History versus Modern Development: The City of Bath

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I live in an historic city which makes every trip into town a visit to a byegone era. It is a privilege and a pleasure for me and for many of the thousands who live here and the numerous visitors who pass through.

By MichaelMaggs (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

The difficulty of balancing the every day, modern needs of a vibrant, thriving city with this historic beauty is an ongoing issue, of course. Traffic, roads, schools, housing, office space; all are constant concerns and conflict with preserving the valuable heritage we have been entrusted with. 

Bath is one of the few cities in the world to have Unesco World Heritage status. And it has been proven that cities can lose this. Dresden, which went ahead with a modern motorway bridge development too close to the city centre, did so. 

The new shopping centre that was opened in Southgate, Bath, in 2009 was aruguably an improvement on the hideous 1960s monstrosity it replaced. But it fails to do one thing that the old shopping centre maintained - the buildings are too tall and visitors can no longer see out over the hills around the city from the centre of the development - something that has always been a feature of the city. 

Now the new Riverside development of thousands of flats (many bought by overseas investors and standing empty, but that's a whole other issue) are threatening the status all over again. Tall, brash and modern, and very close to the Georgian city centre, they can be seen from every vantage point, a raw eyessore. There has been little space planned in to plant cover which would soften the appearance over time. 

Now the city council want to build a Park and Ride to the east of the city, concreting over beautiful green belt, another site that will be very visible from many vantage points; a gleaming sea of cars by day and empty tarmac by night.

Bathampton Meadows

I know a balance needs to be struck, and proponents of development say we can't live in a museum. But my inclination is to say, why not? There are other modern cities you can choose to live in if you want that. I think we are risking our beautiful city and its outstanding reminders of its past. The city in which I set my novel The Girl in the Mask, was built over and adapted by the Georgians. Perhaps people felt even then it was being damaged. But what was built was high quality, was outstandingly beautiful and has endured. Somehow, I don't think the Park and Ride and the Riverside are going to be drawing tourists in 200 years time. 

A Day Trip to Bath by Katherine Webb

I was recently blindsided somewhat by a journalist who'd come over to the UK from Germany to interview me, I thought, about my latest release over there. It turned out that she was after a travel piece on Bath instead, and after floundering for a moment when she asked me to close me eyes and tell her 'What is Bath?', I was able to talk at length about this wonderful historic city, so full of its own character (and, my sister would remark, also full of itself).

I live about eight miles outside of Bath, in the countryside, but proximity to Bath was definitely a pull factor when moving to the area. And, within weeks of moving down here, I'd started a novel set in Bath in 1820 (The Misbegotten). I couldn't seem to help it - the atmosphere of all things Georgian and Regency was too powerful! So this month I thought I'd blog about Bath and some of its famous faces, and recommend it to anybody wanting a day trip this summer to a place that wears its history on its sleeve.

Well, I kind of have to start with this lady. Although Jane Austen only lived in Bath for a few years, she remains firmly associated with the place. Bath features as the setting of 'Persuasion', and gets a mention in other Austen books as well, and there's a Jane Austen museum and festival for fans here. It's just as interesting to visit The Assembly Rooms, however, at which Austen is known to have attended functions. Designed in 1769 by John Wood the Younger, the Assembly Rooms are now owned by the National Trust and you can go and have a wander around the grand tearoom, the octagon room where the men would have played cards, and the ballroom with its fantastic chandeliers - now electric, but in Austen's day holding hundreds of candles. The heat rising from all the thronging, dancing bodies below was often so great that the candles melted, and dribbled hot wax onto the party-goers. http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/bath-assembly-rooms

John Wood the Younger (1728-1782), and his father John Wood the Elder (1704-1754), were the architects who had the most influence on the building of Bath in the Georgian era. Between them the pair designed the most iconic of Bath's seven elegant crescents - The Royal Crescent - as well as The Circus, Queen Square, Gay Street, The Royal Mineral Water Hospital and Prior Park, private residence of Ralph Allen, about whom more shortly, and much more. The Woods' designs pioneered Bath's neo-classical, Palladian grandeur, still so much in evidence today. When it was built in 1775, The Royal Crescent was on the edge of the city, with no other buildings in front of it to spoil the view for the residents. The same cannot be said today, but I can report that Barton Fields, as shown above, have indeed never been built on.

