Jane Austen Past & Present
With Jane Austen featuring on the small and large screen in March 2007, Bath Tourism Plus, the official marketing organisation for Bath and the surrounding area, is launching a new campaign to highlight Austen's connections with the city.
There are many parallels between Bath today and the city that Jane Austen knew. Bath has the distinction of being the only entire city in the UK to be designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO reflecting the number of perfectly preserved Georgian buildings, 5000 of which are listed. A stay in Bath is uplifting not only because of the sheer physical beauty of the architecture and surrounding countryside, but it continues to be a centre for health and wellbeing. The opening of Thermae Bath Spa in August 2006 has meant that visitors can once again bathe in the thermal spring water.
Jane Austen set two of her six published novels, Northanger Abbey completed in 1803 and Persuasion written in 1817, in Bath and made the city her home from 1801 to 1806. Jane knew Bath as a thriving spa resort, popular with fashionable society. Bath attracts modern day's visitors for all the same reasons, it is a vibrant city with great shopping, dining and plenty to see and do. People watching is as much a sport today in Bath as it was in Jane Austen's day and her intimate accounts of the place and the people it attracted make her novels as readable now as they were when they were first published.
Large and Small Screen Austen
ITV is launching its Jane Austen season in the spring including Persuasion which was filmed in 14 different Bath locations. A new film, "Becoming Jane", based on Jane Austen's early life, is due for release mid March and stars Anne Hathaway with Dame Maggie Smith and Julie Walters. Jane Austen is published in 47 languages and her wit and wisdom have enduring appeal.
Jane Austen Centre
For those keen to find out more about Jane Austen's life in the city, the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street is a good place to start. The Centre reflects the significance of Bath in her life and work. Clothes and other artefacts depict life at the time and well-informed guides set the scene with a personal introduction. At the Jane Austen Regency Tea Rooms the most popular option is to take "Tea with Mr Darcy" thus satisfying more than just a yearning for tea, sandwiches and cake. The Jane Austen Centre offers walking tours every weekend enabling visitors to retrace Jane Austen's steps and see the city through her eyes.
Eighteenth Century Heyday
In the Eighteenth Century Bath was transformed into a gracious city with sweeping crescents with grand facades. Architect John Wood was responsible for creating this blueprint, aided by entrepreneur Ralph Allen owner of the local stone quarries. Jane would have been confronted by gleaming new buildings, many of which are still intact today, and by a full social agenda established under the Master of Ceremonies, Beau Nash, the third character credited with Bath's rise to stardom.
Grand Gathering Places - The Pump Room and the Assembly Rooms As the only place in the UK with natural hot spring water, Bath was patronised by Royalty seeking a cure and the rest of society soon followed. Drinking the waters became more popular than bathing in them and the Pump Room was built specifically for that purpose. It soon became the place to see and be seen. To this day the Pump Room is still at the social heart of Bath with entertainment from the Pump Room Trio and the "pumper" on hand to serve the spa water with its characteristic metallic flavour.
Both the Pump Room and the Assembly Rooms are featured in Jane Austen's work. The Assembly Rooms opened in 1771, purpose-built for large gatherings. Guests "assembled" for balls for up to 1200 people, to drink tea, play cards and listen to music or just to see and be seen, to talk and flirt. Now home to the Museum of Costume, the kind of clothes that might have been worn in Jane Austen's time for the evening entertainments are on display as part of a magnificent collection of fashion through the ages.
Retail Therapy
Bath is a buzzing cosmopolitan centre with a lively retail and restaurant scene. Milsom Street where Jane and her contemporaries would have shopped for hats and ribbons is still the place to go for trinkets and fripperies, gifts and high fashion. With more than 40 per cent of shops in contemporary Bath being independent, retail therapy is as much part of life as it was 200 years ago. Investment shopping is nothing new, Jane Austen was an inveterate shopper and a keen follower of fashion but had to work within a limited budget so would scan the pages of the Bath Chronicle for news of sales.
Accommodation
Visitors in Jane's time would have taken lodging in the brand new housing stock built out of the handsome Bath stone and today hotels occupy many of those Georgian terraced houses. The Queensberry Hotel on Russel Street is a good example, as is the Town House bed and breakfast in Bennett Street or Dukes Hotel on Great Pulteney Street. Staying at the Royal Crescent Hotel in the centre of the iconic Royal Crescent is as much of a treat now as it would have been to rent one of these grand and prestigious houses in the Eighteenth Century. A visitor in the early Nineteenth Century said "lodgings are not only very numerous, but are distinguished for the elegance, convenience and comfort which they afford visitors", and the same could be said of the accommodation in Bath today.
Popular diversions
The Austens took lodgings in Sydney Place at the end of Great Pulteney Street. They lived opposite Sydney Pleasure Gardens, where public breakfasts, open air concerts and fireworks were popular diversions. Formerly the Sydney Hotel, the building now occupied by the Holburne Museum houses an important decorative arts collection including some of Gainsborough's portraits commissioned during his sojourn in Bath. Informative museums like the Building of Bath Museum and No 1 Royal Crescent help visitors gain an impression of how the city developed and what life was like in those exciting times.
Walking
The latest interpretation of Jane Austen's period in Bath "Jane Austen in Bath, Walking Tours of the Writer's City" by Katharine Reeve weaves together the story of Jane Austen's life in Bath with the characters she portrays in her novels. Reeve explains the rationale behind her book "Jane Austen is Bath's most famous resident yet her life here remains a mystery." Despite Jane being a keen letter writer, few survive from this period. We will never really know exactly what she got up to on Bath's shopping streets and country walks; at private parties and teas, grand balls and the theatre.
