1-7, Orange Grove

ORANGE GROVE (South side)

Nos.1-7 (Consec) 11/08/72

GV II

Parade of Shops with accommodation over. Dated 1705 and 1897 on rainwater heads, built 1705-1708, and refaced and given uniform treatment with 11 gables in 1897. By CE Davis (1897 refacing). MATERIALS: Limestone rubble, rendered on front and back, pantile roofs. EXTERIOR: Three storeys, cellars and attic with barge-boarded gables, four storey tower to corner. 1897 shopfronts with coved fascia over, all of uniform character. Windows have sashes with unusual glazing pattern, ten/one, and are in groups of three, except for No.3 has only one gable to others two, with two windows, which make continuous five with two. First floor windows have shell hoods, second floor windows have cornices and pulvinated friezes. Gable windows are standard sashes of late C18 type, six/six. Tower at east end (No.1) full four storeys, third floor windows being sashes, six/six with cornices and pulvinated friezes. Plaster relief band, balustraded parapet, conical roof. Grouped rubble stacks with pots. Rear elevation seems to be little changed from early appearance. No.6 has three storey extension, otherwise only minor single storey ones. Mostly six/six sashes of late C18 type. INTERIORS: Shops all modernised, otherwise not inspected. HISTORY: A prominently sited, picturesquely conceived parade of shops, which shows a rejection of High Victorian classical eclecticism in favour of a more historicist treatment. Although the exteriors appear to be wholly of 1897, a print of 1737 shows that the appearance of these houses was not changed as drastically by C.E. Davis as might be imagined: the multi-gabled front was already present (albeit less regular), and the corner tower also (although this latter had gone by c1894, see photograph in Jackson). Leases of 1707 and 1708 required that houses being added to this row must be 'equal and uniform' to those already there. SOURCES: T. Fawcett and M. Inskip, The Making of Orange Grove: Bath History (1994), 24-50; N. Jackson, Nineteenth Century Bath - Architects and Architecture (1991), 231.

Listing NGR: ST7518964768