ABSTRACT
In the early eighteenth century Bath had a population of some seven hundred families. Most of them lived within the town walls which formed an irregular polygon with sides about four hundred yards long. The town, situated in a loop of the Bristol Avon, had the river on two sides and the slopes of Lansdown and Beacon Hill to the north and west. Creative expression in Bath is, in Mannheim's sense, both ideological and utopian. In the way the market economy of agrarian capitalism, as well as determining the strength of demand for the good things Bath supplied and the site and sequence of development, also made it possible to tap reservoirs of capital in such a way as to enable a creative developer like John Wood to translate his image of man and nature into architectural forms. As an architect-developer Wood had to reconcile two contrasting parts of his being; capitalist and member of civil society, and creative artist.
