Tuesday, 16 September 2025, Bath, walking tour

Written 19 November 2025

Whew. While I was scrambling around, trying to figure out whether I'd left my recorder in the Pump Room and how to get it back, the wait staff found it when they cleared the tables. They knew it was a Tauck table and they knew Stefano from many previous tours, so they gave it to him. He knew it was mine, because he'd asked about my constantly muttering into it during tours. So he brought it back to the hotel, left it in the care of the concièrge, and sent me a Whatsapp message. I got the message in the morning and picked it up on the way to breakfast.

Pretty good breakfast at the Indigo. Several flavors of minimuffins and breakfast cake, Belgian waffles, croissants, small Danishes and bearclaws, and pains au chocolat.

The selection of cold cuts and cheese was respectable (at least for someplace that isn't in France)—basically cooked ham and salami. The cheeses were also okay, a Swiss type thing, a mild cheddar type thing, and a Brie type thing.

But I passed them up in favor of a couple of lovely poached eggs.

David said his feet had had it—both the walk to and from Stonehenge and the walk to the Pump Room had been rough and uneven going, so he stayed at the hotel—but at 9:15 am, I assembled with the rest of our group in front of the hotel, where Stefano divided us into two groups with separate guides. We got Andrew Butterworth, an outstanding guide who walked us all over Bath. The tour was scheduled for two hours, but we asked a lot of questions, so ours ran a good deal longer (although one person's phone said we covered only about 3 miles between lecture stops). My feet and legs were griping pretty loudly during the last 20 minutes or so; David would have been crippled.

Among the first things we spotted on our tour were these bronze plaques next to the doors of houses. The door at the left is actually now part of the Hotel Indigo, and its plaque reads "Here dwelt Sir Walter Scott 1775." Little Walter was 4 years old at the time; he spent a year there, with his grandmother, being treated for his polio-induced limp.

The one at the right, just around the corner at 3 Pierrepont St., reads "Here lived James Quin, 1693–1766." Quin was a famous actor and spent his retirement in Bath.

Andrew said that Frances Burney also lived a few doors east of the Indigo. She was a novelist and playwright and also, from 1786 through 1790, the "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen.

I had hoped to eat at Sally Lunn's while we were in town, but the opportunity never arose. Sally Lunn bread actually appears in the Fanny Farmer cookbook—an egg- and butter-enriched bread that originated here in Bath at this very establishment.

Nearby, a woman in period dress was (yes) staring at her phone. Andrew clarified that the occasion just past was Jane Austen's 250th birthday.

The sign at the left marks the otherwise-not-obvious entrance to Abbey Green, a little enclave right in the center of the city. It lists a number of the little privately owned shops that line the green, and ends with a plug for its central tree, the oldest London plane in the city (that's the hybrid of Platanus orientalis and P. occidentalis, a popular street tree in Britain and elsewhere.

At the right is part of the green. That's Andrew gesturing and holding forth to two members of our party while I backed up far enough to get a decent shot of the tree.

North Parade, just a block north of our hotel (which is on South Parade), is easily shut off and looks old and is often used for filming. Abbey Green is another popular spot. Apparently the current obsession of Downton Abbey fans is Netflix's Bridgerton.Bridgerton confused with Sanditon, based on an unfinished work by Jane Austen, which we've watched on PBS. So wherever I mention Sanditon in the postcard version of this page, I probably meant Bridgerton.

Anyway, during that filming, all the shops in Abbey Green had to shut down for weeks. Netflix paid them each 1000 pounds a day during that time. Abbey Deli became the dress shop in Covent Garden.

Written 24 November 2025

Andrew recounted various segments of Bath's history, not in order, but according to where we happened to be standing at the time. Bath has been established as a place of pleasure since the Romans discovered the springs and built their huge establishment, but the 18th century is when our hotel's buildings were built and when two architects named John Wood, father than son, transformed its appearance to more or less what we see now. Our hotel's buildings were put up of John Wood the elder—in fact he designed most of the buildings attributed to them, but John Wood the younger actually carried out much of the building after his father no longer could.