The newly completed Circus in the late 1700s

Another person strongly linked to Bath's Georgian soul is Richard 'Beau' Nash (1674-1761), Master of Ceremonies from 1704 onwards. This was an unofficial title, but it put Beau Nash into a position of tremendous social influence, and helped make Bath the height of fashion in its heyday in the early 1700s. An early career in the army and then as a barrister clearly didn't suit the fun-loving Beau Nash, who had a gambling problem and lived with a string of mistresses. As MC of Bath, he would meet new arrivals, decide who was 'in' and who was not, broker marriages, arrange balls, keep a check on the worst gamblers, and accompany lone women to dances. He is also credited with encouraging a break down in the strict social boundaries between the upper and middle classes in Bath, although this might have backfired on him slightly as Bath fell out of fashion towards the end of the century, came to be seen as vulgar and old hat, the haunt of spinsters and invalids, and to be passed over by fashionistas in favour of Lyme Regis and other seaside resorts.

One more Georgian notable for you: Ralph Allen (1693-1764). Allen started out as a clerk in the Post Office at a young age, and by the age of 19, in 1712, became the postmaster of Bath. With a series of reforms and innovations, he increased the office's profits and reach to such an extent that he became a wealthy man. He bought up stone quarries in the local area, recognising the growing demand for the honey-coloured Bath stone in bringing the Woods' designs to life, and thus became a very wealthy man indeed. On a hill to the south east of Bath sits the Sham Castle, an elaborate folly built to give Allen something to look at from his townhouse in the city.

In 1742, Ralph Allen hired John Wood the Younger to build Prior Park, a Palladian mansion to the south of Bath, which he later moved in to. It is in a truly wonderful setting, with long reaching views of the city and a quintessential C18th garden, designed with the help of Capability Brown, which has one of only four Palladian bridges of its kind in the world. The house itself now houses a school, but the National Trust has the gardens, and they're lovely to visit. http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/prior-park-landscape-garden

The bridge has lots of interesting old graffiti, if you like that kind of thing (which I do) - showing that whilst standards of handwriting have declined over the years, standards of behaviour are much the same as they ever were!

There are so many Georgian wonders in Bath - don't miss the Florentine Pulteney Bridge, either, completed in 1774. Palladian again, this time designed by Robert Adam, the bridge has shops on along either side of its span across the River Avon - but its history goes back a lot further than that. The reason anybody came here in the first place was for the hot water springs, first settled by the Romans who named the city Aquae Sulis - meaning the waters of Sulis. Sulis was the native British goddess to whom the locals had built a shrine on the site. Britain's only hot water thermal springs, the waters were soon enclosed within a huge Roman bath and temple complex, now wonderfully excavated and fascinating to visit (incidentally, you can bathe in the hot spring water yourself, at nearby Thermae Spa - the rooftop pool has wonderful views of the city. You can drink it too, just like a Georgian invalid, in the Roman Baths visitor centre, although I don't think there's much to be gained by it - very eggy.).

The Roman Bath complex

Thanks to Georgian fashion and bombing in WWII, the medieval city of Bath is harder to spot. The Abbey, now in a late C15th form, sits on top of two older churches, and is very beautiful inside - fan vaulting galore. Sally Lunn's Historic Eating House is most famous for being the only place to get a Bath Bun - like a brioche, and very tasty - but for me the real treat in going there is to go down into the basement museum, which recreates kitchens of the past, and where you can see open excavations going down through the centuries, proving that there has been a house on that spot for over a thousand years. The medieval city walls and gates have sadly gone, but many houses in the area to the south of and immediately around the abbey are in fact medieval buildings, hunkered down behind tacked-on Georgian fronts.

I've got this far and not mentioned the Kennet and Avon canal, or Sydney Gardens, or William Herschel, or the Pump Rooms, or any one of a hundred other historical things to see in Bath. It is truly a unique city with a remarkable history, and an absolute must-see for anybody interested in our Roman or Georgian history.

