Vision
Queen Square was the first speculative development by the architect John Wood, the Elder, who later lived in a house on the square.
Wood set out to restore Bath to what he believed was its former ancient glory as one of the most important and significant cities in Britain. In 1725 he developed an ambitious plan for his home town:
| “ | I began to turn thoughts towards the improvement of the city by building. | ” |
Wood's grand plans for Bath were consistently hampered by the Corporation (council), churchmen, landowners and moneymen. Instead he approached Robert Gay, a barber surgeon from London, and the owner of the Barton Farm estate in the Manor of Walcot, outside the city walls. On these fields Wood established Bath’s architectural style, the basic principals of which were copied by all those architects who came after him.
Read more about this topic: Queen Square (Bath)
Famous quotes containing the word vision:
“The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
““The god has not yet answered to our pity
For the black vision and tangle in her brains,
Nor is there knowing soever in the city
Of the red histories that throbbed in her blue veins.””
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)