Sydney Gardens

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Sydney Gardens , looking south along the canal, Cleveland House in the background

Sydney Gardens is a public park in Bath, Somerset, United Kingdom. The layout has the shape of an elongated hexagon. It is cut by a railway line and a navigable canal.

history

Sydney Gardens 1810 with the canal, before the construction of the railroad
Sydney Gardens 1886 with canal and railway line

The four- hectare green space in the east of the city has two development phases. The change from a pleasure garden ( amusement park ) at the beginning of the 19th century to a public park fundamentally changed the character of the garden.

1st phase

Sydney Gardens was laid out in the period from 1790 to 1795 according to the plan of the architect Thomas Baldwin and completed by Charles Harcourt Masters . The model was the New Spring Gardens ( Vauxhall Gardens ) in London . The largest structure in the garden, the Sydney Hotel , was built in 1794.

As early as 1810, the park experienced a change with the construction of the Kennet and Avon Channel , as the waterway was led through the eastern part of the system and formed a cut. The division of the garden area was reinforced in 1840 by the construction of a double-track, full-track railway, a section of the Great Western Railway , for which a deep route was dug.

The operation of the amusement park came to an end in 1891 after the lease expired.

2nd phase

In 1908 the municipality acquired the property and made it accessible to the general public in 1913. The terrain cuts for the canal and railroad remained unchanged.

The hotel building was acquired by a foundation that same year, which opened the Holburne Museum of Art in 1916 . Today the park has the character of a landscape garden .

Equipment and structures

In addition to the Sydney Hotel, there is the Temple of Minerva , a structure with a tetrastyle portico , fluted columns and a triangular pediment, which was moved here from the Crystal Palace site in 1911 . The originally existing maze stood in the way of the construction of the railroad, a castle designed as a pseudo-architecture and a rural scenery equipped with mechanically moving figures are no longer available.

There are four pedestrian bridges, two lead over the railway line, the larger one was built according to plans by Isambard Kingdom Brunel , and two more lead over the canal, which in turn leaves the garden through two short tunnels to the north and south.

At the time it was operated as an amusement park, the railway line in particular was less likely to have been viewed as a disruption than as a further, interesting element, especially since the line of sight through the park was not impaired due to the lowering of the track. Similar connections to railways emerged in the 19th century, for example, in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (Paris) and in the Türkenschanzpark (Vienna).

gallery

  • Temple of Minerva

  • The railway line

  • Canal with tunnel portal

Web links

Commons : Sydney Gardens  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 23 '10.9 "  N , 2 ° 20' 57.5"  W.