John Wood the Elder
John Wood was born in 1704 and is Bath’s most important architect, having designed and built many of the city’s world famous landmarks.
The son of a local builder, George Wood, he was probably educated at the Blue Coat School. He worked at Bramham Park in Yorkshire and was involved in speculative builds in London. In late 1721 Wood, aged 17, is recorded as having leased a piece of land in a London residential development with the intention of building a house on it. The plot was north of Oxford Street and part of the Cavendish estate. Wood was involved in other speculative builds in London as well. London was enjoying a building boom after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The first speculative build on the Cavendish estate was not a success, but Wood managed to fend off bankruptcy and actually take on another speculative build. By the end of 1723 he had built and found a tenant for No.1. Oxford Street. Between 1722 and 1727 (on-and-off) Wood was working at Bramham in Yorkshire, Robert Benson, the first Baron Bingley’s estate.
Wood is the unsung hero of eighteenth century British architecture. He revolutionised the aesthetic of city streetscapes and proved hugely influential to the development of town planning. Yet in spite of such importance, Wood remains academically neglected and his architectural ambitions misunderstood.
John Wood set aside the fashionable sources of ancient Greece and Rome for his architecture. Instead he used the aesthetic of neo-classicism as a means to express an architecture, the full origins of which could be traced from biblical times rather than the heathens of classical antiquity. Wood’s belief in this development of architecture was absolute. When he combined it with the legend of king Bladud, the mystery of a Druidical University and the deep-rooted influence of Freemasonry, he created an extraordinary myth surrounding the foundation of Bath. To give such beliefs physical form, Wood strove to restore the magnitude of an ancient British city, and set about achieving it by manipulating the geometry and proportions of traditional British monuments such as Stonehenge and Stanton Drew.
As well as work in Bath, Wood Senior designed the Bristol and Liverpool Exchanges, a country house in Berkshire and rebuilt Llandaff Cathedral near Cardiff. Wood also published a number of books, including Towards a Description of Bath.
He died shortly after the foundation stone to the Circus was laid in 1754 and is buried at Swainswick Church, Bath.
Transatlantic Acorns
Two of John Wood’s original stone acorns from the King’s Circus were shipped from the USA to Bath in time for The Building of Bath Museum’s 2005 exhibition ‘Obsession’.
The acorns were taken from Bath in 1962 when extensive repairs were being carried out on the King’s Circus. Brown Morton III, an American architectural student who was staying in Bath, spotted builders removing the acorns from the parapet and then loading them into a lorry.
The two workers would not sell them as it was ‘more than their job’s worth’ but suggested that if the architect were to follow them, they could not help it if he saw where the acorns were being dumped.
Brown took the salvaged acorns back to where he was staying in Brock Street. When he returned to America he gave them to his friend, Jane Plante, who was then living in Hampstead, London.
They remained with the Plantes in London until 1981, when the family returned to South Carolina. Jane’s first husband died and when she met her second husband she moved to a smaller house and the newlyweds decided to donate the acorns back to Bath and, significantly, to The Building of Bath Museum.