The project unfolded over two very different days.
The first day began under cloud, the low, even, democratic greyness that can be a gift to architecture. In that light, Bath Quays South’s mass and material presence softened. The Bath stone, brick, glazing and metalwork were released from the tyranny of contrast. The building could be read as a civic object.
This is often the more useful weather for understanding a project. Sunshine flatters, but cloud explains. Under that grey lid, the relationship between the new building, the refurbished Newark Works and the riverside public realm became clearer. The scheme’s real subject is not novelty, but adjacency: old industrial fabric beside new commercial architecture; river beside city; engineered flood defence beside public promenade; working building beside heritage context. One could see the project’s negotiations more plainly in the absence of spectacle.
There was a particular pleasure in photographing the Newark Works in this light. The retained industrial fabric carried its age without sentimentality. The old Stothert & Pitt presence still felt embedded in the ground, in the cadence of openings, brickwork, thresholds and yards. The new work around it seemed most convincing when allowed to remain in conversation rather than competition. For Bath, a city so often trapped by its own postcard image, this mattered. Bath Quays South is not Royal Crescent Bath. It belongs to another Bath: riverine, industrious, infrastructural, slightly tougher, and all the more interesting for it.
The second day arrived with sun. What had been calm and analytical became spatial and animated. The river took up the light. The facades gained relief. The public realm acquired depth and rhythm. Balustrades, paving, soffits, reveals and window lines became instruments of measure. The bridge, the river edge, the new routes through the site, all began to feel less like components of a regeneration diagram and more like inhabited pieces of city.
Photographing for Penoyre & Prasad inevitably brings with it a heightened awareness of architecture as public argument. It is architecture as a proposition about how a city changes without giving itself away. Bath is a particularly demanding test of that question. The city’s beauty is not benign; it exerts pressure. Every new intervention is asked to justify itself against a powerful inherited order.
For a photographer Bath Quays South was especially rewarding because it is a project of altered conditions. A former industrial riverside site has been reworked into a place of offices, studios, crossings and public space. The camera’s task was not to make it heroic, but to make it legible: to show the intelligence of its urban position, the tactility of its materials, the memory of Newark Works, and the new civic life beginning to gather around the river.
