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Union Quarry

Odd Down, Bath.

This quarry was located to the north of Midford Road opposite St Martin's Hospital. It is shown as a 0.9 hectare quarry on large scale OS maps of 1873-88. The large scale maps of 1892-1914 show two cranes in the quarry.

It is not thought that there were any underground workings.

Alternative Names: None recorded.

Notes: An entry in Kelly's Directory of Somersetshire for 1889 gives the quarry master as Henry Shellard at Union Quarry. The 1911 census records Henry, then aged 65, as a stone quarry owner living at Rock View, Bloomfield Road in Bath with his wife and nine children. One of their some followed him into the business as the quarry, together with Beehive Quarry, was then worked by Shellard and Son who were recorded as "quarry owners and stone merchants" in 1919.

The Hill brothers extracted stone from Union Quarry, between the two world wars, and then Bill Reed was the final quarry owner. He was working the west face of the quarry in 1958 and into the mid-1960s. The high tech. engineering company, Cross Manufacturing, then built new workshops in the disused quarry in the mid-1970s. The old quarry site was built over and lost prior to 1999s and is now residential housing. One crane has been preserved, albeit with a slightly shortened mast.

The Wooster (1978) records that the "freestone was found at approximately eleven feet below the surface and was sixteen feet deep, ranging in beds from one foot six inches to three feet thick. The British Geological Survey has one sample collected from the quarry. It is recorded as a shelly oolitic limestone from the Great Oolite of the Middle Jurassic. The location is recorded as Union Quarry, Odd Down, Bath, Somerset with an NGR of ST 744 622.