John Wood the elder developed an area called Sudbury in the area of our hotel in the 1740s. He wanted to build a whole Roman forum here, an imperial forum in the grand circle. Our block and the next block over formed 1/8 of the forum. He was going to divert the river to form a marina in the center. But much of these plans were never realized because (as usual) funding ran out.

The church kitty corner to our hotel, St. John's Roman Catholic, was built in the 1860's, in Victorian Gothic. Kingston Square was going to be the name of the imperial forum. That name is still painted on a building on Pierrepont Street. just where South Parade intersects with it.

Other famous residents include Lord Chesterfield, famous for his advice-filled letters to his son. Admiral Nelson rented one room on this block, in his youth, recovering from an injury. Nelson House is now the study center for Advanced Studies in England (a study abroad center) that serves about 50 American students at a time.

Little of medieval Bath remains. The medieval wall was built on the foundations of the Roman wall. The Bishop of Bath and Wells had a palace just beyond the Crystal Palace but nothing remains of it. (The Crystal Palace is in Abbey Green, but Andrew didn't mention it at the time, and I never noticed it—too much else to look at!). The abbey church is the only medieval building to survive. It was originally Roman Catholic but became the city's parish Anglican church under Henry VIII.

The abbey is the third church on this site. Apollo's round temple was here first, then a little Saxon abbey church. Alfred the Great defeated the vikings just outside Bath at the Battle of Edington in 878 AD, paving the way for his great grandson, Edgar, to be crowned first actual king of all England in that Saxon church in 973 AD. (Here's where I stick in my own ancestry. Thanks to my late Aunt Henrietta, who got into genealogy in the process of completing her application to join the DAR, or maybe it was Colonial Dames of America, I've got reams of information on the subject. She managed to link us into a published genealogy leading back to these very Saxon kings. So she, I, and all that Logan side of the family are direct descendents of Alfred the Great and therefore also Edgar. I generally prefer to claim descent from Edgar's son Aethelred the Unready, who is my 37-times-great grandfather. It's just such a cooler name. But I digress.)

Here at the left is a detail of the carvings on the abbey—angels climbing a ladder. Jacob's ladder, I guess? At the right is the emblem, set into the paving nearby, marking the city as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also now designated a European spa town, like Spa and Vichy.

When the Norman bishop moved his seat from Wells to Bath (thus the Bishop of Bath and Wells, mentioned so frequently in the British Blackadder TV series), a huge Norman church was here, much larger than the current abbey. But then in 1244 the seat was moved back to Wells. In the late 15th century, the Norman church was demolished and replaced by the current abbey, started in 1499. The benches in the square before it are placed to mark the outline of the cloister that used to be attached.

Andrew remarked that where we stood is above the underground rooms of the Roman baths—the caldarium, the natatorium, and so on. I'm not sure whether they were underground in the days of the Romans. Probably not.

Our next stop was the Hospital of St. John the Baptist, founded 1174 AD, which we entered through the gate shown at the left. At the right is a small private garden within its walls.

I think Andrew said it was founded to provide free accommodation for those coming to take the water for their health. The bath would have been in the center of the courtyard, just inside the gates, drawn from the Cross Bath (built over a spring across the street from the gate). Now, it's now assisted living for "old Bathonians." Its patron is the Duchess of Cornwall (who has since became Queen Camilla). She was involved in its patronage long before she married Charles. The hospital's architecture is John Wood the elder again—Georgian.

Andrew remarked that all skin conditions tended to be lumped together as "leprosy," even those that weren't, really, and that they had a separate bath for lepers.

The Cross Bath building is from the 1890's, and the Kings and Queens Bath (over yet another spring is even more recent. The Romans would have had something on the site, but we don't know what. Even these new buildings are built of "Bath stone," the lovely golden stone the whole city is built of; a lot of it is still available in quarries in the surrounding hills.

Nearby was a shop prominently labeled "Boston Tea Party." Andrew expained that it's one of a chain of cafés founded locally; they apparently just call themselves that for the fun of it.

