The No. 1 Royal Crescent Tour: a period drama minus the drama

A further 'must see' site in Bath that offers a tour of sorts is No. 1 Royal Crescent. I got my ticket from a lady in period costume who then directed me to a side room to watch a video.

The video was a professionally filmed and well edited introduction to Bath and The Royal Crescent in its Georgian hay day. I should admit that I start to become a little bit blasé about these industry standard cultural tourism products when I am trapped inside of them writing about them, but I'm also aware I am not their target audience. For the dedicated cultural tourist, this is the stuff of dreams.    

Once the video ended the small group of us who had accumulated were told the the tour of the house began next door. I was also told that photography inside the house was forbidden but it was OK to take pictures out of the window. These images are therefore of everything but the building and that's a pity as it is rather beautiful inside but they want to hang onto the control of their imagery.

This is the view from the dinning room which was laid out very elaborately for dessert. I was handed a laminated information sheet by the guardian who explained some of the features of the room. The most striking of these was a folding screen in the corner behind which gentlemen, during the course of the dinner, could relieve themselves into a pot. With this in mind I looked again at the table and imagined the scene afresh.

I was told by another guardian that the man of the house and the lady had separate rooms and this I seem to remember is the view from the man's room. The ghost tour which passed this way slipped in some historical information which, at the time, I had thought was off topic. Nonetheless, it was good to know when looking out over the crescent that, post WW2 when the crescent was run down, the city council had proposed knocking it down and replacing it with a big concrete town hall. At least, that is how I remember the story and it is curious that none of the heritage guides told me about this important information. I have just ordered Baedeker's Guide to Great Britain 1937, a sort of Fodor's of its day, which reputedly inspired a series of German bombing raids during the war which were a good part of why this area was in such poor condition come 1945. I find the idea of a guidebook being used to select military targets quite far out and I'll be taking that tour as soon as it arrives in the post.

I wandered from room to room like I was in a movie. Speaking of which I have finally relented and in order to get a better grip on why these locations and Bath in general have such an appeal I have started watching Northanger Abbey, more on which I'll write about when I come to the Jane Austen Centre. I think that this period drama filmset made real, is the desired effect. The next step is to get dressed up in the clothes yourself and go in for the reenactments, speaking of which, I did spot a live role playing group in the car park yesterday dressed up like they stepped out of Lord of The Rings. Wrong costume for Georgian Bath but maybe there is another layer of goblins and sorcerers I have not yet found.

When I descended into the basement to the servant's rooms I was surprised to see these were not so well attended to by the guides. Maybe there was less to steal or maybe it was just somebody's break. There was a kitchen, communal dinning room, scullery and housekeeper's room. The most curious of the objects was the 'turnspit dog' model: a dog that walks inside a wheel which turns meat over a fire. I would have liked to have had the opportunity to go further into the class politics and lives of the workers, even if it was a Downton Abbey whitewash of it, but that was not on offer today.

With the tour of the house proper finished, there was still an exhibition to view in the annex. This featured portraits of women who were sexually 'available' from the higher sections of society. That is to say it combined women who conducted affairs, kept mistresses and high class prostitutes. I thought that including women who had affairs which became public knowledge with prostitutes in the same exhibition was stretching the point a bit far, but I also see that this was done to bring the idea of Georgian morality to the fore in order to then interrogate it through the artworks and commentary. The captions were informative and did convey something of the women's lives and the sexism and double standards of Georgian society: men who conducted affairs and used prostitutes were not subject to any such criticism.

Emerging at the end I felt that there was enough here to call the experience a tour, but I was left wishing I could have been shown round by a guide. Because it is a building that contains expensive objects, they have a primary duty to protect the premises and that is best achieved by having guardians based in each room who can both keep an eye on things and explain the room's contents to the visitor. If they were to have tour guides they would probably be in addition to guardians and not instead of them. When the costs are added up, this 'pass the tourist' system is cheaper and quite adequate for most visitors. It all makes perfect sense but something is lost in not having someone give a through line. In any case, most of the visitors, it seemed to me, were quite happy to have their primary focus on the house itself and not on someone dressed up in period costume hustling them from room to room. The thing the visitors really wanted to do was to soak up the atmosphere of the place and imagine how it would have been to have lived here. They were paying to enter a movie. We have different needs and the need to dream is great too.

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.  

The Mayor's Guides Tour of Bath: free heritage tours around the city centre

The Tour of All Tours now turns its attention to a new city and a UNESCO listed one at that: Bath. I will be making a tour here over the Summer months which will be presented later in the year. I got started by taking a guided tour. 

But not before I visited the Jane Austin Centre to inspect the newly unveiled waxwork of the famous author. It, or should I say she, cost several million pounds to be produced so I should have been humbled to stand beside this high-maintenance lady, but I must admit to being underwhelmed. I will be returning to the centre at a later point to take their tour but for  now this was enough as I wanted to begin my investigation of Bath with a more standard city tour.

