A Tour of Bath

July 3, 2019

Our first full day in the city!

We started with bakery items for breakfast, I ran to a Starbucks for some caffeine, then we walked to the Bath Abbey to meet a guide for a walking tour. Richard, our guide, has lived in Bath for decades and has quite the enthusiasm for sharing the town's history with people.

W started by talking about the history of Bath and how the Romans founded it in the first century. They came for resources but stayed for the thermal spa they found here.

Later in the 18th century the Georgians developed it into a place for drinking, gambling, dancing and used the spas to help their ailments. Queen Ann used the spas to help sooth her gout and the city became really popular with the public. The current Georgian architecture is built 20 feet on top of the Roman ruins. You can see the differences in elevation all around the city. Because of the existing architecture, the city will never be able to reconstruct any of the Roman ruins. You can get small glimpses of it though, even in shop floors!

Here you can really see the difference between the lower Roman level of the city and the upper Geogrian level.

This stationary shop has clear tiles in the floor to see the Roman architecture underneath

We walked on tour for a little over an hour. We went all around the city and saw buldings and features from all periods of Bath's history.

      
The Cross of Remembrance has the names of all 417 people who were killed in German blitz bombing of the city in 1942. The city of Bath managed to stay out of WWII affairs until Hitler decided to target places of great historical significance. The Germans used an English tourist book to determine what sites to destroy. Over 3 days and 2 nights Bath lost thousands of buildings.
     
In 1956 the Clean Air act was passed and the black coal soot became less of a problem. The soft limestone that makes up most of the buildings is porous and really soaked in the soot; its also too soft to do harsh restoration techniques on. So to remove the soot, workers soak the stone and scrub at it to remove the residue.
     
Many of the buildings in the city have the limestone facades and then less expensive rubble stone round back.

Because of a window tax from 1696 to 1826, a property tax based on how many windows were built in a house (yea.. England and their taxes..), many buildings have either fake windows or filled-in windows. To tell which kind they are you can trace the mortar line of the stones- if its a straight line from the wall to the window, its probably a fake window. If its off-set, the windows were filled at a later date than the construction. I forgot to take a picture of them though, so use your imagination.

The Bath Assembly Rooms were used in the late 18th century as places for music and dance. Imagine upwards of 800 people in this room, who only bathed once every 4 to 5 weeks! That number of bodies dancing mixed with no real air flow and dozens of candle flames in the chandeliers must have been quite hot and smelly!

The chandeliers are the originals. They were taken down and stored somewhere safely during WWII. This building was destroyed in the blitz in 1942 but was reconstructed in the 1960s.

This assembly room has been restored to look as it did in the Georgian era.

Bath Circus has 3 levels of columns, each with a different style of capital: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. There are also hundreds of unique masonic and druidic symbols in a border along the buildings.

There are a handful of London plane trees in the center circle of the Circus. In the Georgian era the circle would have been fully paved so people wouldn't had to have walked on mud. In about 40 years when these trees die, the city will have to made the decision of planting new ones or paving the circle.