By John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter: Councillors are being urged to save a “very uncommon” historic garden in Bath.
The Georgian Garden at the back of Number 4 the Circus is one of Bath’s less well-known attractions, but the free-to-access site is a rare chance to see the original 1770s garden of a grand Bath home.
The house and garden are owned by a charitable trust — but this trust is effectively defunct with no trustees or other assets.
Now Bath and North East Somerset Council, which is responsible for the charity’s administration, is trying to restore the charity so it can be officially dissolved.
The grand townhouse has been unused for the last six years, while the council has had to spend thousands on its upkeep.
Maintenance on the empty mansion cost the council £18.6k last year and it is projected to cost another £6.5k this year.
A meeting of the council’s charitable trust board on December 9 voted to appoint new trustees “with the purpose of supporting the dissolution of the charity.”
But this has sparked concern that the historic garden could be lost.
Kay Ross, the vice chair of Avon and Gloucestershire Gardens Trust which campaigns to save historic gardens, attended the meeting to urge councillors to keep the garden open to the public.
She said: “We have been very concerned about the garden.”
She warned that its box hedges had deteriorated, the garden was overgrown, and the “hoggin” gravel which had been chosen to be authentic to what the Georgians had used had been replaced with standard river gravel.
A Georgian style bench which had been recreated for the garden had also vanished since 2022, with another unable to be made as the plans for it had been lost.
She said: “It is supposed to look exactly as a Georgian Garden would, using all the research that was carried out and the archaeology and everything else. And it is gradually disappearing and it would be meaningless if the planting or the hoggin was not restored.”
Bath man Peter Scott also addressed the committee. He said: “I am a neighbour of the Georgian Garden and the reason I am here today is just as a local resident to express concern over the dilapidation of the Georgian Garden and its future.
“In researching it, I have looked into the house itself and found a series of anomalies that I found concerning, not least that the council’s lease on the property ended six years ago and that during the time that the council provided trustees for the property it appeared that no money has ever actually been raised for the charity.”
He said that the council was acting like it was a “done deal” in appointing trustees with the express intention of closing down the charity, instead of looking into running the charity for its actual intended purpose.
Graham Page, who sits on the committee as a non-voting independent member, also criticised the wording of the board’s resolution which he said appeared to limit what the charity could do.
But the council’s monitoring officer said the trustees, when appointed, would not actually have to dissolve the charity as the council could not bind them to a course of action. The four trustees will be chosen by the council’s political groups in line with the council’s political balance and are likely to be councillors although they do not have to be.
Councillor Oli Henman (Liberal Democrat, Walcot), who sits on the committee, said: “I think all of us agree that it’s an important heritage asset in the city. We absolutely want to see it thriving and restored to its true historic purpose and a historical value is very much recognised.”
The garden was discovered under a layer of clay with its original layout intact — a rare find — during archaeological excavations in 1985. Ms Ross told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “It’s very uncommon. It’s virtually unheard of. All we have now are plans.”
The garden was then restored with planting based on a plan by Dr John Harvey of the Garden History Society. It was completed in 1990. It is open to the public from Gravel Walk.
The Circus is one of Bath’s most iconic streets. It was begun in 1754 by John Wood the Elder and completed in 1768 by his son John Wood the Younger, who went on to design the Royal Crescent. Number 4 the Circus was recently featured in the BBC programme Empire with David Olusoga, where the historian revealed how money from the British Empire funded much of the city’s wealth. In 1768, Number 4 the Circus was owned by James Plunkett, whose family made their fortune owning enslaved people and plantations in Jamaica.
By the 1960s, however, the home was owned by Bath couple Charles and Frances Cooke, who decided in their wills that it should be preserved as a Georgian house and exhibited to the public. On Mrs Cooke’s death in 1970, a charity was set up to own the house and fulfil this aim. Bath City Council was made responsible for the charity’s administration and appointing its trustees despite it remaining a separate legal entity.
It had been the Cookes’ intention that the whole house be exhibited to the public, but the house itself has only been open one day a year on Bath and North East Somerset’s heritage open days. In the 1970s, the nearby Number 1 the Royal Crescent had recently opened for the same purpose and so Number 4 the Circus was instead leased to the council.
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