A £100,000 investment has been secured to help make the Roman Baths more accessible to all visitors.
The Council was successful in making a bid for a share of grants totalling £4 million – to help improve 36 museums and galleries across the country – jointly funded by the Department for Culture Media and Sport and national charity the Wolfson Foundation.
The grant will help to improve the circulation space for visitors by providing a new route for wheelchair users through the Temple Precinct area of the Roman Baths and removing six flights of steps for all visitors. This area is underneath the Pump Room. It includes the original remains of the temple steps and the great altar, and the life-size gilt-bronze head of the goddess Sulis Minerva, whose statue once stood within the temple.. The money will also enable the area to be re-decorated, to help visitors identify those surviving walls that are originally Roman in their construction.
Councillor Cherry Beath (Lib-Dem, Combe down), Cabinet Member for Sustainable Development, said: “This project will re-display and deliver full accessibility for the first time to the Precinct of the Temple of Sulis Minerva in the Roman Baths and to the collections displayed therein. It will also deliver wheelchair access to the recently re-displayed Aquae Sulis and Worshipping the Gods museum galleries.
“This project will extend wheelchair access and double the number of objects currently visible. Improving accessibility has been one of the key drivers for Bath & North East Somerset Council’s Roman Baths Development which has brought about significant improvements to much of the visit over the last few years. This project follows on from that development and will now deliver full accessibility to all but the most hard to reach parts of the site.
“The introduction of a new platform lift will deliver visitors to a point where they can enter all three galleries. This is an astonishing transformation in an ancient monument that lies fifteen feet below modern street level and until recently had no wheelchair access and 13 flights of steps between the entrance and the exit.”
The total project is estimated to cost around £335,000, with the work being carried out on site in February/March 2013. The new access will be formed with a combination of a platform lift and a gently sloping walkway. It will connect to existing wheelchair-accessible areas of the museum and allow visitors who use wheelchairs to pass through the Temple Precinct in the same direction as other visitors.
The project will replace the wooden walkway with a more elegant and visually less intrusive structure that will follow a step free route.
For more information about Bath & North East Somerset Council’s Roman Baths visit http://www.romanbaths.co.uk or call 01225 477774.
