Exciting developments are underway at Jacobs Wells Baths as restoration efforts continue...

As local residents may have seen, works are progressing on site at Jacobs Wells Baths as part of our repair and recovery efforts. The latest bat surveys have returned positive results, confirming no signs of a roost. With this assurance, a bat license has been submitted, allowing planned works to proceed as scheduled from the start of March.

Work has begun on dismantling the parapet wall, revealing the impressive strength of the original Cattybrook brick (see image, above). Our contractor has noted that the mortar is some of the toughest they’ve ever worked with, further testament to the building’s historic craftsmanship.

We’re also thrilled to announce that Historic England has awarded £89,743 to deliver a focused scope of works to the South Studio roof over the coming months. Stay tuned for updates as this next phase progresses.

Facilities Manager Emma Brown has been working closely with the design team to develop a secure access plan for the site and overseeing essential tasks such as site clearance and graffiti removal.

With these key milestones in place, Jacobs Wells Baths is moving closer to its restoration goals.

Thank you for your continued support and watch this space for more updates!

Join us on the journey to Save Jacobs Wells Baths & empower communities through the arts

Trinity Community Arts is a registered charity number 1144770

Image by Alistair Brookes

Historic England has awarded a grant of £89,743 to the Grade II listed Jacobs Wells Baths in Bristol, providing a further boost to secure the future of this important Victorian building.

The funding will support urgent repairs to the south studio wing, releasing the space for temporary community use while the wider restoration plans progress.

The work will include the restoration of the roof lantern, repairs to the chimney, roof supports, and gutters, and essential masonry work.

The south wing once housed the women’s warm baths. It is matched by another single-story wing on the north side which housed the men’s warm baths.

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Ross Simmonds, South West Regional Director at Historic England, said: "Jacobs Wells Baths is a remarkable example of Victorian civic architecture that tells an important story about public health and community life in Bristol. This grant represents another vital step in breathing new life into this much-loved building, ensuring it can once again serve as a vibrant community asset."

Emma Harvey, CEO of Trinity Community Arts, said: "This funding is more welcome news for Jacobs Wells Baths. These essential repairs will not only protect the building's historic fabric but will help us create a temporary community hub in the south wing. This space will become crucial for engaging local residents and stakeholders as we develop our wider vision for the building's future."

Carla Denyer, MP for Bristol Central, said: “Jacobs Wells Baths is an incredible historic building and I’ve been delighted to watch the progress as it has been restored for the community to use.

“This grant will play a vital role in ensuring that the Baths can become a thriving community hub, and I can’t wait to see the outcome of the restoration.”

This is the second Historic England repair grant to support the Saving Jacobs Wells project, which aims to transform the baths into a multi-purpose community, civic arts, and heritage hub. A grant of £57,800 in 2024 funded emergency works to prevent water getting into the building.

History

Built in 1889 to the designs of City Surveyor Josiah Thomas, the Northern Renaissance Revival style building features distinctive local red brick with buff terracotta dressings. The baths originally served Bristol residents with both swimming facilities and warm baths, fed by the natural springs of Jacob's Well on Brandon Hill. The building was listed at Grade II in 1977.

Ashton Court Future Ville Launch. Photo credit Caroline Thake

Bristol City Council has announced The Community Resilience Fund to be made available to community groups delivering provision in some of Bristol’s most deprived areas. The announcement of the grant follows the publication of Trinity’s 100 Beacons Report that we submitted to the City Council.

The report, created in partnership with other venues and the Council, shines a light on Bristol's community and cultural assets, including the critical role they played in providing local services as part of the COVID19 response.

"Huge thanks to Trinity for advocating for other community buildings in some of Bristol’s most neglected areas and to Bristol City Council for engaging and responding to this need” Katherine Chiswell Jones, Art Space Life Space

We created the report with the intention of building a collective case for capital investment in the city’s youth, community and cultural assets and we are pleased that Bristol City Council has now announced the commitment to funding these much-needed spaces.

The one-off pot of £4 million is also available for city-wide self-organised equality groups and is intended to help groups invest in costs, such as works to improve access, upgrading ICT infrastructure or works to a community building.

