The Huntsman Public House

The Huntsman Public House

Public house, formerly a shop with house attached, built between 1748 and 1750, probably designed by John Wood the Elder. The building is constructed of limestone, rendered and painted, with a Welsh slate roof.

The building occupies a prominent corner position on Terrace Walk with a return elevation to North Parade Passage. It comprises three storeys and an attic. The Terrace Walk elevation has three windows and features a notable original stone shopfront, the only one of its kind remaining in Bath. The shopfront is framed by four Ionic engaged columns and contains three arched openings: the central entrance is three-centred, while the side openings are semicircular. The spandrels are carved with swags of drapery and foliage, and the keystones bear carved female heads. Above the shopfront are small-paned windows, partly altered with replaced glazing bars and radiating fans to each arch head. A panelled door with panelled sides marks the entrance.

The first floor has three windows with architrave surrounds, the centre window being pedimented. Plain four/four sash windows sit directly on the entablature below, showing that sills have been dropped. The second floor windows are similar in style but of original size and without pediment. A dentil cornice runs around the entire building. The mansard roof features two flat-topped dormers with six/six sashes.

The return elevation to North Parade Passage has six bays. The left-hand three bays were formerly a separate house, numbered 6 North Parade Passage, with three windows to the first and second floors. These windows have architrave surrounds, with cornice heads and a continuous sill band on the first floor. All windows are late 18th-century sashes of six/six pattern. The ground floor displays an early 19th-century eight/eight sash to the left, a small eight-pane window in the centre, and to the right a hybrid classical and Gothic doorway of approximately 1880. This doorway features a heavy arched head on elaborate console brackets supported by Corinthian colonnettes, with a panelled door and scrolled wrought iron sign bracket above.

Three tall ashlar stacks with weathering frame paired flat-topped dormers with six/six sashes. The return wall of No.1 Terrace Walk shows similar treatment, though two windows on the right are blind. The front to Lilliput Alley is plain, featuring irregular rough-faced masonry not intended for public view.

The ground floor interior has been substantially altered, though the bar retains traces of Regency-period meander pattern plasterwork. Behind the bar is a fine open string wooden staircase with alternating columnar and twisted posts, panelling to dado height with pilasters, and an upswept dado rail. The principal first floor room retains a modillion cornice and vestigial panelling, indicating significant room layout changes; a late Georgian marble chimneypiece has been inserted.

Early documentary evidence, in the form of an undated deed copy hanging within the pub, describes the building as "the new built shop to Mr James Jones house" and shows a single-room shop in the south-east corner. The shop and house have since been merged. The shopfront has undergone changes to its entrance arrangement: contemporary prints show the entrance centrally positioned, but a print from 1824 shows the door in the right-hand bay, and photographs from the 1920s confirm it remained in this position.

The building occupied a prominent location, closing the western end of North Parade and forming the southern termination of this busy public street. The premises were known as the Terrace Walk Wine Vaults when functioning as a wine and spirits shop, before becoming an Eldridge, Pope public house in 1906.