Bath District Register Office

CHARLOTTE STREET (North West side) No.12 Bath District Register Office 12/06/50

GV II*

Savings bank, later museum, now Register Office. 1841. By George Alexander. MATERIALS: Limestone ashlar, roof not visible from street. PLAN: Tall square block with central entrance. STYLE: Italian Renaissance . EXTERIOR: Three storeys, three bays. Long and short quoins to full height on four corners. Ground floor has six/six-sash in moulded architrave with cornice on console brackets over on either side of panelled double door with projecting Ionic porch (added later, as a C19 original illustration, reproduced in Jackson, shows). Platband at first floor level. Three taller windows six/six-sashes with pedimented surrounds with Ionic half columns standing on blocks and with balustraded apron. Pediments are triangular flanking segmental as on Palazzo Farnese. Second floor sill band square three/three-sashes in moulded architraves. Deep modillion cornice. Ashlar stacks on west and north walls and centrally. North east elevation same except that doorway in right hand bay has no porch. Architrave and cornice of window. West wall plain ashlar with few openings, one six/six-sash on ground and first floors and two three/three above. Rear elevation has five windows in plain ashlar wall except for rusticated quoins and platbands. Three chimney stacks on rear wall head. Windows are six/six-sashes without architraves, second floor has three/three-sashes. INTERIOR: Not inspected. HISTORY: Built as the Bath Savings Bank, it was designed in the vogue style of the day, made famous by Charles Barry¿s Reform Club in London¿s Pall Mall of a few years before. It demonstrated the new wave of Early Victorian commercial building then getting underway, and also the city¿s westward expansion. One of the earliest examples of the Italian Palazzo style to be found outside London, it is also among the first bank buildings to be designed in this style, which became the preferred idiom for such buildings. The building was bought at auction in October 1890 by Holbourne Trustees for £2400 and opened as the Holbourne Museum on 1st June 1893. The Museum remained in this building until moving to its present site in Great Pulteney Street (qv) in June 1916. SOURCES: The Buildings of England: Pevsner N: North Somerset and Bristol: London: 1958-: 123; Jackson N: Nineteenth Century Bath - Architects and Architecture: Bath: 1991-: 184-186 ).

Listing NGR: ST7463265010