the many trades that composed the commercial life of the town, and their primary concern was to perpetuate its economic growth and vitality. To these fiscal ends, the corporation pursued a number of improvements, beginning with legislation such as a tax levy to pay for ten lights to be constructed in anticipation of Queen Anne's visit, or the enactment a few years later of turnpike and paving acts to rebuild the roads leading into Bath and to pay for their upkeep. Improvements to the infrastructure of the town were accompanied by improvements to its maintenance, with further legislation ordering a regimen of street cleaning and a regular watch to protect its citizens. By 1766, the corporation had determined that new and more expansive legislation was needed in order to "have the streets etc. paved by a pound Rate, to be cleaned by a daily scavenger, and to have the power of directing all matters relative to the paving, cleansing, enlightening & watching the streets etc." Such extensive concern for improvement reflected not only the foresight of corporation members who took a longer view toward the town's future growth and vitality, but also the concern of corporation members that the town in its present state did not provide an adequate physical setting for the civic institutions and behaviors that it housed.

Infrastructural and managerial improvements did much to answer these two aims, but more important for the latter concern was the appearance of the town, an appearance decisively determined by its public and private buildings. The architect who seized upon this aspect of improvement and organized much of his career around it was John Wood the Elder, a precocious provincial architect who practiced extensively and influentially in Bath during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1727, when Wood arrived in Bath and took up residence, he brought with him, by his account, designs to carry out grand transformations: "I proposed to make a grand Place of Assembly, to be called the Royal Forum of Bath; another Place, no less magnificent, for the Exhibition of Sports, to be called the Grand Circus; and a third Place, of equal State with either of the former, for the Practice of medicinal Exercises, to be called the Imperial Gymnasium of the City." Any one of these would have intervened in the small compass of the town at a spectacular scale; together they would have imposed an artificial magnificence to rival cities of historical imagination. But Bath had immediate need of improvement at a much smaller and more humble scale. The quality of its houses did not match the quality of the newly arriving visitors, and its "little, dirty, dark, narrow Passages" made the perambulations of those visitors uncomfortable and at times unsafe.

Wood was particularly appalled by the architecture of the town's central attraction, the baths. The entry rooms of the King's Bath "seemed more fit to fill the Bathers with the Horrors of Death, than to raise their Ideas of the Efficacy of the Hot Waters"; the Queen's Bath was even worse, for "a Man no sooner descends into the Bath, than he finds himselfsunk into a Pit of Deformity; if irregular Walls incrusted with Dirt and Nastiness, and these standing beneath irregular buildings, may be so called." Wood believed that the appearance and the physical state of the baths endangered their occupants. The haphazard arrangement of forms and the decayed surfaces of the walls and floors, the darkness of the interiors and the dankness of their air, demanded, in his view, urgent remedy. The architecture of the baths was, after all, the architecture of the central civic amenity of the town, upon which its future vitality depended: "The Wretched and dangerous Condition of what made the Staple Commodity of the City I was about improving ... made me lose no Opportunity, by Observation or Enquiry, to form a Design for making the Baths as Commodious as possible for the Benefit of the present Age." Wood's proposals to improve the baths were not pursued by the city corporation, but Wood had articulated the process of improvement in architectural terms and had in fact already started work on other commissions that would foreshadow the sweeping transformation of the city during the Georgian period.

A contract with the Duke of Chandos to rebuild St. John's Hospital afforded Wood the chance to design and construct adjacent houses. Soon after, he began work on his own scheme for what would become Queen Square, four neoclassical facades facing each other across a square and unifying separate building plots behind. Constructed in what was then an open field just beyond the city wall, Wood's design for Queen Square inaugurated a period of speculative building through which Bath expanded beyond its "small compass" and took on the more orderly and regular arrangements of neoclassical plans — straight streets, consistent proportions, and ornamentation. This architecture would properly house the Company over the course of the eighteenth century, with more commodious interiors, more elegant exteriors, and urban settings that reflected the standing of the citizens and visitors who traversed them. Wood's notable legacy in Bath would eventually include, along with Queen Square, the King's Circus, and the Royal Crescent, projects conceived and initiated by Wood and completed by his son, John Wood the Younger, after his father's death in 1754. (see Figure 1) Though these works in Bath would be his most enduring, he also completed a few significant buildings outside the city, including the exchanges in Bristol and in Liverpool, which contributed to the civic improvement of those important mercantile centers.

Wood's thirty-year career in Bath was not without conflicts — his disputes with clients arose from diverse reasons, from the architect's tardiness to strong disagreements over the architect's designs, and the Duke of Chandos memorably chastised Wood for his inability to properly engineer the drains: "the Water-Closets smelling so abominably whenever the Wind sets one way, 'tis a sure sign that it is the Effect of your Ignorance." (Figure 2) The significance of the arc of Wood's career lies not in the tally of successes and failures, however, but, insofar as it pertains to the issue of civic aesthetics, in the narrative of improvement along which it is structured. Wood published his lengthy and detailed account Essay towards a Description of Bath first in 1742 and in a much revised version in 1749. In the four parts of the book, Wood attempted to provide his reader an understanding of the city of Bath from multiple perspectives, the first part discussing the setting and environs of the town through the lens of natural science, the second giving an elaborate (and largely fanciful) story of its founding followed by a political history, the third — architectural in its focus — describing the physical qualities of the town, its buildings, and its streets, and the fourth presenting its legal and regulatory apparatus of bylaws and statutes. The composite of these four was a narrative of improvement, tempered by repeated assertions of a glorious ancient past subsequently lost, but nevertheless insistent in its demonstration of the effort by Wood and his contemporaries to realize a newly magnificent civic realm within their provincial city.

Throughout the text of his Essay, Wood provided his reader architectural indices of improvement — tiled roofs to replace thatched ones, small and ineffective glass replaced by sash windows, taller buildings, and "Ornaments to adorn the outside of them, even to Profuseness." Such details had already been weighted with significance, for in the opening lines of his preface, Wood presented the transformation of Bath in explicitly architectural — and explicitly aesthetic — terms:

About the year 1727, the Boards of the Dining Rooms and most other Floors were made of a Brown Colour with soot and small Beer to hide the Dirt, as well as their own Imperfections; and if the Walls of any of the Rooms were covered with Wainscot, it was such as was mean and never Painted. ... As the new Buildings advanced, Carpets were introduced to cover the Floors, though Laid with the finest clean Deals, or Dutch Oak Boards; the rooms were all Wainscoted and Painted in a costly and handsome manner. ... To make a just Comparison between the publick Accommodations of Bath at this time, and one and twenty Years back, the best Chambers for Gentlemen were then just what the Garrets for Servants now are.

Calculated in aesthetic terms, the transformation effected was an increase in beauty and a corresponding decrease in ugliness. Imperfections and dirt concealed by the brown coloration of soot and beer were unmistakable examples of a prior ugliness that was removed or rectified by more perfectly milled lumber and carpets of pleasing color. This aesthetic improvement of architectural circumstances was mirrored by a parallel improvement of social circumstances. Where in the seventeenth century "all kinds of Disorders were grown to their highest Pitch in Bath; insomuch that the Streets and publick Ways of the City were become like so many Dunghills, Slaughter-Houses, and Pig-Styes," now Wood could point out "a handsome Pavement ... with large flat Stones, for the Company to walk upon." The unconstrained social habits of the earlier time slowly gave way to the social behaviors regulated by the statutes and by-laws of the town, which were in turn reflected in the well-ordered appearance of new architectural settings.