Bath — River Avon and Parade Gardens

As you would expect, Bath is a fabulous town to wander. I wish we had had more time to spend just aimlessly exploring its nooks and crannies. One of my bad habits on trips is to try to cram in too much purposeful sightseeing and overplan an itinerary. I'm not good at being idle. We did, however, take some time to wander Bath without any definite plans.

Pausing during our wandering.

We stumbled across Mr. B's Emporium of Reading Delights, an aptly named bookshop.

Speaks for itself.

Bath has its share of tourist shops — it can feel akin to an urban version of a beach resort — but when they come packaged in such an attractive setting I don't object too much.

I'm not a shopper — I loathe shopping — but I enjoy a pleasant shop-lined street.

This street busker deservedly attracted a good crowd.

In Bath, even skeletons must have flowers.

Of course, we would have had more time to wander, except for an impediment. A tiny one. Who tends to dictate the speed at which we travel.

We spent a mere thirty minutes or so walking up the street, and down the street, and up the street, and down the street . . .

One of the prettiest areas to wander in Bath is by the river. On a warm, sunny day like we had it's irresistible. We spent hours on the riverside.

Watching (and narrating) the River Avon in Bath. "Dad! That green boat." Yes, what about it? "It's moving!"

Kate and I have pondered taking a few weeks to tour some U.K. rivers and canals by boat.

The Pulteney Bridge is lined with shops and provides a pretty backdrop. It's certainly no Ponte Vecchio in Florence, but I appreciate the effort. We grabbed some food for a picnic from a cafe on the bridge.

Pulteney Bridge in Bath. Boats go up and down the mini-falls in the river.

View from the cafe within the Pulteney Bridge.

We picnicked in the Parade Gardens, an absolutely fabulous, fabulous, place to picnic on a sunny afternoon. You have to pay a pound or two to get in, but the small cost keeps the crowd size down. You enter down a ramp into the Gardens, which are set well below the street level.

Parade Gardens in Bath.

The park provides lounge chairs for your relaxation:

They hold summertime concerts in the bandstand.

Stealer of chips crisps, stealer of hearts. And the kid is cute, too.

Lots of flower beds.

{Ed.'s note: Duh, of course.}

I'm guessing this gardener won the "how many flowers can you stuff into a flowerbed?" competition.

We loved our visit to Bath. So many great things to see and do. And it was a marvelous home base to explore the surrounding towns, which I'll describe in upcoming posts. But my favorite memory from our trip was the family time we spent in the Parade Gardens.

I couldn't decide which of the following two pictures I liked better, so here are both.

Parade Gardens with Bath Abbey as backdrop.

A little more artsy view.

Bath — modern era

Bath is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and its headlining main tourist sites are enough to justify a visit. But there are a lot of other reasons to go.

Your accommodations are likely to be gorgeous. As a city of around 85,000 people, Bath's permanent population is more like a small town than an urban city. But it draws more than 1 million overnight visitors, and 3.8 million day visitors, per year, so its effective population is much larger. Roughly 80 hotels and 180 bed and breakfasts accommodate those many visitors.

We stayed at the Marlborough House bed and breakfast. Unlike many of the other B&Bs, which are in Georgian buildings, the Marlborough House is a handsome Victorian era house. Its owner, Peter, is gracious and eager to be helpful — he provided a map and drew possible routes for touring the city, suggested multiple places to eat, and offered ideas about where to entertain our toddler. He even provided a larger room for us than our reservation, simply because he had the space. The breakfast is vegetarian, and although we are not vegetarians it was a really nice change of pace for us. His staff was very friendly and attentive. The house sits just two blocks from the Crescent. It was one of my favorite B&Bs that we've stayed in all of our travels.

Early morning photo of the Marlborough House bed and breakfast.

Kate, Jackson, and monkey enjoyed a great (and large) breakfast. Kate is a firm believer in enjoying not just the bed, but also the breakfast, in a B&B.