Our 100 Beacons report was part of our continued commitment to advocating for shared community and cultural spaces. We are members of Locality, support a ’Community Power Act’ and, have invested in Stokes Croft Land Trust.

Find out more about the funding and how to apply here

Dr Katie McClymont's talk '...and The Spirit Lingered On' explored the idea of community spirituality photo@ Khali Ackford

As momentum builds to save Jacob Wells Baths and return the listed building to community use we are looking back at our archive and sharing our blogs exploring the importance of community spaces. In this blog, first published in 2018 as part of our Heart & Soul heritage project, we reflect on Dr Katie McClymont's  (UWE’s Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning) public talk about municipal spirituality and its social context.

"Before Katie’s talk I did not understand much about the subject but it was an enormously interesting presentation with many specific examples from around Bristol." Audience member

The talk began with an explanation of the meaning of municipal spirituality and the way it occurs in places with civic and spiritual functions. The term is quite broad and can be applied to music venues, libraries, ex-churches, parks, public spaces and community centres. The factor of whether the space is inside or outside is irrelevant, it is the sense of potential for togetherness or inclusivity that is the key. This feeling does not have to respond to an existing religion, it can be responding to something beyond the everyday realm. For example, cemeteries are not necessarily places of religion but to many people have an enormous sense of the spiritual.

As part of her talk, Katie showed examples of church buildings around Bristol that have been re-purposed. They are all buildings that she happened to be passing on her route around the city on a given day, showing how many church buildings are scattered across the city, and the great proportion of them which are being used for something different than the original purpose.

Katie talked about how, through the 1970s and 1980s, there was an exponential rate of church closures. Some of these still have a social function, such as a former church in Easton that is now a centre for supported independence. Currently the Church of England (C of E) closes around 20-25 churches per each year.

A report from the charity Locality documents this selling buildings and what comminities are doing in response to this.

"I found it very interesting to hear that C of E churches are available for sale, listed on the C of E website for the public to peruse. Some of them have descriptions about their future use, for example ‘for continued worship’, ‘community work’ or ‘suitable for a wide range of uses’." Tess Sieling, project intern

Katie cited the strange feeling around seeing churches for sale in such a matter of fact, straightforward way when in fact they are very special buildings. This raised the question: can you put a price on a church? Also, what judgements are being made about the buildings before they are sold? The example of the Bill’s restaurant chain taking over old church buildings was used, as Katie said that in some cases the insides are ripped out but the strong ethos from the church remains. Even in its new function, sometimes a feeling of the old spirit lingers on. Katie is a very passionate advocate about the amazing idea that churches will always be a place to create connections between people and others; people and the past; and people and something bigger than themselves.

Katie made a film about community art spaces around Bristol including Trinity, Jacobs Wells Baths, Barton Hill Settlement and St Mary Redcliffe Church. As well as being a great medium to communicate the joys of community spaces, Katie said that when they were interviewing people from these spaces, after being asked a question, the interviewee would often give a very telling pause before answering which she believes shows the sense of the community space working beyond its physical and material achievements. Sometimes when churches are changed into private use buildings like a holiday home it can feel wrong and perhaps this is due to that change away from its original ethos. Is it because there is a feeling of loss of the shared community space that once was there?

What is the value of a church when it no longer is a church? Photo credit @Khali Ackford

Sometimes when churches are changed into private use buildings like a holiday home it can feel wrong and perhaps this is due to that change away from its original ethos. Is it because there is a feeling of loss of the shared community space that once was there?

Churches have value. They have a common purpose and a built heritage. The debate is what is their value is and when is it lost? If the value is the sense of people coming together and socialising with people they would not normally, then spaces like Trinity offer us examples of activites that do this with great popularity and with no religious aspect.

Churches closing have caused massive losses to local communities. In addition, a lot of us now live in self selective communities, so where do you meet people different from you apart from in a doctor’s waiting room or on a bus?

Katie's talk highlighted the importance of having inclusive places where different people can engage in a meaningful way. Do we define using a church as a multi use community space as adapting the church or losing the church? As an increasing number of us are of no religion, perhaps we are adapting churches to keep them relevant and concerts, gigs and other actitivites offer us that place to congregate in our secular state.

