Bath City Council/Bath & North East Somerset Council. Collected records relating to the building and furnishing of the Guildhall
Reference Number
BC/6/9/1
Level of Description
Series
Title
Bath City Council/Bath & North East Somerset Council. Collected records relating to the building and furnishing of the Guildhall
Date
1775-1987
Extent
Extent: 4 boxes
Description
These records relating to the Guildhall were created or received by various officers and departments of the Council at different dates. They were assembled together into an artificial 'collection' before coming into the custody of the Record Office. They were found in two boxes, one of which appears to have been compiled at an earlier date than the other.
In cataloguing the records, we have made no attempt to establish the original provenance of the individual items within the boxes, which would be difficult if not impossible to ascertain. The items in Box 1, which date from the 1790s to about 1900, fall naturally into two sections: papers relating to the building and upkeep of the eighteenth-century section of the Guildhall; and records relating to building of the Guildhall extension from the mid-nineteenth century. These have been catalogued as BC/6/9/1/1 and BC/6/9/1/2 respectively. The second box, which appears to have been assembled more recently, has been kept as one box and catalogued as BC/6/9/1/3.
The records include significant material about the building and maintenance of the Guildhall, including reports, plans, elevations, petitions, lease agreements, contracts, ledgers, letters and drawings. They also include designs of the original Guildhall Architect, Thomas Baldwin (c.1750-1820), accounts of the payments made to him during the building of the Guildhall, papers relating to repairs and ideas for extending the municipal buildings during the nineteenth century, and documents, plans, and reports relating to the building of the Guildhall extension in 1893 by the London Architect John McKean Brydon (1840-1901). The papers relating to the Guildhall extension include two of the competition designs, reports on the plans and progress of the extension, sketches and designs for fixtures and furnishings, and memorials relating to the financing of the project.