Flowers are everywhere in Bath. They hang from flowerpots on the sidewalk or windows of homes and businesses. Gardens and small parks are numerous. For decades, Bath has been a regular winner of "Britain in Bloom."

Elderly and down on your luck? Come live in St. John's Hospital, an almshouse designed by John Wood, the Elder, housing around 100 of the local population.

Hastily throw a few flowers in a perfunctory small flowerbed on a street corner? Not in Bath.

Even pubs need flower baskets.

The flowers, the creamy Bath limestone, the neoclassical architecture — it's a natural draw for weddings and "hen parties." It's almost impossible to spend an hour in Bath without encountering a bride and groom, or more frequently a pack of young women in festive attire for bachelorette parties.

Bride and groom trotting by.

Matching sashes, or shirts, or hats, seemed to be de rigueur for the hen parties.

Bath also has invested in making sure its youngest visitors have fun, too. Just a couple of blocks from our B&B was a massive children's park with the largest collection of outdoor play equipment we've ever seen. Ranging from a large skate park to numerous jungle gyms to a half dozen sets of infant swings, you can bring your young'uns and keep them entertained for hours. Maybe the whole day. We faced a disagreement screaming meltdown from Jackson each time we tried to leave the park.

Just in this area, there were four climbing structures of varying levels of difficulty.

Gentle climbing wall and extremely fast slide.

Jack spent his first 15 minutes at the park marveling at the deep, soft, pristine sand.

Swings can accommodate your small and *ahem* larger children.

Besides its major historical attractions, Bath also has several slightly offbeat museums, such as the Museum of Bath at Work providing industrial history, or the American Museum, which is the only U.K. museum focused on U.S. history. In our limited time, we opted for the Fashion Museum, which I entered with some trepidation. A collection of thousands of dresses? Umm, does it have swords or masterpiece paintings or ancient coins? However, I came away impressed.

Wait, did that one's eyes move?

With dresses from several centuries ago, you can get a better understanding of why the Georgian architecture featured such wide boulevards and doorways. This gives you an idea:

Whoa.

Although the number of dresses can be numbing, I learned some interesting things. For example, there were four stages of Victorian mourning, and widows could be expected to remain in mourning for 2.5 years. "Deepest mourning" and "second mourning" had clothes of "dull, sombre finish." The next stage, "ordinary mourning," could have "black silks and velvets" with "jet ornaments and jewelry." For "half mourning" you could add white, grey, or shades of purple.

And then, when you were done with mourning, you could display your bosoms:

If only they had the benefit of the term "nip slip" for the society pages in 1887.

The Fashion Museum also houses a "Dress of the Year" display, picked each year  since 1963 by a fashion expert. Below is the 2012 winner. I'm a bit confused. If you have to wear pants underneath, is it really a dress?

You know how some dresses make it daring to try to sit down? This one dares you to stand. Even the mannequin was too bashful not to wear pants underneath.

Next post, we'll head down to the river for a sunny finale to our tour of Bath.

Bath — Circus and Crescent

The neoclassical beauty that makes Bath one of Britain's most beautiful cities is largely due to two architects: John Wood, the Elder, and John Wood, the Younger. The elder Wood was born in a suburb of Bath in 1704. He set out to create a "new Rome," a planned and unified city designed with neoclassical architecture. Many of the large-scale  architectural features of the city — parks, squares, parades, hospitals, and so on — were planned and/or designed by Wood, the elder.

His masterpiece is the Circus, an inward-facing circle of townhouses inspired by the Coliseum in Rome. Decorated with Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian capitals on the pillars, the main door of each house was made large enough to allow the owners' sedan chairs to be carried straight inside without having to pause outside.

Aerial view of the Circus in Bath. The Crescent is one block away following the road leading off to the upper right.

Quiet morning on the Circus in Bath.

As you can see in Bath's Fashion Museum, the ladies needed extra wide sidewalks to accommodate their dresses.

Between the ground and first floor there's a frieze of pictorial emblems. These include nautical symbols, serpents, symbols of science, and Freemasonry images.

