St Andrew's, Church Street, Bath

In 1870 Sir George Gilbert Scott replaced a small chapel on a triangular site, behind the fashionable Royal Crescent at Bath. Here he erected St. Andrew’s Church, which was a sumptuous design in the Middle Pointed style, with Irvine also acting as the Clerk of Works. The foundation stone was laid in May 1870 and the church was consecrated in September 1873. A tower with a broach spire was added to the west end in 1878, by which time Irvine was at Rochester. The plain rows of terrace houses, so much admired today were, of course, deeply repugnant to the Gothic Revivalists and Scott clearly felt no need to acknowledge them in his design for St. Andrews. However, the tall spire of the church appearing over the roofs of the Royal Crescent, perhaps the finest terrace in the city was, as Pevsner comments, ‘unacceptable even from the picturesque mixer’s point of view’, but it was ‘happily bombed’ in the Second World War. All traces of Scott’s church have been erased and its site is nothing more than triangular piece of grass surrounded by busy roads.

Bladwell was the building contractor as with Bath Abbey.
Pevsner, N., North Somerset and Bristol, Buildings of England (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1958), p. 105.
Fisher, G., Stamp, G. and Heseltine, J., (eds), The Scott Family, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Avebury Publishing, Amersham, 1981), 21 [b].