Another fascinating sight near the hospital gate was this line of bollards blocking motor traffic out of the center of town. We happened to arrive just at the deadline for morning deliveries, in time to see a large delivery truck drive out of the pedestrian zone and to watch those bollards march in from the sides of the roadway to close the road behind it!

The photo at the right shows the tracks they move on. I've seen automated bollards that sink into the pavement to allow passage, then rise back into position, but I've never seen any that slide sideways instead!

At the left here is the New Theatre Royal, which was actually new in 1805 (while Jane Austen lived in town). Next door (and, I think, visible at the right-hand side of the photo of the theater) is the house of Richard "Beau" Nash, the Master of Ceremonies in Bath. There's a statue of him in the Pump Room. Andrew described him as "the son of a bottle maker," though Wikipedia says his father "had risen to be partner in a glass-works" in Wales.

Beau Nash was a dandy, and after trying university studies, the military, and the law (all of which apparently took up too much of his time), became an assistant to the Master of Ceremonies in Bath. When the master was killed in a duel, Beau took up the post (without asking anyone, so far as I can tell) and held it for over 50 years, until he died a few years before Jane Austen moved there. He is credited with making Bath into the the extremely fashionable and popular resort it was in Jane's day, and his word there was law.

He was in charge of the scheduling of balls, events in the Assembly Rooms, concerts, etc., and he invented and successfully implemented rules of conduct: First, no dueling. Also, no wearing of swords. All public events had to end by 11 pm, and participants had to go home, not just continue the party in the street outside. When Princess Amelia, daughter of George II, tried to insist that she could go on dancing after 11 pm, saying "I am a royal princess!" he replied "but I am the King of Bath."

In the baths in that period, for the first time, upper and lower classes mixed. Without clothes, who was to tell who was upper class and who not? (The same mixing apparently happened in Rome but hadn't since.) That new-found egalitarianism is cited as another reason for the city's World Heritage status. When someone mentioned Beau Nash's perhaps questionable upper-class status, he is said to have remarked "I seldom mention my father in company, not because I have any reason to be ashamed of him, but because he has some reason to be ashamed of me."

At the right Andrew pauses to chat with another costumed visitor.

Near the Roman baths, Andrew pointed out Beau Street (I don't know whether it's named for Nash), where the Beau Street hoard was discovered during some construction in 2008. It's the 5th largest hoard of Roman coins ever discovered in Britain and the largest in an urban location—seven leather bags filled with ca. 17,500 silver coins.

Written 26 November 2025

When we turned up Barton Street, Andrew pointed out that "Barton" means farm. At that point, we were passing out of the medieval part and into the newer city. It led us to Queen's Square—more John Wood the Elder houses surrounding a square, about a city block in size, of parkland and trees. That's one corner of it in the photo at the left (with Andrew in the lower right corner).

Andrew pointed out to us the perforated metal plates (one of which appears in the right-hand photo) set in the sidewalks at our feet. Those are coal holes, through which coal was delivered and ran down chutes directly into the cellars of the houses; the cellars extended out under the street.

On at least one side of Queen's Square (maybe all four?), seven adjacent lodging houses were designed to look like one upscale country house. That was John Wood again. Although he's called "the elder" to distinguish him from his son, he was only 23 when he designed the interior courtyard of St. John's Hospital and only 27 when he designed and built Queen's Square.

He even incorporated right into the design of the buildings in the square two lodges for sedan-chair carriers. Each functioned like a taxi stand; one could select a sedan chair fom the stack outside and hire porters to take you where you wanted to go. The porters charged extra if your route took them uphill, but they did not charge extra for heavier passengers. A single replica sedan chair now stands in for the stack.

Andrew told us that, as Americans, we should be particularly interested in the story of Hugh Percy, Duke of Northumberland, who came every year to Bath (with his wife) and took up where he left off with his mistress, Elizabeth Macie, who lived in Queen's Square. This seasonal relationship continued for years, beginning before he became the duke. One year, Elizabeth got pregnant, and when her condition started to show, she went to Paris to have the baby. She then returned to Bath but left baby James in Paris for the next nine years. The duke never acknonwledged him.

