Originally built as a laundry, boilerhouse and warehouse to service the Victorian spa, our scheme has connected three historic buildings by navigating the level changes between them across a complex archaeological site. Two generous learning spaces are supported by essential facilities previously lacking: a generous cloakroom, dedicated WCs, offices and a lunchroom.

Beneath the street, at the Roman ground level, the Baths and the learning spaces are now connected, allowing visitors to walk across and through the archaeology that wasn’t previously open to the public. Part of the undercroft provides a third learning space where, immersed in Bath’s historical past, children can try archaeology for themselves. 

Within these enigmatic spaces the visitor experience is not ‘museumified’.  Here, Roman archaeology stands alongside medieval, Georgian and Victorian buildings in a continuum of over two thousand years of the city’s development. An impression of being ‘behind the scenes’ is preserved; there is space for visitors to see, interpret and imagine for themselves.  Scraping away layers of intervention in the old buildings reveals the character of the former laundry, boilerhouse and warehouse that once serviced the Victorian spa. Soot-blackened walls are left on view and, against this rugged backdrop, new insertions are drawn from a simple palette of unfinished steel, oak and bare lime plaster.