This write up was by Tess Sieling, who was the project intern on the Heart & Soul heritage project. The talk was part of a series exploring the challenges and achievements of transforming and preserving historic buildings and was programmed in collaboration with Bristol's Architecture Centre and the University of West England (UWE).

How to get involved

Click here to sign the Hotwells and Cliftonwood petition to Save Jacobs Wells Baths

Further reading

Read more from Katie McClymont in her published journal, Spaces for Secular Faith

Read more from our Heart & Soul talk series - Father Paul, Fidel Meraz and A Million Bricks of Love.

Read more about the Save Jacobs Wells Campaign here.

As part of the Saving Jacobs Wells Baths development phase, funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, heritage engagement specialists Local Learning have been working with 5 MArch Students from University of the West of England (UWE), City of Bristol College students on the Pathways to Independent Living course, Children from Willow Park Primary and accessibility practitioners Daisy Holder and David Ellington, to understand how accessibility in heritage spaces is not a nice to have but fundamental to how the building will function as a civic space.

With Phase 1 capital repairs live, plans for Phase 2 renovations will attempt to address some of the issues that have long held the building back. The former Victorian bathhouse suffers from being largely inaccessible with no lift provision and a complex arrangement of split levels and changes in floor height, meaning there is no level access throughout the building. This has historically limited who can use the space also limiting its viability. The inability for some participants to physically access the building as part of the design works limited their ability to engage fully in the design process, reinforcing that without full accessibility, the building cannot support meaningful participation or co-creation as a civic and cultural hub.

Through co-design sessions, disabled young people worked with the architecture students from UWE to develop proposals for a fully accessible youth space within the Baths. Their insights, grounded in lived experience of navigating the city, directly informed spatial design, circulation, and the social use of the building.

Many participants had no prior experience of youth spaces, reflecting the sustained closure of youth provision and limited access to dedicated, inclusive spaces within the immediate locality. This underscores both a critical infrastructure gap and the importance of designing environments that are genuinely accessible from the outset.

The student’s work also begun to articulate a unifying creative vision for the Baths that will underpin the building’s reimagining as a cultural powerhouse for Central Bristol Drawing on the building’s layered histories and future potential, UWE architecture student Nghi developed a framework that distilled these diverse narratives into five overarching themes: Resistance, Rhythm, Reflection, Flow and Imprint.

These themes capture the Baths’ evolution, from civic infrastructure to dance space to future cultural hub and provide a conceptual foundation for how the building could be experienced, programmed and interpreted.

The students work is informing technical designs being created by Architects PH3 Design. As part of the design consultation PH3 have also worked with accessibility specialists WECIL to refine and improved accessibility of the site, as part of Phase 2 capital work plans. A full accessibility audit can be seen here.

Sean Redmond, Architect from Ph3 Design said:

“Ensuring we weave accessibility throughout ever changing floor levels of this complex, listed building, has been a significant challenge that has benefitted hugely from the consultation and engagement events that the team has organised. We’re determined to ensure that when we’re finished, everyone – irrespective of their access needs - will be able to access all areas of the building and we can’t wait to welcome people of all access abilities into this magnificent new community and cultural hub.”

Through this process, children shared their experiences of the public realm, what feels welcoming, unfamiliar or out of reach, showing that accessibility is not just physical, but also about permission, ownership and cultural connection.

The work developed through this programme was presented publicly at a Reflection & Sharing session on 23 April 2026, bringing together partners, artists, students and community participants to reflect on learning to date and explore the building’s future potential.

UWE students talked through their design proposals demonstrating how early-stage architectural thinking can be meaningfully informed by people with lived experience, embedding accessibility, inclusion and social use at the heart of the design process. The event also created space for reflection, linking past and present learning to future work.

