THE CITY OF BATH

Today I read in the local Bath newspaper that a man in his late eighties was attacked in broad daylight in the city center with large numbers of people walking by and doing nothing. Sounds just about right for this tight self-satisfied little place whose lower middle class populace think they’re better than anyone else anywhere! Collectively they may believe that butter wouldn’t melt up their arses and that their city is the best place to live anywhere in the known Universe but then many of them are outsiders from London who’ve given themselves over to the carefully manufactured up-front culture of the place. However, if you are a genuine outsider, even though one who’s lived here for many years, it’s still possible to be an observer and look at the town and its people through plain ordinary glasses and make an independent assessment of exactly what’s what with the people who scurry around the place from shoppers, shopkeepers and the legion of tradesmen to the youth and those making money out of the property racket.

Bath’s history goes back a long way. Before the Romans got here it was the ancient British who put down roots around the hot springs. The Saxons came later after which a long medieval spell with Chaucer writing about The Wife of Bath. Some of those medieval passageways are still visible! Later the landed gentry got hold of what is now called the center and flogged off some of their fields to imaginative architects and jobbing builders during the Georgian era who did the businesslike thing of creating fine terraces and crescents for housing, making a mint designing wonderful facades around which they added rubble and breeze block to fill out the sides and the rear. You might call it being all front and you’d be right because Bath’s speculative building era in Georgian times is where the phrase originated. One thing though is for sure. Architecturally they created a beautiful city from 1750 to 1850, one which attracted many famous people and names of the time.

From 1900 to the 1960’s the town fell into decline and became a backwater until new sections of the M4 Motorway were built connecting Reading with Newport, South Wales, bringing Bath within an easy car journey of London. After that the place took off again. The Admiralty it once housed gave way to large numbers of well to do incomers from London. The city center, long been blackened by soot from Victorian and Edwardian coal fires was scrubbed up and a great rush of speculative property development ensued with countless single owner-occupier Grade One listed buildings being turned into flats and new blocks being built onto the backs of the old, the local council turning a blind eye to the activities of builders and their gaggle of surveyors, tradesmen and solicitors. With the town spruced up and a fine collection of buildings already in place, to say nothing of the city’s Roman Baths and Georgian Pump Room, a place where its swells once congregated in a kind of musical marriage market, it became a major mecca for tourism!

That’s a brief history, but only for the city center. Tourists arriving here in a steady stream during the summer take in the medieval Abbey, Roman Baths, Georgian streets, crescents, fine buildings, parks and superb Palladian bridge, stay for a few hours, maybe even a day, then rush off to Stonehenge. For them that’s Bath. Same as it is for most of those who live in its center. The truth in fact is so very different. Most of Bath’s population live miles away in a great working class, underclass sea of housing estates stuck behind the railway, river and the canal to the far south west of the center. And sea of low grade terraced housing and semis it is. Miles of it perched high over the grandiose Georgiana below. A place which tourists never see and is likewise never frequented by the middle class ‘townies’. The only contact between this vast invisible area and the center is on weekend nights when its youth descend on bars, pubs, the cinema complex and cheap takeaways, get a skin-full of booze and become easy prey to police waiting in vans, or else during the day when many of them commute into town by bus to work in shops or as apprentices in garages and tradesmen’s workshops. Whatever the case, their employment may be best described as cheap labour.

The population of the center is small compared to its inner and outer suburbs. Small but firmly up its own arse. Bath to them is what they are or more accurately what they think they are. Generally speaking more righteous but actually self-righteous than anyone else and certainly of a better class than the great volume of a poorer citizenry living miles away out of sight. Because they live in or are surrounded by fine architecture they have adopted superior, to an outsider, supercilious ways and if it actually wasn’t so sad the capers they cut would be comical. This was once noted by a lady possessing great observational power, Jane Austen, who mercilessly sent up the caper-cutting capacity of the city center citizenry in her novels. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that she detested the place and only stayed in it because she had to. Nonetheless, prompted by the local council, ever-conscious of making money from tourism, the town has a flourishing Jane Austen industry in which the Georgian streets are regularly descended on by fruitcake Americans all dolled up in Georgian costume parading around on the pavements playing silly make believe before being fleeced at the local teahouses over oh so very English cream cheese and watercress sandwiches, scones, jam and clotted cream. All part of the Bath tourist experience in paying money for nothing but that’s what they come here for because there’s nothing like it at home, especially America!

To an educated outsider it’s a deliciously sick joke! The local authority preens and prides itself on Bath’s tourist trade but in truth it’s not even a piss in the Atlantic compared to somewhere like Venice with its hundred thousand new visitors each day! Most adult tourists visiting Bath are Chinese, Japanese or American. Most of the kids are Spanish or French. Most come by coach, stay for a few hours then get the hell out. The hotels are only for the rich and the guest house ghettos not easy to find.

