Rename bridge to honour architect

Our resolute Home Secretary is on record as saying that we should not seek to change the names of streets that honour slave tycoons.

Bath is loyal to her, in paying place-name tribute to William Beckford whose enormous inheritance included sugar plantations and 3,000 black slaves, William Pulteney, who profited from slave plantations in America, and the Duke of Chandos, a major investor in the notorious Royal African Company, which traded vast numbers of slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The Home Secretary has a point, however, that the street names are there to honour such men for their other, more positive achievements and public service.

Even so, might we consider reassigning at least one of Bath’s many place-name tributes to Pulteney and his daughter Henrietta Laura?

Through his wife, Pulteney inherited the vast but still rural and undeveloped Bathwick estate.

Finding it tiresome to take a ferry across the river to reach his new properties, which he was anxious to develop, Pulteney resolved to build a bridge.

He had the money and the discrimination to commission a fellow Scot, Robert Adam, to design it for him.

Despite many problems, changes and adaptations, the result remains one of Bath’s worldrenowned architectural marvels.

Is this a case where Pulteney might cede one of his many placename honours to the architect, so that we might in future call it the Adam Bridge?

In this way Robert Adam’s name would be properly commemorated along

side those other gifted architects who created Georgian Bath.

David Robinson

Bath