Jane Austen is alleged to have been less happy in Bath than in the countryside where she grew up but as a keen walker she was soon able to escape to find solace in the rolling hills that surround the city. Walks that she enjoyed are still popular with both locals and visitors who can climb up Claverton Down to Ralph Allen's Sham Castle or walk along the Avon Valley to Claverton through an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Moreland and the Tilneys walk up Beechen Cliff "that noble hill". It is still a great vantage point from which to admire the cityscape and the green hills beyond.
Fabulous Fare
Returning home with a healthy appetite Jane would have looked forward to dinner which would be an elaborate affair. Bath had a reputation for the quality and variety of food on offer, there were even grocery shops selling "ready-meals" like meat pies and fruit tarts. The availability of fresh local produce today gives Bath its distinctive edge as a culinary destination and there are great food shops and delicatessens. Buns were an indulgence for Jane Austen and modern day visitors can still call at Sally Lunn's, the oldest house in the city to sample one of their famous brioche style buns.
Jane Austen Festival
Bath is known as the City of Festivals with 37 festivals throughout the year. In September 2007, the seventh Jane Austen festival will be launched with a colourful costumed parade through the city centre, now the biggest Regency costume promenade in Europe. The week-long programme includes talks and productions, readings and tours and draws Jane Austen fans from around the world.
Theatrical Highlights
The theatre that Jane Austen loved to attend opened in Orchard Street in 1750. In 1768 it was distinguished by being the first theatre outside London to be protected by a royal patent. This theatre drew superstars of the time like Sarah Siddons and today the Theatre Royal dating from 1805 attracts pre-West End shows and top name performers. There is a Jane Austen double bill at the Theatre Royal on 23rd March 2007 with a reading of poetry loved by the Austen family "Rhyme and Reason" followed by a talk on "Jane Austen's Guide to Good Manners."
The Ultimate Jane Austen Experience
For those who want to immerse themselves totally in the period and enjoy the ultimate Jane Austen experience there are specialist costume hire shops like Farthingales, or the Bath Minuet Society offering instruction on the intricacies of dancing the minuet, an essential life skill in Jane Austen's day when balls and dances were an important part of the social scene. Jane Tapley cooks authentic Georgian style cuisine and serves dinner parties in her own Georgian townhouse.
City of Romance
Lauren Henderson, author of the "Jane Austen Guide to Dating", whose thesis at Cambridge was on "Courtship rituals in Jane Austen", has ingeniously applied the author's wit and wisdom to modern day dating dilemmas. She has described Bath as "Britain's most romantic city". It is popular not only for a romantic break but also for holding weddings and other special celebrations. In Jane Austen's time Bath functioned as a marriage market where unmarried daughters were exposed to society and unscrupulous bachelors hunted for a wealthy match.
Accessibility
Travelling to stay with her aunt and uncle who lived in the Paragon, Bath, sounded like an epic. In her letters Jane Austen describes the jouney as being " perfectly free from accident or event; we changed horses at the end of every stage, and paid at almost every turn-pike. .....We had a very neat chaise from Devizes; it looked almost as well as a gentleman's, at least as a very shabby gentleman's; in spite of this advantage, however, we were above three hours coming from thence to Paragon".
First Great Western trains now take just 90 minutes from London Paddington to Bath. The city is 30 minutes south of the M4 and the nearest airport is Bristol with connections to many European cities and daily flights to New York.
For further information on things to do and see and where to stay in Bath please call Bath Tourist Information Centre on 0906 711 2000 (50p/minute) or log on to www.visitbath.co.uk.
Notes to editors
1. Further Information
For further information please contact Nicky Hancock on 01225 332299 (mobile 07956 594113) or by e-mail at nicky@hancockcomm.com or Debbie Ponting at Bath Tourism Plus on 01225 477441 or by email on: debbie_ponting@bathtourism.co.uk
2. Bath Tourism Plus
Bath's destination marketing organisation, Bath Tourism Plus, began trading on 1st October 2003, taking over the management of tourism promotion from Bath & North East Somerset Council and in the process, establishing a ground-breaking partnership between the public and private sector.
Working with the public and private sectors Bath Tourism Plus takes full responsibility for co-ordinating the work of a busy tourist information centre, the marketing of Bath and the surrounding area to leisure and business travellers, PR activity to attract the nation's top travel writers, a conference office, and development of Bath's official tourism internet site www.visitbath.co.uk. Its primary objective is to optimise the value of tourism for members and partners.
3. Featured Tourism Businesses
Jane Austen Centre www.janeausten.co.uk
Jane Austen Walking Tour www.janeausten.co.uk/centre/walking_tours.html
Roman Baths & Pump Room www.romanbaths.co.uk
Assembly Rooms www.museumofcostume.co.uk
Thermae Bath Spa www.thermaebathspa.com
Shopping www.bathshopping.com
The Queensberry Hotel www.thequeensberry.co.uk
The Town House B&B www.thetownhousebath.co.uk
Holburne Museum of Art www.bath.ac.uk/holburne
Theatre Royal www.theatreroyal.org.uk
Sally Lunns Refreshment House www.sallylunns.co.uk
4. Bath Events 2007
For details of events happening in the city see:
http://visitbath.co.uk/site/whats-on/bath-major-events-2007
5. Jane Austen in Bath: Walking Tours of the Author's City by Katharine Reeve (Little Bookroom, September 2006, illustrated hardcover, £12.99)
Copyright © 2008 Bath Tourism Plus
