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CITY | RETAIL
The way to enlightenment
Books are knowledge and knowledge is power. And there’s a whole lot more of both in Topping & Company’s impressive new venue in York Street. Emma Clegg goes through the once-blind main door to meet co-director Hugh Topping always greedy for more books and when we saw this building was available and had a look around we just fell in love with the place. We knew it would create a really special home for a bookshop, a building we can invite everyone into and open up to the public.”
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Our design philosophy is that if there is a wall, put a bookcase on it, and if there isn’t a wall, see if we can put a bookcase there anyway
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The Friends’ Meeting House in York Street, formerly a Freemasons’ Hall, was built in 1817–19 in a Greek Revival style by London architect William Wilkins (1778–1839), who designed The National Gallery. Grade IIListed, the building stands there elegantly over 250 years later with its dramatic façade with projecting, pedimented Ionic portico supported by two columns. The building has had many uses over the years. The Freemasons stopped using it in 1823, after which it became an assembly room, a venue for exhibitions, and was converted into a Nonconformist chapel, before becoming the Friends Meeting House in 1872. After a century of use by them, part of the building was leased to a charity, with the main room used for book fairs and Christmas market stalls. There have been various planning proposals, including one in 2009 for a Brasserie Blanc, but the suggested conversions were considered to undermine the building’s listed status. Now, however, the Friends’ Meeting House has been given a dramatic new energy and purpose within its precious listed structure, because Topping & Company Booksellers opened their bookshop there in November this year, taking over the lease with a plan to purchase the building after three years. Hugh Topping explains their decision to relocate: “We had been at The Paragon for 14 years and our lease was coming to an end so we were working out what we were going to do next. We’re
The original Masonic hall was built with a central blind door and two blind windows on the front façade, and was lit solely by two roof lanterns (with fine plaster details to their ceilings) for reasons of secrecy, but it is thought that the windows may have been later converted into sashes because the lighting proved inadequate for its use as a chapel. The central doorway (with full entablature above) was ‘blind’ in the Freemasons’ design for the reason that, “the way to enlightenment is not always obvious.” Opening up the doorway was one of the first stages of the conversion work,
The entrance to the new bookshop, with the opened-up main door
which started in March this year. And despite the new door opening and the resulting light, enlightenment, it has to be said, is now here in the form of shelves and shelves of books. AN IMPRESSIVE SPACE This is an architecturally dramatic location, which offers around 3,000 square foot of space – double the space of the Paragon bookshop – and it’s the largest independent bookshop to open in England for several decades, housing around 75,000 books. As well as the repair and refurbishment of the historic fabric, a new oak-clad gallery structure (now with books on arts, design and culture) was inserted into the Great Hall, the main room, to increase the retail floor area, and a lift was installed to provide access to all levels, including the lower hall. The latter is a massive area in its own right, full of literary cubby-holes created by shelving partitions, and where you’ll find subjects such as cookery, history, politics, travel and children’s – this floor will also be the location for cookery demonstrations. The Great Hall itself is wide and high, with globe lights and the original foliate frieze with egg-and-dart moulding. The sturdy wooden sliding library ladders (also in the lower hall) lock in place and allow access to the higher shelves. There is the comforting presence of a grandfather clock, originally made in Bath, a large Topping & Company-style handwritten chalkboard against the wooden lift encasement, a kitchenette behind the main desk to allow constant tea and coffee provision for all (and one in the lower hall too). There is even a secret view of Ralph Allen’s Town House from the stairs leading to the lower hall. Clearly Amazon can’t compete with any of this. THE PROCESS OF CHANGE The location is delightfully central, although the bookshop no longer has a main window to lure customers in. Hugh says, “There is no shop window, but a bigger door and frontage, and lots more footfall. We love York Street, which is pedestrianised. We can see people sitting outside having pizzas and coffee on the pavements, so it’s a lovely atmosphere and slightly removed from the hustle and bustle of our busy traffic corner up in The Paragon.” The project has seen Hugh – whose home is in Edinburgh – in permanent residence in Bath since the spring. I ask what issues were encountered in the planning and conversion of the shop, and the logistics of the move.
70 TheBATHMagazine
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DeceMber 2021
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issue 226
