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Dr Cathryn Spence is a museum professional, writer, lecturer and heritage consultant. She has published 5 books and countless articles on Bath’s history, including Bath in the Blitz: Then and Now (History Press, 2012) and, more recently, The Story of Bath (History Press, 2016).

While Director of the Building of Bath Museum (now the Museum of Bath Architecture), Cathryn curated several exhibitions that dealt specifically with post-war Bath, including “If you want to keep Georgian artisan’s houses, then you will have to find Georgian artisans to live in them” – Crisis Collecting and the Coards and Poetry in Stone – Betjeman on Bath.

In this lecture she will consider the various schemes put forward to improve the city during the twentieth century, including Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1945 A Plan for Bath and Colin Buchanan’s 1960s controversial road tunnel. Her discussion will highlight that opposition to modernism in the Preserve Bath Movement which led, inexorably, to the worst excesses of The Sack of Bath. Cathryn will argue that the abandonment of such pioneering schemes resulted in the dysfunctional Bath we all have to live with today.