Stone conservation students at City of Bath College have started repairing a second 19th century statue that used to have pride of place in Bath city centre.
Last summer, the students celebrated the successful conservation of a precious statue of a Grecian lady, thought to have been created around the 1820s.
The gesso statue arrived at the College’s Construction Skills Centre in hundreds of pieces and covered with more than 50 layers of paint, but was been painstakingly rebuilt, cleaned and restored to its former glory.
A second statue, of a Greco-Roman Muse, is now being restored by the talented trainee conservators, in the hope that the pair can be reinstated in The Corridor in the centre of Bath.
There is a question mark over the history of the statues, which were two of four that used to stand in The Corridor. It is believed that the statues may have been damaged in the 1974 IRA bomb blast, though nobody has been able to confirm this.
Working at the College’s Construction Skills Centre the students have remade both of the statue’s arms from the elbow down, including all the fingers. They are now cleaning off around 60 layers of paint.
One of the students currently working on the second statue is Alice Kingma Lee.
“I’m enjoying the project so much,” she said. “The cleaning process is hard work, you have to be meticulous, but it’s very rewarding. To be working on something so old, with such a history, is why I chose to do the course.”
Nigel Bryant, College stone conservation lecturer, said: “Providing our students with projects like these are the perfect way to help them perfect their stone conservation skills.
“The projects are challenging but a lot of fun, and very rewarding once you see the finished product. Working on high-profile projects such as this and also the Orangery at Tyntesfield Manor for the National Trust has given the students a real taste of what’s involved in architectural stone conservation and has helped prepare them for the world of work.”
“The Tyntesfield project won a national Heritage Angel Award last year which is a fantastic accolade and is a reflection of the hard work of our students and our excellent working partnership with the National Trust and Nimbus Construction.”
Students from the College’s Architectural Stone Conservation course have led on the statue conservation project, which is being run in conjunction with Bath and North East Somerset Council and the Bath Preservation Trust. The project is being overseen and funded by the World Heritage Site Enhancement Fund.
The Architectural Stone Conservation course is run over two days a week, one at College and one on-site at Tyntesfield Manor, through a partnership with the National Trust. The popular course equips students with the knowledge and skills they need to obtain a Level 3 NVQ in Heritage Skills, which will help them to find work in the Conservation and Heritage sectors.
For more information on the Architectural Stone Conservation course contact Nigel Bryant on 01225 334806 or email [email protected].
