Sydney Gardens, Bath, England

The most impressive approach to the Gardens is from Great Pultney Street, which has the Holburne of Menstrie Museum at its head. The site is a neat hexagonal design surrounded by a stone wall. The Holburne Museum is at the south-west corner and is divided from the main part of the Gardens by a low wall.

There are two principal entrances to the Gardens, which slope upwards to Sydney House. Like the Holburne Museum, Sydney House is separated from the main body of the Gardens. A wide path leads diagonally (south-west / north-east) across the centre of the site up to the rotunda. The gardens are cut north-south by the railway and the Kennet and Avon Canal. Whilst they obviously dramatically alter the original design of the Gardens, the canal and railway are screened by their cuttings and form interesting features. There are a large number of mature trees and shrubs.

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.   

Late-18th century commercial pleasure grounds designed by Thomas Baldwin and Charles Harcourt Masters, opened by Bath City Council as a public park in 1913.

DESCRIPTION

LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING

Sydney Gardens occupy a 4 hectare elongated hexagon-shaped site situated in Bathwick, a residential area to the north-east side of Bath. The site is ringed by public roads: Beckford Road to the north, Sydney Place to the south and west, and Sydney Road to the east, from which the Gardens are screened by an encircling stone wall, erected about 1880.

REFERENCES

P Egan, Walks through Bath (1819), pp 200-09

J Kerr, Sydney Gardens Vauxhall, Bath (1825)

Gardeners' Chronicle, ii (1886), pp 43-4

S Sydenham, Bath Pleasure Gardens of the 18th century, issuing metal admission tickets (1907, facsimile edn), pp 1-6

W Ison, The Georgian Buildings of Bath (1948), pp 95-7

Country Life, 106 (29 July 1949), pp 328-30

Trans Assoc Studies in the Conservation of Historic Buildings 5, (1980), pp 30-3

Inspector's Report: Sydney Gardens, (English Heritage 1984)

C Pound, Genius of Bath - The City and its Landscape (1986), pp 56-9

P Atkinson, Sydney Gardens and the development of the eighteenth century pleasure gardens in Bath, (unpub thesis submitted to the Architecture Association 1989)

Avon Gardens Trust Newsletter, (Autumn 1991), pp 23-9; (Spring 1992), pp 8-14; (Autumn 1992), pp 11-12

Sydney Gardens, Bath: A Survey of the Landscape, (Colvin and Moggridge; Debois Landscape Survey Group 1992, revised 1993) [Report for Bath City Council]

S Harding and D Lambert, Parks and Gardens of Avon (1994), p 100

R Gilding, Historic Public Parks, Bath (1997), pp 9-20

B Snaddon, The Last Promenade, Sydney Gardens, Bath (2000)

Description rewritten: July 2000

Amended: May 2001, November 2003

Edited: January 2004