Project Gallery
Bath Gasworks was a second-year project, and a renovation brief in the truest sense: how to bring back a site the city had written off. The gasworks had stood condemned and empty for 50 years, an eyesore and a contamination risk on prime ground.
The real brief, though, sat outside architecture altogether. Bath has a housing crisis with no obvious exit: a student population that turns over every nine months, little innovation in its job sector, and an economy propped up almost entirely by tourism, whether from London day-trippers, students, or visitors from further afield. UNESCO's heritage status protects all of this, and rightly so, capping building heights and holding every new structure accountable to high building standards and the iconic Bath limestone that gives the city its character. But that protection comes at a cost: growth stalls, and developers have little reason to invest when the profit on any new build is capped from the outset.
And yet the gasworks itself offered a way through. Far enough from the tourist centre to function as a primarily residential quarter, close enough to Bristol to offer real job and cultural access with further investment in cycle paths, rail and bus links, the site had exactly what the city centre couldn't provide: room for young professionals to live affordably - which has the added bonus of help solve an ageing population crisis.
The design stayed deliberately noninvasive; ground treatment alone would demand serious investment, so the scheme worked with the site rather than against it. The gasworks' circular footprint was kept intact and pushed harder, not altered: clad entirely in Bath stone, the curve reads as a modernised nod to the Royal Crescent. At eye level, a waist-height sedum roof disguises the complex as a raised garden; at the staircase you get a fantastic reveal of the full three storey residential scheme show itself below. Third-floor apartments run clerestory windows, glazed one-way for privacy without sacrificing light, while sinking the building into the ground moderates its temperature by drawing on the earth's stored heat.
Economically, the circular plan allows for real variation in apartment pricing, and a gym, café, bar and function space are built in, so the residents this scheme was designed for have somewhere to live a life, not just sleep in a flat.
