The Jane Austen App Tour of Bath

The Jane Austen Tour of Bath app is an iPhone/iPod app which guides you round the city of Bath with a commentary and pictures, taking in all the main sites associated with Jane Austen and her novels. Starting in Queen Square, it includes the Pump Room, No 4 Sydney Place, the Upper Assembly Rooms and the Royal Crescent plus 29 other locations. The commentary includes information on Jane Austen and her novels, as well as comments on the architecture and history of this beautiful, World Heritage site. There are numerous quotes from Jane Austen’s novels and letters, and over 60 photos of Bath, plus 20 wonderful paintings of the city in Jane Austen’s time*. The whole tour is accompanied by atmospheric Regency music.

There are plenty of opportunities to pause the app and go into the various sites along the way, or stop for a cup of tea. The walk itself takes about 1hr 45, and if you have an iPhone, the app uses the phone’s built-in GPS to play the right content at the right places. If you have an iPod, or if there is a poor GPS signal at any point, there are on-screen buttons allowing you to control your progress. Everything is accessible through a browse menu too so that you can access all the content wherever you are in the world.

The app has been very carefully designed so that the commentary, photos and onscreen instructions combine to make it simple to follow the route. In our trials, two first-time users of iPhones in their 60s found it, “Simple and clear to use”, navigating the whole tour without a hitch. (They also said it was, “Perfectly paced, hugely enjoyable and extremely informative.”)

The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store: http://bit.ly/uTmLqN and costs £2.99. It is made by Interactive Places (www.interacitveplaces.co.uk) of Bristol.

*The paintings are all provided by www.bathintime.co.uk, and are available to purchase as prints.