Records of Bath City Council and Bath and North East Somerset Council

Administrative History

Bath is unique in Britain for its thermal spa waters and its Georgian townscape surrounded by green hills. Settlements have been built around the natural hot springs for thousands of years. In Roman times, 'Aquae Sulis' was a major spa town and religious centre. In the centuries after the end of the Roman occupation the city declined, but in the late seventh century Bath became an important Christian religious centre following the building of a monastery. By the middle ages, Bath had become a regional market town and a centre for the wool trade, with thriving guilds and tradesmen living alongside the powerful and wealthy abbey. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, the property owned by Bath Abbey was acquired by the corporation, increasing its power and property-ownership. During the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, as the wool trade declined, Bath began to develop as a spa, with royal and aristocratic visitors attracted by the health-giving reputation of the waters. By the early eighteenth century, the city had been transformed into a nationally-important resort for fashionable nobility and gentry. As fashion and tastes changed, a gradual decline followed, and by the nineteenth century Bath had become a genteel retirement and health resort, albeit with a significant manufacturing sector - until re-inventing itself in the late twentieth century as a vibrant tourist hot-spot.

The Development of the City Council

The origins of the City Council lie in the trade and merchant guilds who obtained a charter from Richard I in 1189, freeing them from tolls levied by the Crown and empowering them to hold fairs and markets. Later charters confirmed and extended these powers, and gave the right to administer justice within the city; the charter granted by Elizabeth I in 1590 also set out in detail how the city was to be administered, confirming what was by that date current practice. The corporation was a self-selecting body of councillors, aldermen and a mayor: twenty councillors were chosen from the freemen of the city; in addition, the councillors chose between 4 and 20 (but usually about 9) aldermen as well as a mayor, who served for a year at a time, but could serve more than once.

Bath was of course only one of several hundred boroughs created by royal charters. In the early nineteenth century, growing dissatisfaction with these chartered boroughs, many of which were seen as being corrupt and inefficient, led to a Royal Commission on Municipal Government and the passing of the Municipal Corporations Act in 1835. The Act brought a number of changes to the governance of boroughs, including Bath. The most important of these were the end to self-selecting corporations, to be replaced by councils elected by ratepayers, and the removal of judicial administration from their responsibilities.

Further changes were introduced by the Local Government Act of 1888. This Act made substantial alterations to local government in England and Wales, creating county councils and county borough councils. The latter were usually large cities, and were outside the county structure, responsible for all services and functions within their boundaries. Bath ceased to be a municipal borough and became one of these new county boroughs, but the change, sometimes of major significance elsewhere, seems to have had very little impact within the city. Its functions remained more or less unchanged, and its title (by now, 'City of Bath') was not altered.

The next change in the structure of local government, however, had a far greater impact on Bath. In 1974, following the local Government Act of 1972, Bath ceased to be a county borough, and became a second-tier authority, a District Council under Avon County Council. Some functions such as education and social services passed to Avon, while others, such as planning and public health remained with the city. The change was short-lived, however: another re-organisation of local government in 1996 saw Bath District Council united with the adjacent Wansdyke District Council to create Bath & North East Somerset Council. Once more an all-purpose, unitary authority, the Council is responsible for all local authority functions within its (now greatly-enlarged) area.

Functions of the Council

Despite centuries of continuity in some of the Council's functions, its powers and responsibilities have increased dramatically over time. The main focus of the medieval corporation was the maintenance of its rights and privileges and the furtherance of trade for its members, along with the acquisition and leasing of property, and the administration of justice. By the mid-sixteenth century, some civic amenities were provided, such as piped water to a small number of streets, and occasional street cleaning and repairs; but the modern concept of a council whose principal responsibility is providing for the health and well-being of its inhabitants would not have been recognised. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the provision of amenities such as paved streets, street lighting, and watching (policing) became more urgent, both for the convenience of the inhabitants and to serve the high class visitors. Not having the authority under their charters to do this work or to raise money to fund it, the corporation obtained private Acts of Parliament to enable them to carry out specific functions: Acts obtained in 1707, 1721 and 1739 gave them powers to set up a turnpike trust and to pave, clean and light city streets, and to arrange rubbish removal, for which they could charge a rate on householders. These Acts, and an Act of 1757 which sought to make parishes responsible for such services, had limited success, and the corporation turned to the solution adopted by other cities: the setting up of Commissions for specific purposes and covering specific, small areas. Such commissions were set up in Bath by Acts of Parliament in 1766, 1789, 1793 and 1801. Although the Corporation was represented on the Commissions, they were independent bodies.