The most popular starting point for guided tours is without a doubt the square bordered on one side by the Roman Baths and on another by the Abbey. This is an intensely touristic site: in addition to a very general random melee, there was a rank of Japanese tourists forming to my left, some excitable Spanish language students gathering in front of me, and a group of Middle Eastern boys lounging around beside me. The square retains some dignity, however, and is not completely overrun with souvenir stalls and ice cream trolleys, indeed Bath City Centre as a whole tends to avoid the worst aesthetic excesses of mass tourism. The look they strive for is historical: businesses adapt to the existing architecture rather than the street level exploding with garish signs and protruding shopfronts, all competing for attention.  

The tour I took was one with the Mayor of Bath's Honorary Guides. This is a free daily tour and as there was a large crowd of us, we were divided into two groups each led by a different guide. My groups's guide was Jean and her basic approach to the tour was to tell a roughly chronological history of Bath from Roman times up until today whilst making our way through the streets. It is often more satisfying to have a definite narrative structure, such as the city's chronology, shaping the tour, but it is also more difficult to do so neatly, as cities are rarely laid out in a way that makes walking such a timeline obvious. I thought Jean managed pretty well to reconcile these two demands and the history of the city itself aided her since the bulk of its history is from the Georgian period meaning that once we were into that epoch it was possible to treat the city and narration more thematically and to not worry too much about the chronology and more. 

Because the city has retained its Georgian architecture and many pedestrianised streets, it is not particularly well laid out for the delivery lorries that service the bustling shops. This means that on the back roads behind the elegant storefronts we stumbled across lorries backing up and men in high visibility jackets trying to make the system work as best they could. Out tour passed along a number of such roads and when we stopped to talk it was sometimes hard to hear the commentary such was the distraction of the vehicles. This front and back stage of the city is itself an interesting phenomena to observe and something a tour more focussed on the contemporary might be able to embrace. With the historical focus of ours, however, it was simply experienced as a minor nuisance. 

As we made our way through the city-centre we were shown that Bath remains a spa town. From the rooftop pool and viewing galleries, the white robed ones gazed down upon us plebs as we listened to the stories of their illustrious predecessors. I should imagine that the city looks rather different if you experience it from the comfort of one of the thermal spas. I don't know, perhaps it is even be easy up there to imagine oneself as a latter day member of a reconstructed high society taking a cure. That at least is what the pictures in the brochure would have you believe. On street level such a dream appears more likely to be ruptured, particularly on a Friday or Saturday night, when the streets belong to the drunks. I daresay there was a healthy supply of them, back in the real, rather than reconstructed past and I would not be shocked if a good few of them were the self same elite slumming it with the locals in search of kicks.

We were told about the former social life of the city and in particular how convalescence and cures merged with fashion, gambling and high society. This makes for an interesting comparison with today's visitors who take tours to hear about the history of these previous visitors. Bath has evolved from being a resort town into a historical resort town, but a resort nonetheless, that still has to provide beds, meals and entertainment to a wider spread of guests from around the world. This mirroring effect of having contemporary tourists learning about historical tourists as a a tourist experience, strikes me as not so far removed from my tours of tours, the main difference being there is not the same separation in time: I report on the contemporary whereas she reports on the past. 

Walking around the town and going up to the Royal Crescent it is clear why it is the visitor destination that it is: the city really does have a good deal going for it from a tourist's point of view. The commentary mostly stuck to local history and architecture though we did branch out into the origins of numerous phrases and fashions which could be traced back to Bath. In this sense the tour was not surprising, it played to the city's strengths.

About two thirds of the way through our tour we stumbled upon the other group taking the mayor's guides tour. But for standing on the left rather than on the right, at the very start, I would have been in their party. I learnt that the two guides do not give identical tours. While they draw upon the same basic material and there is a quality control filter that ensures it doesn't get too freaky or shambolic, the guides design their own route, tell the history in their own way and decide where to lay the emphasis of their tour. Jean, my guide, went so far as to say that we should take another Mayor's guide tour so we would see just how individual they are. I might well do just that.

In summary, I'd say my guide, was competent and enjoyed sharing the story of the city with visitors. Her presence was very much in harmony with that of the city itself: older, educated, neat and comfortable. So much was she the face of the city, I had to ask myself how a tour of Bath might work if it were given by someone very different: by a teenage goth, an african mother or a long haired hippy, which you do see a few of from time to time. For a first tour of Bath, the Mayor's Guides' Tour was a good one to take as it represented a mainstream idea of what the city is. I will, however, be looking further afield in the coming weeks and months to expand upon this and get a broader view of the things.  

The tour was circular finishing in the same bustling square where it started. As well as it being full of tour groups, it is also home to a constant stream of buskers and street entertainers. The quality of the acts I saw was decidedly mixed but the volume consistent. One consequence of this saturation of music is that tour guides have considerable competition for attention. I have not seen any of the guides wearing portable speakers to amplify themselves yet, but it really would not be a bad idea, even if it might look and sound a bit kitschy. When competing with musicians who come with amps and mobile generators, you can be at a distinct disadvantage and need all the help you can get.