Meet Some of our Guests
This month our roving reporter, Lady Anne Russell, shares tales of her Strictly Jane Austen guided walks through the streets of Bath.
So it falls to me, Lady Russell, a guide for many years (initially in London then briefly, entertainingly, focussing on the artists’ colony in St Ives, Cornwall) and now back in my beloved Bath, to confess that what I especially enjoy about guiding is the conversation. The interaction between guide and her guests (or guest as individuals are most welcome too) in terms of ideas, expansion of knowledge and additional research that a random question might engender, is a joy. I am of the same mind as Anne Elliot, who remarked in Persuasion, ‘My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation;’
I also enjoy tailoring my walks to the needs and interests of our guests, who come from all over the world. I cannot establish the extent of their ‘Janeite knowledge’ and other areas of interest – perhaps the rediscovery of the Roman Baths or the importance of the thermal waters – until we meet so each tour is a delightful, unique surprise. I don’t – by choice – script my walks and, like my fellow guides, I always aim to encompass Bath’s principal architectural highlights as well as lesser-known sights or attractive hidden areas.
So, now I must introduce, in no particular order, some of our guests:
A French Gentleman and knowledgeable, regular visitor to Bath who saw, with mounting dismay (as I did on screen) the shocking destruction of Notre Dame. This pre-walk chat led to an interesting discussion of the Cathedral’s restoration and some of the almost-lost trades involved, before we got onto the serious business of our one-to-one perambulation, during which he asked many engaging questions about the growth of eighteenth-century Bath, its entertainments and social mores.
He had, on previous trips, stayed in attractive, differing, historic hotels – The Royal Crescent, The Bath Priory, The Gainsborough – and questioned me about their histories, especially The Gainsborough’s transformation from an 1826 hospital to a five star hotel/spa village (via incarnations as a technical and art college) with its own supply of the unique health-giving thermal waters.
He also commented on Bath hospitality (restaurants, pubs, bars, café-bars) which led me to take him to various unusual venues such as The Botanist on Milsom Street in which the television series First Dates, Bath is filmed. This was once Timothy Lightoler’s (1766-67) comfortable, commodious Octagon Chapel where Jane Austen occasionally worshipped and her aunt, Jane Leigh Perrot, had a private pew. It also frequently doubled as a concert hall hosting performances by William Herschel, the resident organist/musician/astronomer and discoverer of Uranus. And then The Salamander on John Street, a c1747 Coffee Shop, where I like to think Jane perused the daily papers or drafted parts of Northanger Abbey.
By the time we reached Margaret’s Buildings, off Brock Street, my guest remembered a one-off pop-up shop, ‘Purveyors of the Finest Paper Hangings’ (eighteenth-century wallpapers/hangings), which had so inspired a colleague that he went on to research, then devote himself to, the sympathetic re-decoration and restoration of historic houses. Delighted, I took him to the location which had, aeons ago, also been a chic up-market grocers and then a delightfully-disordered antiques shop and which now serves as a relaxing coffee/lifestyle venue.
Then there was a charming Cuban couple, now resident in the USA, who wanted (and got to see) all of the highlights, hear masses of architectural history and learn a huge amount of Janeite information. Their questions were excellent! They were also eager to hear about the way old-style coffees and teas were brewed and imbibed and the various implements that were used, as well as unusual shopping opportunities, so what else could I do but take them into The Corridor (a Georgian arcade dating from 1825 and a new building type that Jane could not have known), and thence to The Guildhall Market for the oldest-established tea/coffee purveyors, Gillard’s. (The Guildhall was an indoor market in Jane’s day, though the present, beautifully-domed one was built from 1861-63.) After which we somehow got onto discussing Cuban music, especially the atmospheric, moving film The Buena Vista Social Club. I’m sure Anne Elliot would have approved!
I admit, though, that there was one occasion when I felt very, very silly, fearing that I had let down both myself and Strictly Jane Austen Tours.
Imagine the scene: spring, but it felt like high summer, over a celebratory dinner at a chic Bath venue following a busy day filled with talks about the Pleasure Garden and Bath’s Thermal Corridor and a ‘Countryfied Walk’. My immediate companion – an elegantly-dressed, magnificently-magisterial Chicago lady – and I had already discussed ‘all things Jane’ and had somehow moved onto her home city’s legendary 1893 World’s Fair, as documented in Erik Larson’s fascinating work, The Devil in the White City, a book we both knew well. Later, we talked about film.
I have no idea why I held up Last Year at Marienbad as a prime example, but it might have been because I had been examining (with horror) the 1959 photographs of Bath’s long-lost, much be-mourned Grand Pump Room Hotel on Stall Street showing its huge, deserted halls and spectacular rooms which brought to mind Alain Robbe-Grillet/Alain Resnais 1961 ciné-novel, filmed at an apparently-deserted German Spa. I confessed to my companion that the critics were divided as to the worth of this film; the first camp, to which I proudly belong, pronounced it to be high art, while the other lot berated it as utter twaddle. I then began to enthuse about the stylish images, blurred chronology and incomprehensible dialogue.
Suddenly she turned to me and asked if Johnny Depp was in it. This was a perfectly reasonable question as I’d neglected to tell her the date of the film, but I confess that it reduced me to helpless paroxysms of laugher since the juxtaposition of fine (if mannered) images, the portentous, hypnotic, intoning voice-over and Johnny Depp was so hilariously improbable. The Chicago lady, and the other guests around the table, looked on aghast. I apologised to all, of course, but as we were about to leave what had otherwise been an excellent evening, all anyone had to do to set me off again was to sidle up and mutter ‘Johnny Depp!’ Well, the joke was well and truly on me that time, but I was thrilled that they all enjoyed themselves, as I did!
Other guests have included a Parisian hen party who were drawn to Bath on account of its architecture and the similarity of formal grand-statement-boulevards and squares. The bride was beautifully costumed throughout in a claret-coloured gown. Then there were the lively ladies of a local book club, who – while we laughed a good deal – covered a lot of worthy, serious ground and a lovely Scottish lady whom I met at ‘The Jane Austen Basement Flat’, 4 Sydney Place, Jane’s favourite Bath residence. She was also knowledgeable about the last duel fought on British soil (Kirkaldy, 1826) when the taunted, unwilling ‘challenged’ shot dead his vindictive bank manager. We started our walk with Sydney Gardens and its Pleasure Garden past, then visited Jane-related sites in Great Pulteney Street, Laura Place, Abbey Churchyard, Bath Street and Queen Square, finally reaching The Gravel Walk where upon we resumed our discussion of duelling and I told her a wonderful ghost story.
And so passed a fascinating and unpredictable spring and summer season. As autumn arrives in Bath, I am looking forward to walking through the falling leaves with a new set of ‘clever, well-informed’ guests. I will report back!