The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 initially made little change to the functions of the council, which remained limited, and for the next decade and a half the Commissions continued to be responsible for what would now be seen as basic civic services. The Commissions finally came to end in 1851, when their functions were taken over by the Council under the Bath Act of 1851. Under this Act, the Council adopted the provisions of the Public Health Act of 1848 and became the Local Board of Health for the city; this gave it powers and responsibilities in relation to public health and sanitation, such as the provision of sewers, paving and cleaning of streets, and removal of rubbish. The 1851 Act repealed all the Acts relating to Commissions, and provided that all the assets of the Commissioners were to be passed to the Council. The Council appointed a committee (the '1851 Bath Act Committee') for executing the Act. This committee came to an end in 1871, when its responsibilities were passed to the Council meeting as the Urban Sanitary Authority (for policy decisions), and to the Sanitary and Surveying Committees of the Urban Sanitary Authority (for detailed work).

During the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, the functions and responsibilities of the council - as of all city councils - expanded dramatically. Further public health responsibilities were added by the 1858,1872 and later Public Health Acts; the Education Act of 1902 transferred responsibility for education to the council; and responsibility for poor relief was transferred from the Board of Guardians in 1929, developing into a rather differently-focussed responsibility for social welfare in the late 1940s. Some responsibility for housing was given to the council in 1909, developing into a wider responsibility for town planning in the 1930s and particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. The council also developed municipal undertakings: it had provided a water supply to a limited part of the city since the sixteenth century, but from the mid-nineteenth century this was expanded to the whole city; and it generated and supplied electricity from the 1890s.

From the second half of the twentieth century, the trend for the growth of powers and responsibilities began very gradually to be reversed. In the late 1940s, Bath City Council, like other local authorities, ceased to have responsibility for electricity and gas supplies; responsibility for water supply was lost in the 1970s. Towards the end of the twentieth century, significant changes took place which have left Bath and North East Somerset Council with, amongst other things, a very much reduced role in the provision of education and a totally transformed role in the provision of health and social services.

The area covered by the Council

The changes in structure, powers and responsibilities have been accompanied by equally dramatic changes over time in the area covered by the city. The medieval city was very small, bounded by the city walls. The 1590 Charter defined the city as a larger area, taking in land to the north-west, and a large part of the parish of Walcot, which lay outside the city walls. The 1769 local Act added a portion of Bathwick, near the river. The rest of Bathwick, along with the rest of Walcot (apart from a detached portion), and Lyncombe and Widcombe, were added to the city at the time of the Municipal Corporations Act in 1835. The 1911 Boundary Extension Act added what had been the separate villages of Twerton, Lower Weston and part of Charlcombe, while the 1951 Boundary Extension Act added further parts of Charlcombe, together with parts of Claverton, English Combe, Monkton Combe, South Stoke, and Weston. The 1967 Bath Order added the rest of Charlcombe, and parts of Batheaston, Monkton Combe and Swainswick. Bath & North East Somerset Council, the authority created in 1996, includes all the Bath City area, and extends to Keynsham in the West, and south to Midsomer Norton and Radstock, including numerous villages.

