Survivor

 

A rare 17th century survivor in the shadow of the Abbey. This place survived because it forms one long side of Orange Grove. The front has been tarted up and sanitised, but still follows the gabled format of domestic buildings from that period.

Nearby small towns and villages have many 17th century dwellings, but the Georgians were keen on modernising Bath in the classical style. Quite a few buildings - including pubs like The Bell and The Crystal Palace - simply had Georgian fronts stuck onto their old faces, making the walls about a foot thicker that they might have been if left alone. The clue as to their real age is the arrangement of windows. They would remove the two gables on the front and replace them with a straight, low parapet, but the windows underneath would be left in the same position - oddly out of alignment with the ones below.

Look at the straight-down pattern of the four large windows on the side of this house which were blocked-up years ago. Imagine all the people who have looked out of them over the centuries. This place is built on the graveyard for the Abbey and the bones of abbots and monks still lie a few feet beneath the grass where tourists sit around in the Summer. I have seen them.

In a similar house to this - also in the shadow of the Abbey - Mary Shelly wrote part of  Frankenstein one dark and stormy night. That was not a literary cliché, it really was a dark and stormy night. The house was demolished to expose the Roman Baths.