Description of the attraction
Pulteney Bridge is a bridge over the River Avon in the English city of Bath. It was built in 1773 and is under state protection as an architectural monument.
There are only four bridges in the world where shops are located on both sides from coast to coast, Pulteney Bridge is one of them. It is named for Frances Pulteney, heiress of the Batwick estate, located on the other side of the Avon, opposite Bath. It was an ordinary village, but Francis's husband, William, decided to turn it into a modern settlement, a suburb of Bath. And above all, he needed a bridge that would connect these two cities. With his idea for a new bridge, William turned to the architects brothers Robert and James Adam. Robert was fascinated by the construction of a new bridge, and he turned Pultney's simple project into an exquisite structure with rows of shops on either side of the bridge. Adam was in Italy, and his design traces the influence of the Ponte Vecchio and Ponte Rialto bridges - especially the Ponte Rialto project that never came to fruition.
In the form in which Adam created it, Pulteney Bridge lasted only twenty years. In 1792, the exterior of the facades was damaged by the expansion of shops, and the floods of 1799 and 1800 destroyed the northern end of the bridge. In the 19th century, shopkeepers completely remodeled their houses in all sorts of ways, and one of the houses on the southern end of the bridge was completely demolished.
In 1936, the bridge was included in the lists of architectural monuments, and the restoration of the original appearance of the facades began. The work was mostly completed for the 1951 British Film Festival. Today Pulteney Bridge is one of the most famous landmarks in Bath, famous for its masterpieces of Georgian architecture. In recent years, the city council has been considering plans to ban traffic across the bridge and turn it into a pedestrian zone.