Young James Macie grew up to be a chemist and mineralogist, as well as an adventurous traveler. His father died in 1786, and his mother in 1800 (when James was 35). She left him her considerable fortune on the condition that he change his name to that of his biological father—not Percy, but his original name before he changed it to Percy (by complicated means and for complicated dynastic reasons): Smithson.

James then managed to multiply that fortune about 10-fold. Having traveled widely and sampled a number of nationalities and cultures, he chose to leave all his money to the United States of America for the foundation of an educational institution. Therefore, as Andrew pointed out, the Smithsonian Institution was conceived in Queen's Square, Bath!

We then continued toward Victoria Park, set on a hillside north of the center of town. On the way, we passed Bath's war memorial, just outside the park's gates, shown here at the left. The upper plaques list those from Bath who died in WWI; the lower, slightly darker colored ones list those from WWII. At the left-hand edge of the photo, you can see parts of plaques listing civilians who died in WWII.

Harry Patch, who was born, worked, and died nearby, was the last survivng British combat soldier from WWI. He fought at Paschendale in 1917 and died at age 111 in 2009.

At the right is a view of some of the flower beds in Victoria Park, one of the first public parks in the country. It was opened by Victoria, who was 11 at the time and was there with her mother. The buildings you can glimpse through the trees are part of the famous Royal Crescent, a magnificent curved line of houses (today, we would call them condos) designed and built in the 18th century by (three guesses) John Wood, this time the younger. All the houses are still occupied except for #1, which is now a museum.

As we sat resting on a park bench and admiring the view of the park, my pocked recorder, which I was so happy to recover in time for this tour, stopped working. Aaaargh! So at this point, my notes get pretty sketchy, and for about the last third of the tour, I have only my photos to rely on.

At the left here is part of the Royal Crescent. The house with the museum, #1, is the one on the near end.

At the right is another magnificent "square," called the Circus because it is, in fact, round, forming a complete circle with a green in the center. That one was started by John Wood the elder and finished by the younger. During WWII's "Bath Blitz" (one of the relatiatory "Baedeker Blitz" raids), a bomb destroyed a couple of the buildings, but they have been built back in the original style. Andrew pointed out where you can still see traces of the crater in the central green.

The rest of the tour wound down the hillside back toward our hotel. As we passed it, Andrew pointed out the Coeur de Lion (as in Richard I), reputed to be the smallest pub in Bath.

Here we are, back at the River Avon, just a few blocks from the abbey and our hotel. The sheer wall above the arches, with a row of windows in it, is the back wall of the row of shops that line the bridge. It's one of those bridges where you don't even realize you're crossing the river because all you see from it is a row of shops on both sides of the road! This is the downstream side of the bridge. The upstream side isn't so flat—the backs of the shops stick out to different degrees. The railed area where you can see people below the tall walls is the terrace of a Thai restaurant.

When Jane Austen lived in Bath for four years after her father retired, this is the bridge she would have crossed when she walked from their house into the center of town (less than half a mile). I took the photo from the town side.

Immediately downstream of the bridge is Pulteney Weir, rebuilt in more modern design since Jane's day. It was famously used as location for Javert's suicide in the 2012 movie Les Misérables.

Back at the hotel at lunch time, I got out my stash of AAA batteries. They looked suspiciously powdery inside their ziploc bag. Had one burst and covered the others with gunk? So I got out my other stash of AAA's, and put new ones in the recorder. Still dead. Drat! Had it rusted out on me in midvacation, as has happened before? So I changed the batteries again, to a different pair, and it woke up perfectly, ready to go—it hadn't even forgotten the date and time. Whew, again!

So I collected David, and we set out in search of lunch. We chose The Huntsman, which opened in 1850 as the Parade Coffee House, mainly because it advertised that the daily lunch special was a ploughman's lunch for two that sounded great (ham, three cheeses, bread, pickled onions, and lots of accoutrements). David and I had remarked earlier that throughout this trip, we had not come across a single establishment that offered either a ploughman's lunch or a "real ale." When David asked about CAMRA, an organization that promotes real ales, no one knew what he was talking about! On previous visits to England (admittedly farther south), we've found both to be uniquitous.

