SPLASH! Rediscovering Studley’s Bathing House 

 Why the details matter, and why we look for them

 MN 13th June 2013

 Looking at the Studley Royal designed landscape through an archaeologist’s eyes, it often strikes me how much it is like a worn coin found in a ploughed field. It’s an exciting discovery. It obviously has a long history – public and private – imbued in what it is and what it looks like, though that story may take effort to read, and not be obvious at first glance. It’s also that it was once more detailed and has become worn through use.

Wonderful as the gardens remain – more than fully justifying their recognition as a World Heritage Site, a place of “outstanding universal value” – when one starts to investigate them it is immediately obvious that much has been changed or lost since the death of William Aislabie in 1781. William himself, unusually amongst Georgian garden makers, was concerned with the preservation of his creation and addressed this through conditions in his will. But whatever he may have wanted, all gardens are organic and simply won’t stand still; features and buildings decay and may or may not be replaced; others may come, filling the gaps created, to meet new needs. Over the course of time, just like the worn coin, much detail has been lost from the gardens. But, with care, you can often make out where and what those details were, or even identify those lost completely.

 If we’re going to understand and conserve William Aislabie’s masterpiece those details matter. Every designed landscape (landscape-scale garden) is a work of art, a unique sculptural essay. Designed Landscapes marry planting, built structures and the management of views with the natural (or modified) topography to produce a range of sensory, aesthetic and emotional effects. Little, if anything, that remained within them was there by accident. Even in its degraded state, Studley is a defining example of this genre.

 There are a range of reasons why it’s a unique masterpiece, one of which is the intricacy with which John (and later his son, William) Aislabie fitted so many experiences and episodes into a relatively restricted piece of landscape. This is especially true of John’s work (at the core of the present gardens) mainly developed at the 1720s and 1730s, when he was effectively writing the rules of contemporary landscape design. The Skell valley was laid out with statues, water features, buildings and paths (great and small, at a range of heights up the valley side) serving a series criss-crossing network of carefully contrived set-piece views and experiences. The whole was as precise and co-dependent on its parts as a watch mechanism.

 What we are left with today works, brilliantly, but many of the mechanism’s parts have vanished. Some, such as smaller paths, were of lesser significance; others, like statues, perhaps of rather more. And then there are the missing buildings.

 We have long known that one of these was a Bathing House, which once stood on what is now one of the main paths through the garden. However, we know comparatively little of its form, and there is nothing there today to suggest that there was once a handsome building on the site. But it is a location still focussed on by other elements of the garden design, and therefore experienced – unnoticed – by the majority of Studley’s visitors.

 This summer’s work aims to discover more about this missing detail, to think about it seriously for the first time since the building’s demolition in the 1850s. The work will (hopefully!) rediscover what the building looked like, and perhaps more about the reasons for its construction and the full role that it played in the garden design.

 It will also ensure that we are looking after any archaeological remains properly – and explore the potential to some way 'restore' the Bathing House to people’s understanding and experience of Studley. And thus an important worn-away detail will be returned to its rightful place.