66-77, Great Pulteney Street

Twelve symmetrical terrace houses built between 1789 and 1795 on the south-east side of Great Pulteney Street in Bath, designed by Thomas Baldwin, John Eveleigh and other architects.

The houses are constructed of limestone ashlar with double pitched slate mansard roofs featuring paired and triple dormers and moulded stacks set on coped party walls. Each building comprises three storeys with attics and basements, arranged on a double-depth plan with rear additions. The street frontage is uniform: each house presents a three-window range.

The external treatment is architecturally refined. A continuous entablature with modillion cornice and moulded architrave runs across the entire range. Upper floors have sill bands, ground floors have a plat band, and chamfered rustication with radial voussoirs articulates the ground floor, which sits above a plinth. Windows are six-over-six-pane sashes. Eight-panel doors are set back, many retaining cobweb fans in their overlights. The terminal houses at each end are pedimented and slightly advanced, each with a tall semicircular arched window to the centre of the ground floor set under a cornice on consoles. The central range displays a grand order of four pairs of Corinthian pilasters rising from the ground floor cornice. No. 66 (left terminal) has a door and plain overlight to the left and a four-window return to William Street where the ground floor plat band is returned, with a set-back door and overlight to the left-of-centre. Nos. 67 and 68 have doors to the right with quarter and full pilasters respectively at their party walls. Pilaster treatment varies across the row, with some houses having paired pilasters. No. 74 retains its original cobweb fan. No. 76 has a late 19th-century five-panel bolection-moulded door with a scrolled overlight and a 19th-century full-width stone balcony to the first floor. The right-hand range of No. 77 forms part of No. 7 Laura Place.

Internally, No. 77 (recorded by the Bath Preservation Trust in 1992) contains a cantilevered stone staircase with three flights to the first floor and a second flight to the second floor, with mahogany butler's trays on the landings and an enclosed smaller staircase to the third floor. The first-floor drawing room features a large triangular panelled cupboard with a six-panelled door in the wall angle, thought possibly a wig cupboard, suggesting this section may have functioned as a powder room. The ground floor has an irregular shape with a similar cupboard and connecting doors to the front sitting room. The kitchen contains an archway that originally housed a bread oven, and windows that were originally doors with stairs to the garden. A cupboard formerly contained a dumb waiter. The scullery retains a porcelain sink with fluted decoration. The lower basement contains a wine store and laundry with an old copper set into a stone block with space beneath for a fire.

No. 66 was converted into eight units for the elderly in 1971. No. 68, inspected in 1992, retains many original and Victorian features. No. 69 was adapted for hotel use in 1978. No. 73 became a guesthouse in 1958, No. 74 became a hotel in 1978, No. 75 was subdivided in 1982, and No. 76 was subdivided in 1966.

The street is historically significant as the principal element of the late 18th-century development of the Bathwick estate east of the River Avon, laid out on an unusually generous scale of 100 feet wide, and ranks as one of the most imposing urban set-pieces of its period in Britain. Robert Adam prepared designs in 1782, but Thomas Baldwin was responsible for the eventual executed design. Leases were granted from 1788, though progress was delayed by the building crash of the mid-1790s.

No. 66 was William Beckford's first home in Bath after leaving Fonthill in 1822 (compare Lansdown Tower, Lansdown Road, and 19 and 20 Lansdown Crescent). Hannah More lived in No. 76 from 1789 to 1820, commemorated by a bronze plaque.