The frieze above the ground floor includes 525 images.

There are decorations above the second floor, as well:

Frowning visages look askance at passersby.

Besides the floors above ground, the townhouses also enjoy sunken gardens in front, some more deep than others:

I suspect that the owners of this townhouse have built a room underneath their garden.

This garden is at least twice as deep as the garden pictured above.

For those of you counting at home, there are at least five floors to these houses — one below ground, three main floors, and a servants' attic above.

Those little circular windows at the top were for the servants.

Construction of the Circus began in 1754, the same year John Wood, the Elder, died. It was completed by his son, John Wood, the Younger, in 1768. Trained by his father as an architect, the younger Wood spent his life expanding upon his father's vision, connecting some of his father's isolated sites with wide neoclassical boulevards, and helping to create an entire section of the city in the neoclassical (known in England as "Georgian") style.

For example, he built the grand Assembly Rooms which served as public gathering spaces for the aristocracy to play games, hold concerts and dances, and avoid grubbier public houses (i.e., pubs) where they might have to mingle with the lower classes. The rooms are generally symmetrical and feature high windows to provide privacy for those within.

The Germans bombed these rooms during World War II so everything is a reconstruction except for the chandeliers, which are original.

Octagonal room. Chairs apparently set out for an epidemic of wallflowers.

The younger Wood's greatest achievement is the Crescent, a block away from the Circus. At the time it was built, it was on the edge of town and faced out into the countryside. Started in 1767 and finished in 1774, the Crescent contains 30 houses — or, at least, 30 house facades, but some of the houses have been combined on the interior. When building the Crescent, the buyers of the homes purchased a section of the front and then built their house behind the facade, which means the Crescent is uniformly sweeping in front but has a varied and irregular back.

Aerial view of the Crescent in Bath. Note the irregular backs of the homes, contrasting with the uniform front.

The facade of the Crescent is simpler than the Circus, with only Ionic columns and no friezes or other statuary. It is widely considered to be one of the best examples of Georgian architecture and has been imitated in various cities across England.

Several of the houses were undergoing rehab when we visited.

Can you spot Kate and Jackson in this photo? (Good luck.)

At the center of the Crescent, behind the red construction (and the green shrubbery somehow allowed to overwhelm the facade), is the Royal Crescent Hotel. If you're pretty and smile nicely like me {Ed.'s note: It assuredly was not for Brian, but rather for Kate.}, they'll let you walk through and peek into the back of the crescent and perhaps stop for some tea.

Inside the Royal Crescent Hotel.

A view of the garden/restaurant seating. The rear of the Royal Crescent Hotel is in the background.

Behind the hotel, one of the many tourist-site cats we encountered in southwest England.

Unlike the inward-facing Circus and other sites designed by Wood, the Elder, the younger Wood designed the Crescent to be open and outward-facing. An expansive lawn fades downhill from the Crescent and is now much used as a spot for picnics or pickup football matches.

The upper part of the lawn is reserved for the homeowners on the Crescent. They're not that welcoming to the hoi polloi.

Dividing the upper and lower lawns is a "ha-ha" wall. From the lower side of the lawn, the ground slopes down into a ditch, with a stone retaining wall holding up the upper lawn. The wall is invisible from the Crescent, leaving an illusion of an uninterrupted lawn. Even from the lower lawn the wall is hard to see until you get fairly close. In times past, the ditch was steeper and the wall was higher. It had good use for when sheep and other livestock might graze on the lower lawn, but were prevented by the wall from munching on the upper lawn and getting too close to the houses. Not coincidentally, the wall kept peasants and other lesser folk from visiting.

Jackson giggled a "ha-ha" at the wall, trying to climb it and throwing a ball onto the forbidden land.

We visited the Crescent at least three times during our weekend stay in Bath. It was only a couple of blocks from our bed and breakfast, and the jovial open space was great for burning off toddler energy. Jackson even helped organize the grass clippings.

I crush them! Kaboom!

More must be added to this magnificent pile.

Next post will move us into Bath's modern era.