Prior Park

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Prior Park is a Neo-Palladian house on a hill overlooking Bath in Somerset, England. It was designed by John Wood the Elder and built in the 1730s–1740s for Ralph Allen to showcase Bath stone. The building is Grade I listed.

The design follows Palladio’s style: a long central block with 15 bays, flanked by two wings of 17 bays, connected by arcades and a porte-cochère. Construction began in 1734, but Wood was dismissed and his clerk Richard Jones finished the work, adding the Palladian Bridge. The house was completed in 1743 and Allen lived there until his death in 1764.

The surrounding park covers about 28 acres and was laid out in stages by poets and landscape gardeners, including Alexander Pope and Capability Brown. Features include the Palladian Bridge (one of only four in the world), a Gothic temple, a grotto, an ice house, a serpentinite lake, and other garden structures. The garden helped shape the English garden style in Europe.

After Allen’s death, the estate passed through the family. In 1828 Augustine Baines bought it and created two colleges in the wings. Henry Goodridge updated the staircase, added a gym, and a theatre was added in the West Wing around 1834. A fire in 1836 damaged parts of the house. The seminary closed in 1856 after a fire and financial problems. In 1867 Bishop Clifford established a Roman Catholic Grammar School in the mansion. It later became a boys’ boarding school run by the Christian Brothers, and since 1924 it has been a mixed public school, now Prior Park College. The mansion burned again in 1836 and 1991; the 1991 fire destroyed much of the interior and rebuilding took about three years.

The National Trust owns the parkland, and restoration work on the cascade, lake and Gothic temple began in 2006–2007. The Palladian Bridge also appears on the cover of the Opeth album Morningrise.