An interactive workshop led by Colourful Minds formed part of this wider engagement. It invited attendees to explore heritage, place and belonging, building on earlier work with children and young people including the Bristol–Bordeaux twinning exchange, funded by Bristol City Council, where children from after-school clubs at Evergreen, Hannah More, Easton and St Nicks primaries (with Willow Park to follow) created cardboard models of landmark buildings in both cities - such as La Rocher de Palmer, La Cité du Vin, Bristol Museum and Easton Jamia Masjid. Also facilitated by Laura from Colourful Minds, these sessions encouraged creativity, observation and a deeper connection to heritage.

The event presented a series of site activations created as part of Art of the Possible, a pilot activation programme exploring how artists can work within the Baths during its restoration. To date, 11 Bristol-based artists have responded to the space across disciplines including music, spoken word and dance, helping to test how the building might function as a future cultural hub.

This work demonstrates the value of embedding creative, community-led thinking within the development process, ensuring the restored Baths are not only physically accessible, but also culturally meaningful and legible to those who use them. It shows that investment in accessibility goes beyond compliance, enabling Jacobs Wells Baths to function as inclusive social infrastructure shaped by and for the communities it serves. It reinforces the role of heritage spaces as welcoming and relevant to those historically excluded from cultural and civic life, and highlights accessibility as a collective process, strengthened through ongoing collaboration and knowledge-sharing between practitioners, participants and future users.

Photos by Shamphat Productions

“Some of my favourite times making music, sharing music has been in grassroots venues. Getting it really right, getting it really wrong, getting it all shades of in between and through that, learning so much about not only myself, but learning about the people around me, learning what a sense of community feels like.

Grassroots venues are essential and so much love to Trinity for what this space is going to be." - Grove

Trinity Community Arts has launched Art of the Possible, new pilot programme exploring how creativity can thrive inside Jacobs Wells Baths while the historic building continues to undergo restoration. The programme offers a rare chance to experience the site in its current transitional state, test creative ideas and imagine future uses for the space for both communities and artists. The series invites Bristol artists to respond to the building as it is now, capturing the energy, atmosphere and potential held in an unfinished space.

As part of this pilot programme, Trinity is releasing a series of short videos created on site with Bristol artists, including Grove and Muneera Pilgrim. The series will feature a broad mix of artistic disciplines - from spoken word and live music to dance and electronic music, with more contributors to be announced as the programme unfolds.

As Trinity Community Arts works to restore the Grade II listed bathhouse, Art of the Possible acts as a living research and development process.

Emma Harvey, CEO of Trinity Community Arts, said:

“The history of Jacobs Wells Baths is rooted in everyday people making that which seemed impossible into a reality. And we know artists are the best people at bringing our imaginations and dreams to life.” -Emma Harvey

These early responses demonstrate how different art forms can inhabit the building even as repair work continues, offering audiences a glimpse into how the Baths might operate as a creative hub once restoration is complete.

“Grassroots venues are not just important they are vital they are the life blood to what we do as artists, as communities. If we don’t have grassroots venues we don’t have venues.

In spaces that are grassroots you get to cultivate music, art, truth, create community and create change”- Muneera Pilgrim

Muneera Pilgrim by Khali Ackford Photography

A continuation of heritage learning and participation offer for residents, schools and community groups already involved in this phase of the project, will run alongside the artistic research and development programme, helping people connect with the building’s social history and understand the traditional skills involved in its conservation.

This work is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, made possible thanks to National Lottery players, and is part of Trinity’s wider programme to bring Jacobs Wells Baths back into everyday community use. The Art of the Possible pilot also complements active restoration funded by the Architectural Heritage Fund and other partners.

Trinity continues active fundraising to support the next stage of restoration, with the aim of safely reopening the building as soon as possible. Continued support from local people, funders and partners will determine how quickly the Baths can return to public use.

Art of the Possible marks an important moment in the journey to bring Jacobs Wells Baths back into everyday community use, offering a glimpse of its future potential while celebrating its past alongside this important renovation phase.

Trinity’s wider renovation and engagement programme is supported by a range of funders and partners including the National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players, The Nisbet Trust, John James Foundation, Society of Merchant Venturers, Historic England, Pilgrim Trust, Bristol City Council, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Centrica Energy and Trinity’s individual donors and sponsors.