Mr Pulteney’s Bridge: the first 250 years

Pulteney Bridge has become a major Bath icon, the only Georgian bridge in the world to have a complete row of shops on both sides. That’s not how it started off, so how did the bridge end up like that?

As if the hurdles that Pulteney had to overcome weren’t intriguing enough, by the time it was finished in 1774, times had moved on. The bridge was left forlorn, like a folly. It survived, but how has it changed over the last 250 years?

Join Dr Michael Rowe, who has been researching the Pulteney family for years and wrote their entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Paul Jackson who has been supplementing Michael’s research with that of his own, to uncover the often surprising story behind Pulteney Bridge.  Together, they are writing the definitive history of Frances, Laura and William Pulteney.