The Royal Crescent is a row of 30 terraced houses laid out in a sweeping crescent in the City of Bath in Somerset. Designed by the architect John Wood the Younger and built between 1767 and 1774, it is among the greatest examples of Georgian architecture to be found in the United Kingdom. The buildings are all Grade I-listed.
John Wood designed the great curved façade with Ionic columns on a rusticated ground floor. The 114 columns are 30 inches in diameter reaching 47 feet, each with an entablature five feet deep. The central house (now the Royal Crescent Hotel) boasts two sets of coupled columns.
Interestingly, each original purchaser bought a length of the façade, and then employed their own architect to build a house behind the façade to their own specifications. Hence what can appear to be two houses is occasionally just one. While the front is uniform and symmetrical, the rear is a mixture of differing roof heights, juxtapositions and fenestration. In other words, a bit of a mess. This architecture, described as "Queen Anne fronts and Mary-Anne backs", occurs repeatedly in Bath.
The Royal Crescent is regarded as John Wood the Younger's greatest achievement and was one of the first designs of its type. It was imitated in Bath and also in later English towns such as Buxton, Brighton, Bristol and London.
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