The Bath City Trail

I realised today that I have been walking over a tourist route these last few days that I hadn't even noticed. I'm probably in company with pretty most of the people in the city centre as The City Trail is anything but noticeable.

Upon emerging from the Tourist Information with some leaflets on further tours, such as The Tour of Britain coming to Bath very soon, I looked down and by chance spotted this plaque below.

Each of these brass plaques, sunk into the pavement, has a quote about Bath from a British writer or notable figure of the past. What they have to say is rarely interesting or important, all that matters is that Dr Samuel Johnson said something about Bath.

Unexpectedly then, I was off once more on a tour, excited to see where it would lead me. I somehow managed to miss plaque 2 and passed directly to 3. The arrow seemed to be pointing in the right direction. When I thought about it further, the work involved in laying out this trail is not simple at all and there is scope for error both in the design of the plaques and in their installation too.

The arrow gives you the direction of the next plaque but not the location. It could be 10 metres away it could be 10 kilometres, there is no way of telling. This made the game more interesting as it introduced an element of uncertainty that kept the eye busy. In practice the distances were never that great but they were certainly not uniform either.

The route was also designed to make it easy, as far as possible, by avoiding obstacles in the path from one point to another. It would have been possible to have made two points on either side of a building, so that you would either have to walk through the building or else walk around it, thus going off the line of the arrow in order to return to it. I would have rather liked it more if they would have done this as that would have brought the intervening structures and spaces more fully into the frame of the trail. 

Thinking about that further, such a trail cutting straight lines through space is somewhat reminiscent of the colonial divisions of newly acquired territories. When conquering powers had a duty of administering land over which they had little familiarity, the line was the abstract and arbitrary method of delineating one area from another. It is precisely this possibility of making a line that passes through someone's house and then turning that line into a meaningful border that displays both power and insensitivity. The line can be a potent thing. These lines, however, were not.

As I fell into a rhythm moving from plaque to plaque, I started to think of the work of the Boyle Family too. Some of their works present pavements as wall mounted artworks and I remember how these had the wonderful effect of reawakening the senses to the complex compositions under the feet. The least loved of the directions of looking, down is where these abstract social sculptures abound.  

As I was fully expecting, there were locations where the trail met unforeseen obstacles. The arrow pointed in the direction of this construction site and at the far end of it no plaque was to be found. With the pavement claimed and closed off, I had to assume the plaque was there but I could not be sure, which made it far more interesting.   

I found my way back on the trail again easily enough as it passed through the tourist attractions. I only had to pause and think, what is the most obvious place to walk to next, go there, search for the plaque and there it was.

The trail made me think of the trail of plaques put up by The Museum of London along the length of London Wall. I really should write that up as a tour sometime since I have taken it and it was a really worthwhile stroll. It was enjoyable partly because of its limitations and neglect: the Roman wall has been largely destroyed and exists only in fragments. The contemporary plaques have also fallen into neglect making it a trail of double neglect. Following such a tenuous route became a challenge.

This plaque struck me as a sad one. The designer must have run out of quotes to add so it remained blank with just a number and an arrow in its centre.

After a while the distances between the plaques enlarged and it became increasingly difficult to find them. What also happened is that my eye became more attuned to looking for them. I spotted, for instance, the plaque on the far side of this crossing.

I here realised that there was another quoteless plaque and that the previous ones had attempted to make the quotes relevant for the locations they were sited in. That must mean that there was nothing much to say about Queen Square, which was sad in itself too. Surely, even staying within the frame of the work, it would have been possible to find enough specific quotes for the locations that had them and keep enough generic Bath quotes to spread around the rest. But no, the trail became a simple game of directing the walker from point to point. To be honest I didn't miss the quotes that much as they added little and were written in a circle that makes you have to stand above them, twist your head, turn around and even stoop down to read more closely when there is an interior line of text with a smaller font size.   

Thank God for number 14, then. and a return of words! My impressively practical though less than beautiful shoes, by the way, are for a skyline walk tomorrow which I was instructed to come suitably attired for.

I found this plaque a curious one as it was quite different to the others. It was on the right direction, more or less, but it seemed to not belong to the series. It had no number in the middle and was embedded in a newer concrete slab which was itself framed by tarmac. I suspect that this may have been a later addition but I could not say for sure. If it were a newer addition it makes me ask, is the trail still maintained or was there a year when it ceased to be?

The trail seemed to fall apart all together at this point so I took a picture of a water cover instead, as it was in the area the plaque should have been. That's when it struck me just how invisible these plaques are. With a little bit of weathering they fade into invisibility and become a variant of the utilities cover.

By the time I got to 18 my will to pursue this City Trail was failing. I started to wonder if anyone had really bothered to come this far before, except for the people specifically invited when the trail was first set in place. I suspect there may be a handful, but this really is one of those public art projects that must have seemed like a good idea at the time but which is now near forgotten.

At the circus I felt sorry for the designer of this trail as he or she had an obvious problem to contend with: how to point with a straight line around a circular space? Their solution, pointing towards where this woman is coming from, was not a good one but then again this was always going to be a challenge. Following the arrow on its word would have led me into the building behind her so I instead interpreted it to mean, follow the circular path of the pavement.

This I did and I failed to find another trail plaque so settled for this gas cover. With that I concluded the City Trail.

Stepping back to Tourist Central I noticed this woman posing for the camera. Following up on an observation I made on the Pingyao Tour about there being a very interesting range of culturally specific poses that tourists pull when getting their picture taken, this was a new one for me. I cannot locate this body gesture at all. It looks very deliberate, like it might be part of a traditional dance or a pose common to statues, yet there is always the possibility that it's a more personal mannerism.  

