Sudeley, Gloucestershire

Hidden treasure

A few miles from where I live, hidden in a wood on a slope of the Cotswolds, lie the fragmentary remains of a Roman villa. The site was excavated in 1882, when some mosaics were uncovered, the remains of a few walls were noted, and the plan of a courtyard villa, which had developed from an earlier corridor-based structure, was made out. The ruins did not fare well in the years after the excavation. Damage due to frost, burrowing rabbits, and visitors occurred, and Emma Dent, the owner of the land on which they stood, removed one of the mosaics to her home, Sudeley Castle.* She had part of the site protected by wooden sheds to help preserve it, but those sheds have long rotted away and most of the remains are now all but enveloped in undergrowth and concealed by trees. One mosaic is protected by a low shelter roofed in corrugated iron. By bending down into the shelter and peeling back some sheeting held down by stones, one can see the mosaic, fragmentary but beautiful, its patterns of loops, curves and diagonals standing out in the gloom.

It’s not known for sure how old the villa is. Coins of the 3rd and 4th centuries were found on the site, and I’d guess that the building goes back well before that. That this much has managed to survive in its isolated and quiet location, in spite of animals, weather, and the removal of tesserae by ignorant 19th-century visitors, is heartening, and to me at least, somewhat moving.

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* She justified this removal because it was necessary to protect the mosaics from locals, who walked up to the site and removed handfuls of tesserae. A panel of the mosaic, having been removed to the castle, was apparently subsequently lost: its present location is unknown. A mosaic from another Roman site that Miss Dent removed had a happier fate: she had it restored and reinstalled in its original position.

Bath, Somerset

Another Bath

Walking out of the centre of Bath and up Bathwick Hill, one gradually leaves behind the urban Georgian world of symmetrical crescents and terraces and comes upon another, different Bath, a Bath of asymmetry and greenery. Here, in the 1830s and 1840s, a number of large, Italianate villas were constructed, to bring a breath of the South to these otherwise very English slopes.

These houses wear their Italianate origins on their sleeve. It even begins with the names on the gate piers – Casa Bianca, La Casetta, Fiesole. These villas are essays in the Picturesque, the asymmetrical style of the early-19th century, in which towers, balconies, loggias, chimneys, and overhanging roofs are assembled to produce enticing, rather Romantic houses. Openwork balusters, and ornate chimneys add further ornate notes, although there are also typical classical details such as quoins and large keystones.

All this material was marshalled by architect Henry Edmund Goodridge to produce houses like Fiesole, the one in my photograph. Goodridge, son of a successful Bath builder, built up a large practice in Somerset and Wiltshire. He attracted prominent patrons like William Beckford, whose Lansdown Tower he designed, and this brought him numerous domestic jobs in the area, many of which show this willingness to mix Italianate and Classical styles.

This bit of Italy in Somerset is a little known aspect of Bath and embodies a different architectural approach from those we normally expect to find in the city. The Pevsner city guide to Bath finds their design ‘formulaic, heavy-handed and lacking charm’. True, the concatenation of gables and projections, the jagged roof edges and the unbalanced facades hardly add up to great architecture. But I have a bit more time for them than the Pevsner guide. I’m rather fond of this lumpy collection of varied masses. In addition, my photograph, taken on a sunny afternoon, shows the practicality of the loggias, which are providing shade (on the upper floor) and sheltered sunshine (at ground level), a combination that works as well in England as in Italy. Once the preserve of well-heeled owners, today, these facilities are available to a wider public because Fiesole is a Youth Hostel.

Flaking paint, gate pier, Fiesole, Bath