This description has been compiled with reference to the following printed sources, as well as from internal evidence from the records themselves:

Brian Barber, 'Municipal Corporations', 'Ad-Hoc Authorities' and 'Local Government 1872-1974', units 7,9 and 10 of the module 'Records of Central and Local Government' in the Society of Archivists' 'Diploma Training Manual', London, 1996

Graham Davis and Penny Bonsall, 'Bath. A New History', Keele, 1996

Trevor Fawcett, 'Bath Administer'd', Bath, 2001

K B Smellie, 'A History of Local Government', London, 1968

S and B Webb, 'The Manor and the Borough', with a new introduction by B Keith-Lucas, London 1963

John Wroughton, 'Tudor Bath', Bath, 2006

The Records

The records of the council, in all its guises, are large in quantity and complex in nature. The earliest record is the charter of 1189; property records date from the thirteenth century, financial records from the sixteenth, and minutes from the seventeenth century. The bulk of the records, however, date from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and are continuing to accrue. The records include the constitutional records of the council - the foundation documents such as charters and acts of parliament; minutes of the council and its committees; and records created by its officers and employees, relating to all aspects of its work.

System of arrangement

Many of the records have been kept in the Guildhall since their creation, some for hundreds of years; others have been stored in other council buildings, and transferred to the Record Office at various dates. Unfortunately, over at least a hundred years, numerous attempts at re-ordering and classifying the records have been made, so that the original order of much of the material has been lost. While it is fascinating to find the evidence of work carried out many years ago, this re-ordering has made the complex task of arranging and cataloguing the records to current standards even more difficult than it might otherwise have been. Organisational change and restructuring, particularly in the later twentieth century, have added to the complexity of the task.

Arrangement of the records has therefore been carried out taking a number of considerations into account:

- the basic archival principal of provenance and original order, where this is identifiable (Who created these records? What order were they kept in?)

- the function of the records (What purpose were the records created for? Has responsibility for this function changed between different departments at different dates?)

- ease of use by potential researchers (While keeping in mind the different interests of different researchers)

The result has been a pragmatic arrangement, sometimes bringing together artificially-created sub-fonds and series, because this provides the easiest method of access to researchers, while at other times keeping together seemingly disparate material because it was quite clearly created by one individual or department. The reasons for most of the arrangement decisions are given at the appropriate points in the detailed catalogue. Because inevitably records of relevance to the same subject may be found in a number of different places in the catalogue, substantial cross-referencing and information on related records is also included.

The collection has been divided into 22 'sub-fonds', some based on the creator of the records, and some comprising records brought together on a functional or thematic basis. The sub-fonds are as follows:

BC/1 Constitutional records: Charters, Acts of Parliament, and related records of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council

BC/2 Council and Committee Minutes and related records of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council

BC/3 Records of the Town Clerks, Chief Executives, and related departments of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council

BC/4 Records of Bath Municipal Courts

BC/5 Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council Financial and Accounting Records

BC/6 Records relating to property owned or administered by Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council

BC/7 Records relating to the responsibilities of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council for infrastructure

BC/8 Planning and Development Control records of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council

BC/9 Records of the Civic Functions of the Mayors of Bath

BC/10 Records relating to Bath City markets

BC/11 Records relating to Bath City gaol

BC/12 Records relating to the work of Bath City Watch Committee

BC/13 Bath as a Spa, Cultural and Tourist centre: records of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council's responsibilities for culture, leisure and tourism

BC/14 Records of the public health responsibilities of Bath City Council

BC/15 Records of Bath Education Authority

BC/16 Records relating to the responsibilities of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council for parks, allotments and cemeteries

BC/17 Records relating to the responsibilities of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council for Public Assistance, Children's Services, and Social Services

BC/18 Records relating to Bath City Council's responsibilities for civil defence

BC/19 Records relating to Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council officers and employees

BC/20 Records relating to Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council public relations and communications activities

BC/21 Records of Bath City Freemen

BC/22 Records of Bath [Improvement] Commissions

Note that only some of these records have been catalogued in detail. Further detailed cataloguing is continuing; please contact the Record Office for more information.

Cataloguing of the records was funded by a grant from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives, awarded in 2014. The archivists carrying out the cataloguing were assisted by a dedicated team of volunteers, some of whom are credited individually in the detailed catalogue, while others preferred to remain anonymous.

The Heritage Lottery Fund awarded a grant to the Record Office in 2015 for the project 'Our Heritage, Your Story: Explore the Past with Bath Record Office.' As part of this project, the Record Office was able to provide training, supervision and support for the team of volunteers, who sorted, cleaned, listed and packaged a significant amount of records.