Bath has no proper market. The one at the Guildhall is an apology at best, without any competition between its handful of stalls and the once a week so called Farmer’s Market is a fabulously overpriced rip off with the same sour-faced traders flogging their soggy overpriced products or organic, joke-joke, comestibles week after week primarily to the liberal greenies who think that any craft made foodstuff or hand reared livestock product fertilized by something they normally don’t want to think about is the best thing since crusty brown bread. It’s a place frequented by terribly sensible thirties type people who think they’re doing themselves good by munching once a week on something reassuringly, healthily expensive. Their corollary are those who feel a similar status need to walk round the town holding a coffee cup with a brand name on it so you know that they’re drinking the right stuff from somewhere else reassuringly expensive! It’s what those who live in the City Centre do best. Parade around casually showing everyone else that they’re drinking and can therefore afford the reassuringly expensive because that’s what the parading around means. An existential drama of status.

With this kind of casual weekend showmanship, the status game of city center Georgian Bath is replayed in the modern era by the local middle classes. It’s fascinating to see people sipping what they think is real coffee because the important thing is the price they paid. There are many who must know that it’s barely coffee at all but that doesn’t matter. The cup they’re holding is a status accessory and status is what city center Bath is all about. It’s something regularly confirmed in a direct and most interesting way. In a generalised manner the city has a decidedly upper-crust image, especially to those living in towns forty, even fifty miles away. When visiting such places with my wife and chatting to people we’re often asked where we live. When I say ‘Bath’ their reaction is invariably to make the gesture of putting a finger under the end of their nose and raising it upward. In a general sense it means very posh, or upper-crust, conveying the view that we must have plenty of money! It’s what they think of everyone who comes from Bath. That anyone living there must be rich! Perhaps it’s got something to do with the fiendish house prices or flat rentals in the Georgian center, something that’s spread into the suburbs in recent decades making the whole property market industry jump with joy. Bath a booming city of general wealth!

It may be true for the property companies, estate agents, solicitors, building surveyors and other leeches that grow fat feeding off it and it may fill the Lib-Dem/Tory Council that runs the place with delight but then most of these self-satisfied petty politicians who think that they’re so terribly important are little different in mentality from their local self-satisfied electorate whose values they so closely imitate.

Bath has very few museums. As I’ve said in a previous post, it’s culture and art lie in its architecture, a static thing of the past. There’s nothing really modern, imaginative or innovative going on in the place. It’s somewhere for festivals and book signings. A pretense that this kind of thing makes it an intellectual center which it’s most certainly not! Those who live in the Georgian buildings of the center occupy a finished thing out of the past. Something completed that they feel satisfied with and self-satisfied about. It gives them an irredeemable smugness that is as pathetic as it is laughable. That said, the place is a fascinating mixture of the nice as well as the nasty. Working class people are rarely seen except those serving in shops who’ve been taught to address potential customers in the particular Bath manner. They never ask if they can help you. Instead they ask if you’re ‘alright,’ as though you might be ill or something. Small shopkeepers on the other hand are more often plain rude and in the more ‘exclusive’ type shops, staff often won’t serve you if they think you’re not dressed well enough to purchase their goods. I once asked for a piece of salami in a frightfully upmarket delicatessen and was ignored despite being first in the queue. The lady passed on to the person behind me as though I simply wasn’t there and when I insisted on being served was loudly told, “the salami is very expensive!” and then, as though I’d been cast into oblivion by the price, again went on to talk to the man behind me! My insistence on being served had an amusing conclusion. Having cut me a large slice on my insistence and telling her I didn’t want it wrapped because I’d eat it in the street, she triumphantly said the price was eleven pounds sir with a sneer after which I pulled out the bundle of fifties I had in my pocket after visiting the bank and slapped down a note! Her response was a treat. “Oh sir, we can’t change one of those,” she said pathetically to which I responded, “what, you can’t change a miserable fifty?”

The nice things in Bath contrast beautifully with those that are unpleasant. The parks in the City Centre particularly, but also those of the inner suburbs are magnificent. Superbly tended and cared for by the Council garden staff who work there and a real treat for many flat dwellers without gardens. These places however are blighted by large numbers of homeless drinkers and drunks who make a point of talking so loudly that you can’t hear yourself think and publically urinating just about everywhere. Some of these parks have well displayed signs notifying restrictions on dogs but have little effect on countless dog owners, many being single women of middle years who address their charges as ‘baby’ or ‘darling’ bring them in and allow them to run around off lead pissing over benches and shitting in the flower beds right in front of those who’ve gone there searching for peace. Complaining to neurotic owners about their likeminded charges may be unwise!

