The City of Bath Will Live Up to Its Name in the New Millennium

There’s no marketing problem here. Bath has the name, three hot springs spilling a million quarts of mineral water each day, and a spa tradition dating back at least 2,000 years.

And the one drawback--that Bath does not actually have any public bathing houses--will soon be rectified.

Bathless Bath in southwest England is building a thermal spa for the new millennium, hoping to turn one of Britain’s most popular tourist destinations into a resort to rival its original Roman watering place.

A year’s worth of archeological digs at the downtown site wound up last week, and construction on the $28-million Bath Spa is scheduled to begin in January. The aim is to open the spa in September 2001.

“The city has been trying to rebuild its baths for 25 years,” said Paul Simons, director of the Bath Spa Project. “There were lots of failed attempts for one reason: They were never big enough to support the cost of construction.”

This venture has been made viable by an $11-million grant from the government’s Millennium Commission, which distributes National Lottery funds for one-time, turn-of-the-millennium projects. The rest of the funding comes from the city and the Dutch firm TDC, which will operate the facility.

The high cost of building in Bath--and the prolonged construction schedule--is due to the fact that the city is a protected heritage site. In-depth archeological and seismological studies must be conducted, and buildings must meld with the city’s graceful Georgian architecture.

“You can’t just go in and slap some 20th century plaster on the walls,” said Giles White, a project spokesman.

In fact, the architecture of the spa will be thoroughly 20th century. The architects, Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners, who designed the Eurostar rail terminal at London’s Waterloo Station, plan a four-story, cube-shaped building in the honey-colored Bath stone, with a glass exterior to reflect the 18th century buildings around it.

“Generally, new buildings in Bath have been a pastiche of existing Georgian architecture and a poor effort at replicating what already exists. This project depended on a millennium grant, and the scheme said it should be forward-looking, not just look to the past. We felt the best way to interpret that was to leave a mark of the 20th century on the city and not simply imitate what had gone before,” White said.

The decision to go modern has been surprisingly noncontroversial among what Simons calls the “architecturally literate community of Bath,” in which just about everyone has something to say about each new building.

Michael Briggs, director of the Bath Preservation Trust, says this is because most Bathonians see the spa project as a return to the city’s roots.

“Everyone is so keen to see Bath used as a spa again. There is almost unanimous support for this, even though it is a modern building,” Briggs said.

The Romans built the first known network of baths and a temple dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva in the city between 43 and 50 AD. The pools fell to ruin in the 4th century, but 500 years later the King’s Bath was built on top of the old spa.

The baths were expanded in the 16th century. And in the 18th century, when Queen Anne came to take the mineral waters in Bath, the city enjoyed a boom. Its famous pillared Georgian houses were built as weekend or holiday homes for Britain’s aristocracy.

Bath’s 116-degree waters, with sulfate, chloride, calcium and other minerals, were bottled in the early 1900s and sold for relief from rheumatism, gout and lumbago, and the baths remained popular through the 1960s. The pools were closed to bathers in 1978 after a young girl died from a form of meningitis possibly contracted in Bath, and the old Roman baths became a museum for tourists.

The Roman Great Bath in the center of town cannot be renovated for use because its status as a protected building prohibits the amount of construction that would be required to bring it up to standards. However, two other former baths, the outdoor Cross Bath and the Hot Bath therapeutic center, will be revived.