The tables were soon turned and she was in the camera crew taking pictures of the monks. There's something funny about monks doing typical tourist things, you somehow imagine they would be above that. 

On a similar note, I saw this picture of Obama in Stonehenge this morning, he visited it after the NATO summit in Newport, which itself is also slightly mismatched. This opens up the question of appropriate and inappropriate costume for tourists which narrows down to casual and smart casual in the UK. Going round the Roman Baths dressed as a soldier, a nurse, a cleaner or a homeless person would not look at all right. A businessmen in a suit mixing work with leisure is somewhat acceptable but even that looks like it belongs more to the 1970s than to today. Practical solution: remove the tie and jacket.

The People Behind the Plaques Tours: the famous and the forgotten

These two tours of Bath, one of the centre and one around the Royal Crescent, were based upon the historic plaques on the sides of buildings indicating who lived there. The idea was to understand more about these people, some of whom are well-known and others who have sunk into obscurity. 

These tours were organised by the Mayor's Honorary Guides who have been in existence for 80 years so they themselves are a bit of the city's history too. The two complimentary tours I went on were part of a week of one-off tours given to mark the guide's 80th anniversary. The guides do this for pleasure and neither ask for nor receive payment for showing visitors around the city. They are self-organising and seem to be mostly made up of older people who know their city and have the time to perform this role. 

The tour began with a map of plaques drawn up by the honorary guide's founder. It turns out that some of the plaques are not in the correct locations and some notables have more than one plaque, as they stayed in multiple properties. The group was led by no less than three guides who managed to share the work remarkably well. When I compare this with the Dalston Conservation Tour which was given by two guides speaking at cross purposes, this tour was wholly harmonious. Indeed, because this was a one-off tour and a significant number of the audience were themselves honorary guides, the spirit was more that of assisting and chipping in with information as and when it seemed relevant. It was also an opportunity for the guides to meet one another on a social level so it fulfilled this role and at the end I discovered it had a greater significance again. A well-respected honorary guide had planned this 'people behind the plaques walk' and he had passed away last year. These walks were a way to honour his memory by realising his proposed series of walking tours. In this way, there was a much deeper motivation behind giving these tours than most typical city tours, though this remained understated and the focus was very much on the plaques, people and their stories. 

A nice moment at the beginning was gaining access to the usually locked courtyard of Ralph Allen's city house. It was clearly a lost courtyard from the abundant weeds that were growing between the cracks in the paving slabs. While the story of the man was quite familiar to most, the location offered a new twist.

In general the plaques are made of bronze and were put up in the first half of the 20th Century. This one is an exception and is a more recent one. There are some complications around putting up new ones and some property owners do not want such plaques on their walls. This means that this record of the great and good is more or less fixed in time with history ending in the Victorian era. To compensate for this the guides did stop in front of some properties without plaques and talk about who had lived inside, which made for a balanced story but I should admit I was curious about the plaques themselves and what they connoted. Seeing as they reflect a historical idea of fame, which today equals celebrity, there may be some interest in testing these boundaries and sticking to the bronze plaques would do just that.

And there was a further type of modern plaque we came across, this blue circular affair for local legend Sally Lunn. I like the fact that most cities have one or two characters like this: they are a part of the story of the city and may indeed reach iconic status yet are completely unknown elsewhere. When you arrive you are told about them as if they are common knowledge and you have to take it all in faith. When you leave, you leave these personalities at the city gate, their significance lying solely in the city. As such, these figures offer quite some potential for invention and myth making.

 

Nelson's plaque was an interesting stop. I am familiar with him as the great naval commander who secured victory at Trafalgar at the cost of his life. This is the story that has been drummed into me since my childhood visits to HMS Victory. Indeed I'm still hearing it through my current research in South Dorset, which lies on The Trafalgar Way and was home to Hardy of “kiss me Hardy”. How refreshing it was then to hear another side of him, namely, Nelson the shameless rogue. In this way the tour managed to retain some interest in an overly famous person and it did so through taking the point of view of his wife who, it was said, he abandoned in Bath. 

The current life of the buildings on the Royal Crescent was not gone into at all as it is not yet plaque-worthy and that was a big question hanging over the tour for me, given my focus on the contemporary. The hotel behind was going about its highly-priced business and I heard on the bus tour yesterday that John Cleese was now living on the Royal Crescent. We occasionally saw someone enter or exit a door but they were like ghosts from the future who had no part to play in the tour. I had been interested a couple of years ago in making a performance about the usage of history in the present and on the basis of my observations in Bath so far I may be able to draw upon quite a number of that work's threads here. I like it when stalled ideas turn out to not be stalled at all but merely dormant, waiting for the occasion.   

The next plaques were located on the square at the end of the short road in the background. We didn't bother crossing the road and walking over there, however, and this indicated to me that the relationship between the stories and the precise locations was not that strong, it was more or less enough that these people lived in Bath but the exact building and how it looks today were for the most part irrelevant. This got me wondering whether it was necessary to make this walk at all if we weren't going to visit the precise locations referenced. I came the conclusion that it was necessary, not because the sites were significant to the storytelling but because this tour was a vehicle to bring people together in a series of attractive public spaces. It would be a very different event if it took place in a meeting room.

A final plaque and a short history of the postal service. I had never realised that Bath played an instrumental role in the setting up of the country's postal service and the city remains a stamp collector's paradise. It is definitely a niche interest but I suspect there must be a tour connected to the post service. That is a tour I will have to search out and report back on next.