Bath is about 11 miles away and is scheduled to take about 20 minutes. Something was screwed up because about half way there we passed the earlier X39 bus. Oh well, we weren't in any hurry and we still got there is about half an hour.
Our first impressions of Bath were that it is a very well organized, clean and with less diversity of building types. Bath's major business is and has been for close to 2000 years a tourist town. The Romans, who developed an extensive bath complex, knew the hot springs. The city wasn't heavily fortified. This indicated that the Roman's only used it for R&R.
When the Romans left, the city decayed and disappeared. Later the English re-discovered the hot springs and developed them and built a monastery and medical center on the site. In the 12th century. The King's Bath was built over the site of the old Roman Baths and the city began its career as a "wellness" center rather than merely a place to be cured. By the 1600s, Bath was beginning to recognize its potential as a tourist destination for the rich and famous. In 1705 Beau Nash, a farm boy from Wales, came to Bath as a gambler but stayed and gains fame as a social organizer.
Although Bath sits on one of the older sites in England, it is one of the younger cities because it has constantly renewed itself. The oldest home in the city was built in 1680. By the 1700s, Bath had defined its clientele as the aristocratic wealthy, who would come with their servants, family and hanger's on for months at a time. Accommodations built were basically vacation rentals: large and luxurious, but not meant for permanent residency. Most of the homes were designed in the then popular Georgian style and all were finished in the local almost white stone that weathers to a cream color.
It was in the late 1970's that rules in England changed forbidding people using coal as their main source of heating. The buildings had all turned very black and were being destroyed by the acidity of the smoke. Our docent told us that the way to clean the soft sandstone was by using a water drip method. They somehow piped the water up to the top of the building and allowed a small amount of water over a long period of time to drip down the building and that is how they are cleaned in Bath. We didn't see any in action, but he showed us a building that had not been done and it was pretty black. When we were in London in 1988, a lot of London was being cleaned this way. For more information on cleaning click HERE.
As Beau Nash established the social atmosphere of the city, the architect-builder, John Wood took on the physical shapes. John established his reputation building the Queen's Square and his crowing glory was "The Circus", a complete ring of homes, three 120-degree arcs, in the Georgian with influences from the Roman and Greek styles, the phases of the moon and his whims. John developed "The Crescent" but died before its completion. His son finished the project.
That's probably more than you wanted to know. Anyway, we arrived at Bath just in time for a Free Walking Tour of Bath lead by volunteer docents (it really was free - wouldn't even accept a tip). The tour is scheduled to take an hour and a half to two hours. Our tour lasted about two and half hours, but no one left early.
The picture above illustrates a couple of devices to evade the window tax. The building to the left has bricked up a couple of its windows. This was a very common device and used throughout the country - straightforward and simple. The super rich, to flaunt wealth, would add windows to their homes. Some of the windows would light blank walls.
The house on the right used a much more subtle dodge. Georgian architecture insisted on symmetry. The house pictured is not symmetrical. This is an adjoined set of houses. The house on the left (of the right hand building) has its windows closer together than the house on the right side of the building. The law specified that distance between windows (to be different windows) had to be at least 12 inches. If you look closely, you can see that the window frames have been reworked so that the pair of windows counted as one. The law counted the number of windows - not their size
The tour started and ended in the courtyard of the Bath Abby. We were told that a visit to the Roman Bath Museum would take about two hours. So, even though the museum was next door to the Abbey, we left the area to find lunch. We found a nice sidewalk café and had a nice leisurely lunch. And then went back to the Roman Bath Museum.
What they've done is build a museum over the excavations of the Roman Baths. This means that the baths are not functional but you can look at what's left. The baths would not pass today's health codes anyway. For those people who would like to experience the Roman Baths, they are building a new complex - very modern - nearby. The new complex is very nice with an open, rooftop swimming pool, saunas, massages, the whole works. It won't be ready until next year and is way over budget. The water from the spring will be piped to this new facility and processed to modern standards.
This pipe, on the right, was built by the Romans some 1800 years ago.
If you look carefully at the picture of the spring pool you can see the water boiling (actually its gases released by the spring) the spring isn't boiling but it was really hot ~137°F (the threshold of pain is 140°F)
The plunge pool is cold and is adjacent to one of the sauna rooms - the idea was to get really hot and then jump into this cold pool. The pipe shown is lead, built by the Romans to carry high pressure, hot waters to a "Jacuzzi" type pool.
The Roman Bath was worthwhile and we had a good time. All of the historical information was relayed to the museum visitors through signs and audio head sets. The signs had numbers on them that you programmed into your machine and you heard about what you were looking at. They had short and long versions and then sometimes told you if you wanted more information, another number. Way cool!
We had put in a hard day and knowing that we could come back again, we headed home. About half way back we hit a thunderstorm with pouring rain. We had left just in time. Our timing was even better - by the time we got to Bristol the storm had already passed us. So we walked from Bristol Centre to home without getting a drop of rain.
It was a good day and we are looking forward to visiting Bath again. One time, we'll take the bus one way and return by canal boat. We want to do it in better weather than we're getting right now.
Our docent, Ben, wanted to know where we were staying and when we told him Bristol, he was excited and mentioned that Bristol had much more interesting architectural buildings than Bath. Bath was pretty much all Georgian-style buildings whereas Bristol had a lot of different styles.