Sale away: Jane Stephenson on how Bath Meeting came to sell its building

‘We have significant questions and opportunities to consider.’

On York Street in Bath, if you look for the imposing building that was once the Friends Meeting House, you will now see a bookshop: Topping & Company Booksellers Ltd. Friends who enter the premises can hardly fail to be impressed by the sights that greet them. The building has found a new life, and Bath Friends are now seeking their way forward.

Our former Meeting House is a large Grade II-listed neo-classical building of some 4,000 square feet. Designed by William Wilkins, who also designed the National Gallery in London, it was built for Freemasons in 1817 and sold to Quakers in 1866. Over the years, much of our Meeting’s limited resources and energies had to be devoted to the building, attending to its increasing maintenance and conservation needs. In good times, we supplemented the upkeep with income from shared use for educational work, by local charities, and other lettings.

Our discernment in 2019 to sell the Meeting House did not come out of the blue. An earlier generation of Bath Friends had considered selling in the mid-1970s. A further planned sale fell through in 2009 due to the impact of the financial crash on the prospective buyer. In the aftermath of this, we recruited a property management company to undertake the day-to-day management of the building and found two anchor tenants that assured financial stability for a few years. We made renewed efforts to refurbish the building and to make it more environmentally sustainable.

In 2014, we set up a long-term vision group to look at future options. By 2017, we could see that the anchor tenants were planning to move on, and we began a process of discernment to look at our options. Rather than selling, we focused on retaining ownership and leasing the building. We identified four potential pathways:

• developing a long-term relationship with one of the existing anchor tenants, a local charity working with homeless people
• finding new anchor tenants
• letting the rooms on an ad hoc basis to premium hirers
• developing a joint venture with a partner.

We held sessions with Friends from across the Area Meeting to discuss these possibilities, hear suggestions, and answer questions. By 2018, we were ready to thresh the emerging ideas, and used a sequence of decision-tree diagrams to explore the consequences for their longer-term viability. This process helped us see how setting out along one path might close off other options, and how incompatible our aspirations and resources were. Some ideas would have entailed burdens for Friends, as yet unknown, in the future. Many ideas required not just commitment to a Meeting but to a building that was no longer suited to our purposes. At our subsequent business meeting we united in discerning our readiness to move on.

We knew from the 2009 experience that a decision to sell was just the start. We moved the Meeting from the building and, from April 2019, rented rooms in the Bath Central United Reformed Church (BCURC). The Area Meeting trustees had to piece together the jigsaw of the historical ownership of the building by searching for evidence in the nineteenth-century Quaker archives held at the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre. Consultation with the Charity Commission required further work on the status of each of the Area Meeting’s properties. An agreement with the Charity Commission was reached in December 2019.

This cleared the way to advertise the building for sale, which invited the submission of sealed bids. These were received in March 2020, and the trustees chose Topping & Company Booksellers Ltd.

Within weeks of this decision it was clear that the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown made the business environment very precarious. Topping & Co approached the trustees with a suggestion that they exchange contracts in early 2021 with a defined completion date, and simultaneously agree a lease-and-rental until the sale was complete. After agreement by the trustees, the lease of the property took effect in March 2021 and extensive refurbishment work began. The bookshop opened in November 2021. The final completion of the sale is expected before 2024.

Meanwhile, like all Friends across Britain, we learned to live with the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. We used Zoom when meeting in person was not permitted. We welcomed the discovery that this allowed some to join us online where they would previously have been unable to attend in person. In periods when we were again able to meet in the BCURC rooms, we nonetheless maintained our Zoom Meetings in parallel, making our best responses to the needs of all who would participate.

During 2021, our Area Meeting began to engage with the lessons learned from Britain Yearly Meeting’s Simpler Meetings project. It was encouraging to learn that around thirty per cent of Quaker Meetings in Britain do not own a Meeting house – and even more so to discover that, of the Meetings that have grown in number by fifty per cent in the last ten years, three quarters do not have one.

We can see that, as we consider the future of the Quaker Meeting in Bath, we have significant questions and opportunities to consider. Bath is the largest urban centre of our West Wiltshire & East Somerset Area Meeting, well-served by public transport links, home to many thousands of people, and much visited by tourists. As we emerge from the restrictions of the pandemic, we will likely want to keep the benefits conferred by Zoom but also to find a new place – or places – where others can readily find our distinctive form of worship.

Naturally, these are questions for Quakers in Bath, but also for those of our Area Meeting and particularly for our trustees. Having the proceeds from the sale does not necessarily mean the purchase of another building, or the rental of premises available for use at any time of the week. We can learn from our past, so much of which is the history of Friends rather than of a building. Bath Quakers have been involved with the city and local communities for over 350 years, forward-thinking and active in pursuit of social and economic justice. Friends have sustained a Quaker commitment to conflict resolution, equality, accessibility, inclusivity, and environmental sustainability. We have held exhibitions, hosted theatre and film, and held public debates about matters central to Quaker beliefs. For a while, Bath Meeting was a Sanctuary Meeting, involved with refugee assistance, and has maintained a pacifist presence at commemorations of those who died in war. We have nurtured a Children’s Meeting and our own spiritual growth. We have set aside space and time to discuss many topics, from education to humanitarian relief to end-of-life matters. None of these activities require us to own a building. We will wait patiently for the way to open, and to find unity as we seek the right way forward.

---

Comments

Please login to add a comment