It’s not every day you get an email inviting you to take a look at something you have never seen before, but that is exactly what happened a few days ago.
Netty Miles lives on Hampton Row – alongside Cleveland Pools and the River Avon – and at the front of her home – basement level – a short flight of steps leads to an installation you certainly don’t get to see every day.
It’s an ice house.
A building used to store ice throughout the year and something that was very common amongst those who could afford to build one before the invention of the refrigerator.
According to Wikipedia, the ice house was introduced to Britain in the 1600s – there’s one in Hampton Court! More locally, there is one at Prior Park in Bath and at Ashton Court in Bristol.
The one in Hampton Row is a typical brick-lined and domed underground level structure but on the large and very impressive size.
It must predate the houses here and one wonders who had it built and for what purpose? It’s the sort of thing you would only expect to see at a large manor house!
It is not easily accessible, so l can’t see it going on a list of historical assets to view on any Heritage Open Day. Thanks Netty for letting me see it.
I wonder if this is something to do with Bathwick Villa? Ice houses were often some distance from the house and this would have been in the gardens of the villa. The advertisement when it went up for sale in 1782 does not mention an icehouse but says the gardens consisted of ‘of about an acre and a quarter of land laid out in the modern taste,with serpentine gravel walks, valuable shrubbery, evergreens, fishponds,bridges, fruit-trees, in the highest perfection.’ An icehouse would not have been out of place.
The other possibility I can think of is James Aust’s Villa Fields Tea, Pleasure and Aquatic Gardens but at 1855 I think it is a bit late.
I am 81 and went to Bath High School where I had a class mate whose family ran an ice company and lived in a big house in Bathampton, maybe it was theirs