Bath: England’s Haven of the Senses by Jeremy Seal
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Steam is rising into the gathering dusk from the roof-top pool of the spa building in the heart of Georgian Bath. I’m poaching myself a pleasurable pink and feeling like something of a playboy. I find myself sharing this super-sized, open-air hot tub with a group of bikini-clad girls on a hen night considering pub and club options and a gaggle of French glamourpuss mums haggling over fish restaurants.
And there was I thinking this English West Country city was classic aunty territory – all open-top bus rides, audio tours of the Roman baths, shopping on Milsom Street and perhaps a nice bath bun in Sally Lunn’s tea shoppe to finish. Despite its famous looks – set in a bowl of riverside parkland, with its honey-toned Palladian crescents, terraces and Rialto-style Pulteney Bridge - this World Heritage Site has often been dismissed as overbearingly genteel, even staid; home of dowager dames and bowls-playing retired professionals. Even the city’s most illustrious sometime resident Jane Austen, who set much of her fiction here, did not much enjoy her time in this bastion of polite society.
Bath’s Baths
The city further lost its way in 1978 when its world-famous mineral baths were closed following a meningitis scare. As over a million litres of thermal spring water went daily to waste in the River Avon, Bath ossified into a heritage and retail experience, leaving visitors to bemoan a Georgian theme park with nothing like the pleasure potential or crucial cool of that other old established British resort, Brighton.
Well, Brighton beware. Bath’s baths reopened (after embarrassingly protracted delays) in 2006. And though the indigestible-sounding Thermae Bath Spa is still crying out for a catchy nickname, the city has been quicker to recover its original sense of purpose. It may even have improved upon it, coming over all stylish, even steamy, in the process. Jane Austen? Shirley Conran, more like.
The flourishing hydro scene now extends beyond the main spa to the city’s top two hotels, the Bath Spa and the Royal Crescent, which have since opened excellent spas of their own. Bath’s culinary landscape has also been transformed, with a spate of excellent eatery openings emphasising the home-made and locally sourced in pared down but homely surroundings. Bath is re-establishing itself, if not quite as a full-on fleshpot, at the very least as a haven of the senses.
Taking to the Waters
Visitors to Bath have been taking the waters – the springs emerge from the earth at a constant 47 Celsius - since time immemorial. Bladud, legendary son of King Lear, supposedly discovered the waters’ health-giving properties when a dip here cured him of leprosy. A range of conditions including infertility, gout, palsy, psoriasis and polio were duly treated at the baths. Not a pretty sight, as one visitor confirmed in 1817. ‘It seems to me incredibly dingy and wretched, and the infamous old men and youths carried in chairs and mechanical carriages round the smoking baths horrify me,’ he wrote.
Today’s visitors are spared such scenes. The new spa seems intent upon putting clear water between itself and the adjacent Royal Mineral Water Hospital (even today the UK’s national centre for rheumatism treatment) to emerge as a full-on pampering centre. The building’s spectacular glass façade conceals a beautiful, soothing interior, complete with scented steam rooms, indoor pool with whirlpools and neck massage jets, restaurant and treatments including aroma massages, Shiatsu sessions, wraps in everything from Alpine hay and nutrient-rich mud to seaweed and Chardonnay.
It’s plain that most visitors are suffering from nothing more serious than a little too much of the modern world. One of the French mothers, on what she calls a corporate visit to Bath, tells me she’s just been immersed for a blissful hour in lavender blossom. ‘How I needed it,’ she exclaims. ‘I only flew back from Guadeloupe two days ago.’
Estimable Residents and Visitors
Lord alone knows what the city’s roll-call of estimable residents and visitors – the young Queen Victoria, Clive of India, Pitt the Elder, William Wilberforce and Charles Dickens among them - would have made of the new Bath. It’s a fair bet, though, that William Beckford would have approved.
I’m staying in the ground-floor apartment of the remarkable Italianate tower which this literary aesthete, erotic sensualist and all-round millionaire prodigal built on Lansdown Hill after moving to Bath in 1822; not, at 45 minutes on foot from the city centre, the most central accommodation option on offer but hard to beat for atmosphere.
The apartment was restored in 1999 and is a truly Beckfordian vision, with its scarlet drawing room’s arched windows, coffered wooden ceiling, enormous marble fireplace, cotton moiré wall hangings and gilt-framed eighteenth-century landscapes. I have my own key to the 130-foot tower which I climb for the belvedere’s fabulous views over the city and beyond, to Salisbury Plain and the Avon Valley. I wander in the surrounding cemetery, all Gothic romance, where Beckford lies in a typically overblown sarcophagus among canted, ivy-swathed headstones.
The apartment’s location is also a spur to walk - especially with the spa to soothe those aching muscles – and Bath, richly served by a network of local footpaths and lying on both the 100-mile Cotswold Way and the Kennet & Avon Canal towpath, is a walkers’ paradise. One such footpath leads me through fields across the city’s northern slopes to emerge at Lansdown Crescent. This majestic sweep of houses, fronted by a wooded slope where sheep graze, is the most delightfully positioned, though least discovered, of all the city’s crescents.
Steep Slopes
I drop down steeply sloping Park Street, which sorely tried the visiting Charles Dickens for puff, and heading for one of the city’s lesser-known museums; the house at 19 New King Street, home to musician and astronomer William Herschel during the 1780s. It’s a beguiling period piece, and the workshop where Herschel fashioned telescopic lenses is a welcome reminder that there was more to Regency Bath than frivolous tea dances at the Assembly Rooms. It was in the house’s garden, now laid out with cypress trees and quinces, that the star-gazing Herschel first discovered the planet Uranus (to the evident amusement of the schoolchildren touring the museum when I arrive) in 1781.
I spend the afternoon tackling the city’s famous Skyline Walk. It takes me on a six-mile ramble up the sloping woodlands and meadows which push hard against the south side of the city. The city is a spectacular panorama beneath me though I am in the deepest countryside, pushing through stands of beech trees and thick carpets of bluebells. I even disturb deer in Bathwick Woods.
The hen party and the French mums are gone by the time I finish my pre-dinner soak at the spa. I head for the Garrick’s Head, a newly opened restaurant in a former pub, where stripped-down parlour surroundings suit the spectacularly simple menu. Call it honest English, but it happens that venison in stout, with braised red cabbage and root mash is all I could wish for. I get a taxi back to my hilltop tower.
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