The Bath Postal Museum is in Bath, Somerset, England.
The museum was founded in 1979 by Audrey and Harold Swindells in the basement of their house in Great Pulteney Street. In 1985, it moved to a home in Broad Street. This was the site of Bath's main Post Office from 1822 to 1854 and the building in which the first recorded posting of a Penny Black took place on 2 May 1840. It has been designated by English Heritage as a grade II listed building.The museum's collections include: biographies of key figures involved with the development of the Post Office and connected with Bath, such as Ralph Allen, John Palmer and Thomas Moore Musgrave; a history of the post from 2000BC to the current day and a history of the British postbox.
Artefacts on display included quills and ink wells, stamp boxes, post boxes, post horns, clay tablets, strip maps, model mail coaches, and letters and postcards. There was also a replica Victorian post office.
Due to vastly increased rent from 2003, the museum had to move out of the Broad Street building and on 7 November 2006 it reopened on a much smaller scale in the basement of the post office building at 27 Northgate Street.
The Bath Assembly Rooms, designed by John Wood the Younger in 1769, are a set of assembly rooms located in the heart of the World Heritage City of Bath in England which are now open to the public as a visitor attraction. They are designated as a Grade I listed building.During the Georgian era Bath became fashionable, and the architects John Wood, the Elder, and his son laid out new areas of housing for residents and visitors. Assembly rooms had been built early in the 18th century, but a new venue for balls, concerts and gambling was envisaged in the area between Queen Square, The Circus and the Royal Crescent. Robert Adam submitted a proposal that was rejected as too expensive. John Wood, the Younger raised funding through a tontine, and construction started in 1769. The new or upper assembly rooms opened with a grand ball in 1771 and became the hub of fashionable society, being frequented by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, along with the nobility of the time.
The building, made of Bath stone, is arranged in a U shape. There are four main function rooms in the complex: the 100-foot-long ballroom — the largest Georgian interior in Bath; the tea room; the card room; and the octagon. The rooms have Whitefriars crystal chandeliers and are decorated with fine art.
In the 20th century they were used as a cinema and in 1931 were taken over by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and restored. They were bombed and burnt out during the Second World War, with restoration undertaken by Sir Albert Richardson before reopening in 1963. They are now owned by the National Trust and operated by Bath and North East Somerset Council for public functions. The basement of the building provides a home to the Fashion Museum.
The Museum of Bath Architecture in Bath, Somerset, England, occupies the Countess of Huntingdon's Chapel, where it provides exhibits that explain the building of the Georgian era city during the 18th century.
It is owned and managed by the Bath Preservation Trust. The Trust moved its own offices from Number One Royal Crescent to occupy part of the Chapel while the Whole Story Project was undertaken to reunite Number One with its original domestic offices. As of 2018 some Trust staff are based at No. 1 Royal Crescent and some are at the Old School House adjacent to the Museum of Bath Architecture.
The museum includes a series of models, maps, paintings and reconstructions to show how a typical Georgian house was constructed, from the ashlar stone to the decorative plasterwork. Sections include displays of stone mining, furniture making, painting, wallpaper, soft furnishings and upholstery. A model of Bath on a 1:500 scale gives a bird's-eye view of the city.
The study gallery specialises in books on architecture including the Bath Buildings Record and Coard Collection.The collection includes several works whose purchase was supported by the Art Fund. A panoramic view of Bath from Beechen Cliff, by Charles Joseph Hullmandel and dating from 1824 shows Bath as a still relatively small city, after its Georgian growth, but before the arrival of the railway and Victorian expansion. A slightly later panorama by Joseph William Allen is of Bath from Lyncombe Hill, on the present site of 6 Carlton Road, and includes a gabled house in the immediate centre foreground which still stands and is reputed to have been the house in which Alexander Pope once stayed.
