I'll believe that sight unseen. I hate 1960s & 70s architecture -- and I hate to think of what was lost forever to make room for it; in a place like Bath most of all.
This century has been marked by replacing the worst offences with at least okay efforts - New Southgate might not be amazing but it's a huge improvement on what it replaces.
In Frankfurt they recently replaced a whole block of hideous 1960s/70s inner city architecture by authentic historic reconstructions of what had been ther before (and had been partly destroyed in WWII, partly to make room for the monstrosities). It may not be the "truly" authentic buildings anymore, but dammit, it's got *so* much more flair nevertheless!
Anything is better than those 1960s/70s monstrosities. And I definitely agree on New Southgate -- I saw it (or most of what was completed at the time) shortly before in opened; we visited Bath in the summer of that year.
The incomplete building site was probably an improvement on the Marchant's Passage/Hamm Gardens nightmare it replaced...
Great to hear about Frankfurt, my only experience of which was taking the train from the airport to Wiesbaden and back again a few days later. I'm not sure there's a sufficient record of the lost buildings in Bath to be able to do that.
The building site was almost completed when we visited, so I did get a pretty good impression. Though at the time, I thought "oh, just another shopping mall" ... it was only later that I learned what had been there before -- originally, and from the 1970s to the early 2000s.
I don't even want to know how much historical / architectural research, money, and effort it must have taken to recreate that Frankfurt inner city area. Though I think the interior of most of those houses doesn't actually follow historic plans / structures -- it's chiefly the buildings as such and the facades that have been reconstructed, with more modern and practical room plans inside. Still ...!
That's true of some of the most iconic Bath structures, e.g. most of Royal Crescent is divided into flats, there's a hotel right in the middle. No.1 is a museum that has been restored as best they can to it's original state. Dunno if you visited it?
Mostly original; the west end was destroyed by bombs during the "Baedecker Raids / Bath Blitz" near the end of WWII and was rebuilt after the war, along with The New Assembly Rooms which was an almost total loss.
I think there's a book about the Bath Blitz that I should probably get hold of, but I've still got four unread books about Bath architecture on my shelf...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom-R%C3%B6mer_Project
https://youtu.be/NlnyY9cwlv8
Anything is better than those 1960s/70s monstrosities. And I definitely agree on New Southgate -- I saw it (or most of what was completed at the time) shortly before in opened; we visited Bath in the summer of that year.
Great to hear about Frankfurt, my only experience of which was taking the train from the airport to Wiesbaden and back again a few days later. I'm not sure there's a sufficient record of the lost buildings in Bath to be able to do that.
I don't even want to know how much historical / architectural research, money, and effort it must have taken to recreate that Frankfurt inner city area. Though I think the interior of most of those houses doesn't actually follow historic plans / structures -- it's chiefly the buildings as such and the facades that have been reconstructed, with more modern and practical room plans inside. Still ...!