Have a Bath (minibreak)
The perfect city for a literary, romantic - and slightly hungover - getaway
Hi everyone,
I went to a wonderful wedding in Somerset this week and since my mother had come up to London to look after our toddler, my husband and I figured that we’d add on a couple of days in Bath to our jaunt.
Incidentally, proof that I take my own advice: I wore this Rixo dress, which was included in my wedding guest dress round-up from a few weeks ago. I paired it with gold platform heels and took an oversized black blazer that I didn’t need as it was a beautifully balmy evening and I was on the dancefloor for most of it anyway. Loved wearing it.
I haven’t been to Bath for nearly 20 years, which is silly, especially considering it’s only 1 hr 20 mins from London on a train. I always tell my American husband that the best cities to visit outside of London in the south of England are the three Bs: Bath, Bristol and Brighton but, because I’m a bad wife, have failed to take him to any. So after staying at The PIG-near-Bath for the wedding, we travelled into the city for some Culture™️.
We weren’t going to be there for long so I’d done a ton of research and made an itinerary which is very unlike me. And despite a pretty brutal wedding hangover, we were troupers. I may have had to give the odd rousing speech when my husband suggested just going back to the hotel to sleep but we soon got into it. So, here’s everything we got up to in Bath, including exhibitions, attractions, wine bars, restaurants, and hotels. Fortunately no one threw up.
Literary exploits
Bath is obviously Jane Austen land. She lived there from 1801 to 1806 and all six of Austen’s novels mention Bath, and two of them (Persuasion and Northanger Abbey) are set there. This year is the 250th anniversary of her birth and Bath is being very chill about it:
There’s a whole ten-day Jane Austen Festival in September, which seems like it’s going to involve a lot of Regency dressing up and historical reenactment which is a cringe too far for me, so I’m not mad we missed that. We went to the Austen Centre on Gay Street (where Austen lived) with semi plans to go in when my head was turned by another literary heroine two doors down: Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein (Shelley lived in Bath for a few months in 1816-17 and wrote much of her famous novel there). I’ve always been more of a Gothic lit girl and I sort of rate Frankenstein over any of Austen’s novels so we decided to take our £17 ticket fare and instead go to the high camp House of Frankenstein, which I fully recommend. There are lots of stories about Mary, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron et al here and, as it goes on over four floors, how Frankenstein became a fixture in pop culture.
Unrelated to Frankenstein, but one of my favourite takeaways was that when Percy’s body washed ashore in Italy after he drowned in a boating incident, Byron asked if he could have Percy’s skull to keep but was refused “due to a story of him once using a human skull as a drinking cup”. That Byron, eh?
The House of Frankenstein is supposed to end with you going through an unlit maze in the basement in what they dub a “scare attraction”. On entering and seeing a sign warning that real actors were being used somewhere inside, we decided that we would forgo the basement on account of our fragile conditions and the high likelihood that the experience would result in a stroke. 8/10