Annoyingly, they were out of it when we tried to order it. So David settled for fish and chips, which he said were way better than what he's had so far. For one thing, it was real cod, not haddock, and the peas were better.

I had the mustard-glazed loin of pork with "crispy cheek." It came with scalloped potatoes, roasted carrot, roasted leek, applesauce, and a pitcher of rich gravy. It was great! The pork was still pink inside, tender as a steak, and the crispy cheek was just that—a lump of tender braised pork cheek, rolled in crumbs and fried crispy. Yummy!

Even more annoying, while working on this diary today, I looked up the Coeur de Leon to make sure I had its story straight, only to discover not only that its menu advertizes two versions of a ploughman's lunch but that its nearby sister establishment The Star Inn was CAMRA's 2022 Pub of the Year! We need to go back to Bath.

Back at the hotel after lunch, in the elevator lobby, I encountered this umbrella dispenser. Many hotels lend their guests umbrellas on rainy days. This one rents them! If you need an umbrella, you tap your credit card on the payment spot, slide an umbrella off the metal arm that lights up green, then when you're done with it, slide it back onto any of the metal arms. If you keep the umbrella for less than 48 hours, your card will be charged 2 pounds. If you keep it longer than that, you can either return it or just keep it permanently; either way, your card will be charged 20 pounds. What'll they think of next?

Soon it will be time to tip the Mick the busdriver, as he leaves us tomorrow in London, and I had the afternoon before me, so I set out to do a little more sight-seeing on the way to a reliable, major-bank ATM to make sure we had enough cash. A quick internet search pinpointed a relatively nearby Barclay's bank in a cluster of more modern shopping streets, carefully designed, of course, to remain in keeping with Bath's lovely Georgian architecture.

I think this was St. Lawrence Street, decorated to suggest an undersea location. Below the colorful streamers were suspended many stylized artificial fish of various sizes and species.

The Barclay's ATM supplied the needed cash, but when I asked about converting our out-of-date pound notes, they suggested I go next door to Eurochange (whose ATM I wouldn't trust on a bet, but who apparently are a respectable currency exchange). I did, and for a fee of 8%, they changed the old notes for new ones, so that's taken care of.

On the way back, I passed a big toy store—now there, thought I, is a place that will have batteries, right up front, and they did, right next to the cash register. They were on 2-for-1 sale, so I got a dozen AAA's to replace my rather iffy stashes of spares.

Then, just for fun, I ducked into Marks & Spencer's food hall, also on the way, where I admired all the wonderful prepared foods, especially all the biodegradable paper tubs of salads. You could get refrigerated packages of brown-and-serve cocktail-size sausage rolls; bottles of ready-made sauce for your coronation chicken; squeeze bottles of sticky toffee and millionaire's sauces (the latter recommended for pancakes and waffles); and jars of blackberries in gin, sliced peaches in cognac, and cherries in kirsch.

I was particularly struck by these packages of The Original Atora Shredded Beef Suet ("for fluffy dumpling, pastries, puddings and pies").

Dinner was at the hotel, in Brasserie Beau, with some of our tour mates. It was another of those cases where we ordered à la carte and Tauck picked up the tab. Good deal.

I started with "chicken liver parfait," which on all the other menus we've seen on this trip has meant cold chicken liver paté. This was not that, but it wasn't bad.

David, of course, went for the smoked salmon again.

I think David then ordered the Lavinton lamb rump with babaganoush, baby aubergine, black garlic, and goats cheese, but I don't seem to have gotten a photo.

I had the slow roasted belly of Tamworth pork, spiced hazelnt praline, pickle walnut puree, and bitter laves. The bitter leaves were two pink endive leaves and some parsley. Yummy.

Service was so glacial that dinner ran so late that several of us gave up and skipped dessert.

At the right is a better photo of the art on the walls of my room. I have no idea what the artist is on about, whether he or she painted the portraits as well as the splotches, or whether they are authentic period protraits. Distinctly odd.