Changing Language

by Marie-Louise Jensen

When I'm researching and reading old books, I love to find and note all the ways language has altered over the centuries. Writing my first Georgian book, The Girl in the Mask, I had to write down a note for myself:

1) You keep your clothes in a closet.
2) Your wardrobe is your collection of clothing
3) Skirts are the part of a man's coat below the waist
4) Ladies skirts were referred to as petticoats or 'coats
5) A dress was a gown.



There were others, but those were the frequently used ones I was concerned about getting right (I did make one mistake in Smuggler's Kiss which slipped through).


When I ask school children today what ladies in the 1700s called their dresses, they struggle to get the right answer, instead guessing robe, frock, tunic etc. The word gown has been pretty much lost.

Incidentally, I remember my grandmother always talking about 'frocks'. With the arrogance of youth, we'd roll our eyes and sigh, but in fact the word has come back into fashion now in the phrase 'posh frock'. I secretly always rather liked it.

I had fun in Runaway with a few Georgian phrases. For example, I used the expression 'sick as a cushion'. I'd come across it in Georgette Heyer novels and always found it amusing, so I put it into some dialogue. But the copy-editor queried it. When I hunted for it in the OED, I couldn't find it, but I did find 'sick as a parrot', which I thought was equally amusing, if not more so - given that parrots can be green. In the end, lovely assistant editor tracked down 'sick as a cushion', so although I kept parrot, I've notched it up as a phrase to use in future. I have quite a store of them and I always love coming across them when I'm reading too.

SLAVERY IN THE DRAWING ROOM – Elizabeth Fremantle

One thing retelling history can do is remind us of the horrors of the past in the hope that they will not be  repeated. Narratives like Toni Morrison's harrowing novel Beloved and Steve McQueen's Oscar winning film Twelve Years a Slave have served to remind us of the story of slavery from an insider perspective, bringing the cruelty home to us in a powerful and uncomfortably intimate way – they give a voice to the victims. But it has been easy for us English to respond from a distance, thinking of it as something essentially that happened elsewhere. It is true there has been much post-colonial discourse on the slave trade, with commentary on why it is never mentioned in Jane Austen; and novels like Heart of Darkness demonstrated anxiety about the destruction of Africa and its people more than a hundred years ago, but now we are beginning to see narratives that put slavery right into the gentile drawing rooms of Georgian England.


Imogen Roberston's latest novel Theft of Life describes a multi-cultural eighteenth century London, its hands drenched, up to the elbows, in blood. In her notes she says, 'Our institutions, our monuments and our culture are all stained and coloured by slavery, and it's not talked about enough,' and what her novel seeks to do, aside from entertain, is open that conversation in an unexpected arena: that of crime fiction. Drawing on stories of Oludah Equiano and Frances Glass she shapes her narrative around the atrocities of slavery, allowing us to see, with each  teaspoon of sugar, that they existed as much in Europe as they did across the Atlantic. She gives her protagonists, whether black or white, a voice and a space to express themselves, showing them all as equally part of the fabric of society even if their status was often unequal. Within Robertson's gripping novel, stories emerge of a bookseller who was once a slave, as was a teacher in the art of swordsmanship; the mixed-race children of slave owners and their female slaves, carry the weight of a past that asks questions about how those, surely one-sided, relationships.

One such story is Belle, which tells of the mixed-race daughter of a naval Admiral and a slave. She was gathered into her aristocratic English family and raised by her grandfather, Lord Mansfield a man who had a hand in the abolition of slavery. Based on a true story, the film addresses issues of race – Belle though well loved is not quite treated as equal to her white siblings – from an oblique angle, placing ideas about 'otherness' at the heart of what is essentially a traditional tale of romance, only here the obstacle to love, so necessary to the genre, is the heroine's skin colour. The impact of the young woman being named Belle highlights both the similarities of this story with that of Beauty and the Beast whose simpering Disney protagonist bears the same name, placing it at the heart of its genre whilst also commenting upon the story of 'otherness' it has to tell. People may want to judge films with a romantic imperative such as this as trivialising an issue that deserves more weight but it is by siting those narratives into genre fictions, be they crime or romance, that they inform a wider audience and that can only be a good thing.


Theft of Life is published by Headline and is out in hardback and ebook

Belle is out in cinemas nationwide from 13th June

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of Tudor fictions Queen's Gambit and Sisters of Treason.

Visit her website for information on those and future projects – elizabethfremantle.com