The Pleasures of Bath

The quaint town of Bath gives Hugh and Colleen Gantzer a glimpse of an era when Romans were at their hedonistic best...

We didn’t have a bath in the Roman baths in Bath. No one does, nowadays: certainly not the way the Romans did. Men and women bathed naked, together, exchanged gossip; had themselves oiled, massaged, steamed, scrubbed, depilated, listened to philosophers and learned discourses; even conducted their business in the baths. These were social centres, spas and clubs combined in one elaborate complex. But though those liberal Roman attitudes have fallen victim to the hypocritical prudery of later centuries, the imprint of its gracious birth has still left its gentle stamp on this quiet town in England. And we love it.

Twenty centuries after the Romans came, we made our second visit to Bath. It was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987 and when we stood in the Mendip Hills, rising above the town, we could see why it had been given this international recognition. Bath, made of white Bath-stone, sits massed in an oval bowl in the green hills, with the blue Avon River meandering through it. If it had been created by a designer for a fairy-tale set, he couldn’t have done better. It had just rained as it had rained 10,000 years ago. That ancient water had percolated through the Mendips, soaked into the ground, been heated by subterranean fires, and had then gushed out at an incredible “250,000 gallons per day at a temperature of approximately 46 degrees C.” And it’s still surging hot into the baths.

Though they don’t encourage you to bathe in the baths any more, the old baths continue to capture the ambience of the Roman age. We picked up audio guides at the circular reception counter under the domed rotunda and walked around the Roman Baths complex. It’s quite a labyrinth. Deep in its bowels the thermal spring still spurts out steaming water, discolouring the rocks of its mouth with the minerals it brings up from the fiery depths of the earth. Even before the Romans came, Celtic tribe, of the race of Asterix, felt this was a holy place and dedicated it to their Goddess Sulis. The Romans, not wanting to offend any supernatural being, added their own deity, Minerva and built a temple to Sulis Minerva. In the museum of the complex, we saw idols and dioramas of these ancient beliefs. And, when the Celtic and Roman Gods were superseded, Christians built their magnificent Abbey with its superb stained-glass windows and fan-vaulted ceiling as a virtual part of this complex.

The Abbey Square is still the heart of the town, filled with tourists and enlivened by street entertainers or buskers. A white-bearded man played a flute, acknowledged coins dropped at his feet. He was the successor of a long line of itinerant performers except, possibly, for brief period when a remarkable man named Richard ‘Beau’ Nash became the Master of Ceremonies of Bath. This flamboyant man, rid the town of its buskers and beggars, cleaned up the streets of Bath, laid down rules of conduct for its visitors, and attracted the Prince of Wales and his rich London friends escaping from the rigidity of the Germanic Georgian court. Bath became the social capital of England and it blossomed.

Nash made the Pump Room, in which visitors could drink the therapeutic water of the springs, the watering place of the elite. It’s still a fashionable restaurant, and the water is still drunk warm, and it still has a flat, iron-kettle, taste. Nash’s Assembly Rooms were the Drawing Room of Bath, though they are not as popular now as they were in Georgian times. The fascinating Museum of Costume is part of the Assembly Rooms. It captures the wide range of fabrics and dressing styles from the 16th century to the 20th showing the ebb and flow of fashion from the grotesque to the severely pragmatic, from the sack-back gown of brocaded silk of the 1770s to a denim mini-skirt of the 1990s. New exhibits are added every year to keep the exhibits in tune with the latest trends.

Nash’s success in establishing Bath as the haunt of the Page Three types of the Georgian Age also set off a chain reaction among local architects. We walked along that superb stretch of elegant houses known as the Royal Crescent and the Circus inspired by the moon and sun motifs of pre-Christian religions. No. 1 Royal Crescent has been restored as a typical Georgian House. We strolled through it and were delighted to find that much of the furniture and many of the fittings in it were familiar. The stately old homes of India still hold Georgian antiques presumably brought in by the nabobs of the East India Company.

Our hotel, the Francis, one of the oldest in Bath, spread inside two beautiful Georgian mansions. It, too, is filled with antiques or excellent replicas of them. Right across the street was the Queen’s Park. In it we discovered an obelisk erected by Richard Nash in honour of the visit, to Bath, of Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales, and his wife. We found it odd that her name had not been mentioned on the stone pillar.

We had wanted to catch the bus, that tours all the sights of Bath, from our hotel, but when we had told our concierge that we wished to visit their famed Postal Museum, he had smiled and said that we might get there faster if we walked. He was right. The Postal Museum is historic and run by a private organisation of dedicated philatelists. We spent an enchanted morning here absorbing the history of global postal services which marked the first great communication revolution of the world. This was history’s first post office and it was from here that, in 1840, the post-master’s daughter posted the first letter carrying the first postage stamp, the famed Penny Black, even before it was officially released. There are still a few, original, Penny Blacks on sale here.

Within walking distance of the Postal Museum (everything, in fact is within walking distance of everything else, in Bath) is the Bath Aqua Glass workshop and showroom. In the showroom there is a dazzling display of exquisite, free-blown, glass from vases and bowls through mirrors and jewellery: every bit is handmade and each of them is inscribed Bath and dated making them unique.

There are many types of English glass, virtually all of them drawing from a heritage established by the Romans. And their colours vary. Thus, Exmoor Cranberry glass is red because of the addition of a little gold according to a Victorian recipe. Bristol produces a deep blue glass because of the addition of the cobalt derivative, Saxony smalt blue, to the molten glass. The aqua blue colour of Bath glass comes from copper oxide, one of the main elements of the spa waters. Behind the showroom is the Theatre of Glass. We sat behind a railed off area and watched glass-blowers draw a red-hot lollypop of glass, out of furnaces heated to 1300 degrees C at the end of long pipes. They then blew it and turned it to create their marvels of crystals. In fact, they even allowed a little girl to have a hands-on, or rather a ‘mouth-on’ experience, blowing her own glass object. It was a memorable visit and we strongly recommend it.

There is another encounter that is an essential part of the Bath experience though, for us, it wasn’t nearly as memorable as the Theatre of Glass. All guide books encourage tourists to visit Sally Lunn’s House, reputed to be one of the oldest in Bath. Atop the remains of an old Roman villa, medieval builders seemed to have constructed a faggot oven, possible as part of a kitchen to feed the masons building the old cathedral. Then there’s the romantic story of the protestant Sally Lunn fleeing religious persecution in her native France, and bringing the recipe for her famed bun to this house. More likely, however, is the fact that these confections are known in France As Sol et Lune, literally Sun and Moon, because they are yellow on top and white below. If you feel you should taste a Sally Lunn bun, have it with cream tea in the restaurant in Sally Lunn’s house. It is really a brioche, slightly more interesting than the Bath bun, which is a sugar-and spice currant bun; and appreciably more delectable than the Bath Oliver: an unsweetened biscuit invented by an 18th century doctor for his corpulent patients.

Clearly, Bath’s traditional snacks are rather unimaginative. But it has made very creative use of one of its bridges. Built in 1770, the Pulteney Bridge was inspired by the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. It’s a shop-lined bridge made of beautiful Bath Stone and was designed by Robert Adams. He is better known for his Adams style of furniture. And this is just another one of the gentle wonders awaiting discovery in the beautiful old city of Bath.