| Possible forthcoming road works in Bath to address additional woes with vaults Posted by Mark A at 21:03, 12th November 2026 |     |
Hooo boy.
The article outlines a series of vault repairs similar to the ones from the last six months at the south end of Manvers Street, potentially starting with the other half of Manvers Street from spring next year and then tackling other areas such as Terrace Walk (about which I seem to recall a lot of discussion as to how to progress repairs as long ago as the 1990s). All dependent on a grant from the national government.
https://www.bathecho.co.uk/news/community/32m-bid-stop-vaults-city-centre-roads-collapsing-120650/
| Re: Possible forthcoming road works in Bath to address additional woes with vaults Posted by grahame at 08:53, 13th November 2026 | |
Hooo boy.
The article outlines a series of vault repairs similar to the ones from the last six months at the south end of Manvers Street, potentially starting with the other half of Manvers Street from spring next year and then tackling other areas such as Terrace Walk (about which I seem to recall a lot of discussion as to how to progress repairs as long ago as the 1990s). All dependent on a grant from the national government.
https://www.bathecho.co.uk/news/community/32m-bid-stop-vaults-city-centre-roads-collapsing-120650/
The article outlines a series of vault repairs similar to the ones from the last six months at the south end of Manvers Street, potentially starting with the other half of Manvers Street from spring next year and then tackling other areas such as Terrace Walk (about which I seem to recall a lot of discussion as to how to progress repairs as long ago as the 1990s). All dependent on a grant from the national government.
https://www.bathecho.co.uk/news/community/32m-bid-stop-vaults-city-centre-roads-collapsing-120650/
That rather explains the story heard but not corroborated that Manvers Street will be open for the Christmas Market but then closed again in the new year. Vunderball!
| Re: Possible forthcoming road works in Bath to address additional woes with vaults Posted by Red Squirrel at 09:37, 13th November 2026 | |
It’s all about damp, see. Damp will only rise about 1.3m, so if you raise the level of your ground floor by about that you will be, as it were, home and dry. If you round it up to 2m then you also get a useful storage space under your house for your coal, wine and cheese.
The problem with this arrangement is that your front door is now rather a big step up from the ground. So the Georgians raised the roads to match, adding even more useful subterranean storage space.
Nowadays we have fridges and central heating, so we’d just buy a roll of DPC from Screwfix and avoid all this complication.
If you go the western end of Kingsmead Street in Bath, walk down the steps and stand in the car park, you can see how this works. Half of Kingsmead Street was flattened in the interests of progress, and the resulting car park is at the original ground level.
