A city of consumerism, not culture?

Bath, a world heritage city and one of the finest cities in the UK, has come under fire in an article in Sunday’s Observer entitled ‘Is Bath Britain’s most backward city?’

Written by Stephen Bayley, the article (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2169978,00.html) accuses Bath of having a virulent hatred of all things modern following the rejection by the Tory-controlled Bath & North East Somerset Council of James Dyson’s £25 million plan to create a new school of design and the proposals to extend the Holburne Museum (http://www.bath.ac.uk/holburne/).

 In his article, Bayley asks ‘the nimbys of Bath’ whether “they want a city that resists healthy development, rejects bold new architecture and shrugs at any effort towards metropolitan improvements?”

“A city that flinches form the optimistic and new? The answer, it seems,is yes. What a depressing place,” concludes Bayley.

I have lived in central Bath for more than a decade and within 20 miles of Bath for virtually all my life.

I love this city but I agree with Bayley – Bath is increasingly becoming a museum and is stagnating.

While the city’s bureaucrats have been able to make a decision about redeveloping the Southgate shopping centre with a pastiche Georgian development that will create 58 new shops, it has failed spectacularly to embrace the exciting new proposals to extend the Holborne Museum with a visionary glass extension designed by Eric Parry.

I live in spitting distance of this museum and am appalled that this gallery risks closure and the loss of substantial lottery funding as a result of the short-sightedness of those who only want development in this city to involve ‘beige masonry’.

If this world heritage city wants to be more than a city of consumerism (and there are enough of those already in the UK), it needs visionary leadership that recognises and embraces the value and vitality of mixing the old with the new.

However, I fear that Stephen Bayley is right in his analysis and that Bath will continue to totter blindly towards becoming a Georgian theme park and not a vibrant city of the 21st century.