upper ass rooms.qxp_Layout 1 27/08/2021 11:44 Page 1
CITY | HISTORY
Reading the Rooms
The Assembly Rooms were built 250 years ago this month. Emma Clegg celebrates the anniversary by looking back on their conception and building, revelling in their wild Georgian heyday, assessing their chequered fortunes since, and with the help of Stephen Bird, Head of Heritage Services at B&NES, she takes a look at what the future holds...
T
he Lower Assembly Rooms in Bath – the two sets of buildings constructed to cater for the fast-growing number of fashionable visitors flocking to the city in the early 18th century – offered gathering places for those looking for amusement once they had taken the waters, namely dancing, card playing and tea drinking. But as Bath’s social scene continued to thrive, the size and modernity of these rooms became inadequate to house visitors in style, and the residents of the growing upper town now had a long way to go to visit the Lower Rooms, so larger assembly rooms became a priority. John Wood the Elder had originally advocated the need for purposebuilt assembly rooms in frustration at the lack of a suitable building, but it was his son John Wood the Younger who in 1765, a year after his father’s death, put forward plans for new assembly rooms north east of Queen Square. There was a rival, much grander, scheme produced by architect Robert Adam, which was seriously considered but deemed too expensive, and so Wood’s plan was used, funded by a tontine, an annuity shared by subscribers to a loan or common fund. The capital amounted to £14,000, divided into 70 shares, with original subscribers including James Leigh Perrot, the uncle of Jane Austen, Walter Wiltshire of Shockerwick and friend of Gainsborough and Thomas Bowdler, the editor of Shakespeare. John Wood the Younger laid the foundation stone of the new Upper Assembly Rooms in 1769. The total cost of the build was £20,000, the largest investment in a single building in Bath during the 18th century. The Ball Room, Upper Assembly Rooms
Building the Upper Assembly Rooms The Upper Assembly Rooms covered nearly three-quarters of an acre, the location bound by Bennett Street on the north and Alfred Street on the south. The building’s vast external facades and details – including the main entrance under a three-bay portico with Doric columns – were relatively plain, perhaps deliberately to disguise the splendours inside, perhaps to render the overall cost more palatable. The windows were set at a high level within each of the rooms to ensure privacy, preventing nosy local residents or urchins from observing the fun. The shell of the building was completed in 1770, designed in a Ushape with the central aisle linking the Ball Room, the Octagon and the Tea Room – the Octagon originally acted as the card room, until a separate Card Room was added in 1777. The tontine subscribers were then asked to help fund the furnishing of the rooms. Of the original furnishings, only the nine great chandeliers survive today, each one eight foot high, and these represent the largest single purchase at £999 (today’s equivalent £173,000). The three chandeliers in the Tea Room and the five in the Ball Room are by William Parker of Fleet Street, produced from the glassmakers’ factory at Whitefriars. Jonathan Collett made an earlier set for the Ball Room but one month after the opening in 1771 an arm collapsed, narrowly missing Thomas Gainsborough beneath (who at this time had a studio in The Circus), so they were dismantled and salvaged to form a single chandelier, now positioned in the Octagon. The records show that other commissions included plated candlesticks, candelabra, silver Turkey coffee pots with wicker handles, bells, lamps and girandoles (supports for candles or lights), mirrors and settees covered with ‘scarlet stuff damask’, along with a ‘groce of Whist Cards marked with the Mogul’s Head’. There was also a payment to Gainsborough for the frame of his portrait of Captain Wade, who presided as Master of Ceremonies at both the Lower and New Assembly Rooms until 1777. The grand opening of the Rooms The Upper Rooms opened on 30 September 1771 with a Ridotto, a combined dance and concert. The Ball Room, which housed up to 800 dancers, would have been illuminated by the candlelit chandeliers and fires burning in the fireplaces as guests arrived, but then the temperature would have risen rapidly, although the heat would have been absorbed by the high 32-metre ceiling and the upper storey windows which would have provided a welcome breeze. The room interiors are remarkably austere. The lower walls were left bare – plain walls with a dado punctuated by door surrounds and chimney pieces – to accommodate the high tiers of raked seating benches where elderly ladies and children and unpartnered dancers would have sat. No extra architectural detail was required as it was the crowding attendees that provided the glamour, the glitter, the colour, the noise and the movement. The Rooms were also used in this era for concerts, a notable example being a performance attended by King George III by virtuoso violinist George Bridgetower, who appeared at the Upper Assembly Rooms in 1789. The festivities at this time would have alternated between the new Upper Assembly Rooms and the Lower Assembly Rooms, but the Lower Rooms lost their sheen with the arrival of the new splended building and one of them was demolished around 1820 to make way for the building of York Street. The other was devastated by a fire in the same year and was rebuilt, lasting until demolition in 1933 to make road improvements on the site now known as Bog Island. Jane Austen lived in Bath from 1801–1805, during the period when both the Lower and Upper Assembly Rooms were open, and her
