Georgian Town Planning – Bath & the druid connection

This talk is the third in a series of six talks about the UNESCO World Heritage status of the city of Bath. To see the whole series click here.

John Wood, the most successful town planner of English eighteenth-century architects, was ferociously eccentric. The very idea that Bath, his grand artefact and a byword for classical order, should owe as much to the prehistoric stone circle at Stonehenge strains credibility, as does his obsession to evoke a lost Druid civilization in the city, which had everything to do with his imagination, nothing to do with reality. Wood’s restored Bath was to provide the template for Robert Adam in his Edinburgh New Town and the inspiration for the crescents and circuses of the spa towns of late Georgian and Regency England.

Professor Timothy Mowl FSA, Emeritus Professor of History of Architecture and Designed Landscapes, University of Bristol