Bath councillors have voted to physically dismantle the city's UNESCO World Heritage status by removing every listed stone from the Roman baths, the Royal Crescent and the Circus, and rebuilding the entire city as a single terraced housing estate with a compulsory Georgian facade. The operation, codenamed «Operation Honey Stone», will begin at dawn on Monday with a team of masons instructed to unbolt the first column of the Pump Room and carry it to a designated rehousing site on the A4.
«We have listened to the government's housing targets, and we have decided to meet them by treating the city as a pile of very old bricks that can be stacked more efficiently», said council leader Margaret Tufnell, speaking from a cherry picker above the Royal Crescent. «Every stone will be catalogued, cleaned and re-laid as a two-bedroom flat with a shared courtyard. We estimate this will create four hundred new homes by Friday, and a further six hundred once we work out what to do with the abbey.»
UNESCO has been invited to attend the demolition as guests of honour and to watch from a specially erected grandstand on Pulteney Bridge. A spokesperson for the organisation said it would send an observer with a clipboard and a packed lunch. Local residents have been issued with a timetable: those living in the Circus will be relocated to a temporary car park in Trowbridge, while those in the Royal Crescent will be asked to stand very still while their front doors are removed and replaced with a bus shelter.
The first new resident, a retired teacher named Alan, is expected to move into the reassembled Pump Room on Tuesday. «It's a bit damp», he said, «but the water feature is a nice touch.»