It’s similarly the case with walking along pavements. Some of the almost boulevard-like thoroughfares in Bath such as Great Pulteney Street, surely one of the most magnificent streets in the entire country, have splendid well maintained wide pavements that are a pleasure to stroll, except for the fact that they’ve been taken over by cyclists. Such conduct has become a neurotic obsession by a singularly neurotic group of people, usually middle-aged men, who speed along often narrowly missing pedestrians or at times going  into them. Their response, it has been remarked, when asked to ride in the road, has invariably been hostile and threatening. The police don’t allow it but they’ve never been seen stopping a cyclist riding a pavement. They’ve taken them over it seems. Think it’s their right and get seriously ratty with pedestrians, especially women with prams who sometimes complain after a near miss.

The center of Bath then is frequented by an ever increasing number of neurotics. The city itself seems to attract this kind of person, usually single, middle-aged and without family who lovingly direct their affections on treasured dogs and bikes, both of which become weapons of deliberate aggravation and offence. To those in the medical profession it must undoubtedly lend the area a certain degree of psychiatric charm but to visiting tourists or others having to deal with them it’s a challenge at best.

Of course, if you like your exclusive cheese shops, places that sell an endless variety of chutneys and jams, utterly exclusive hand-made breads or sitting out at tables looking terribly self- satisfied while eating a salad of ‘leaves’ with a solitary tomato stuck in it somewhere or other priced at a king’s ransom, then the center of Bath’s your kind of place. Alas, there’s only a single butcher’s shop in it but no matter. Along with being Liberal Democrat the place is very much ‘green’ so you can sit on a painted ironwork chair and be seen lovingly eating ‘leaves’ or alternatively an half inch wide piece of carrot cake! The café in the Guildhall Market however does a superb bacon sandwich and more with mushrooms, fried bread, egg, sausage and beans. One of the best fry-ups in the Galaxy I do declare!

Alternatively the supermarket situation is fascinating. Sainsbury’s clearly has the town by the balls only somehow the main store never seems clean and its prices are strangely expensive. Waitrose by way of contrast is fascinating. An enlarged store was recently opened at the expense of closing eight or nine first class retail outlets on the ground floor. The result has been a poorly lit offering where it’s genuinely difficult to see anything in wide isles that resemble grey canyons. And oh my goodness me! It’s ropping with utterly exclusive brand name products at utterly exclusive prices which takes the cost of a basket of shopping over the Moon. The place is often out of standard necessities by four in the afternoon and those asking why they’re out of stock of this or that item are advised by management that their custom is no longer welcome and they ought to shop elsewhere. Equally important is the small number of cash checkouts operating at peak times in the afternoon. Having to wait in long queues to buy a few items is standard but it’s not a problem that bothers management. The city center Waitrose purports to be a supermarket but actually it’s a convenience store more than anything, though ‘inconvenience’ might be a better description!

Morrison’s on the other hand is one of Bath’s pleasures, thanks to its excellent management. It may best be described as a community store. Great staff, first rate products at good prices, always clean, well lit and with a pleasant atmosphere. A genuine family store and a pleasure to shop at. The thing about Morrison’s is that its staff really try. That’s my experience anyway. Shopped there weekly five years or more and never had one bad experience! Waitrose on the other hand has got its head up its self-satisfied posterior and typically, these grey shopping canyons are invariably empty of customers, with anyone there wandering around like headless chickens.

Every Spring the city center goes a ritual that lasts till October. It’s the time when building works can begin so the area becomes a home from home for a legion of scaffolders, maintenance and repair men, electricians, carpenters, brickies, roofers, tilers, letting agency operatives and surveyors, most working for private property companies or landlords hot to make their tenants pay for various forms of repairs the cause of which they had nothing to do with but result mostly from plain dilapidation. This endless cycle of repairs and maintenance swindling by landlords, supported by seriously rude and aggressive jack the lad tradesmen is the great untold story of Bath and possibly its main daily character. The property companies themselves, with supercilious surveyors at their head, form the City’s commercial heart. Their rudeness and arrogance let me tell you is not only breathtaking it’s legendary! Perhaps it’s because their surveying qualification is something minor in the broad educational scheme of things, that they behave as though it’s an honorary doctorate and that they hold Emeritus Professorships in Measuring! But actually one can detect a sad sense of inferiority driving their often unpleasant temperament because when they come across anyone of serious intelligence with academic qualifications and experience to go with it they seem to get all bitter and twisted!

Such are the intellectual ‘leaders,’ makers and shapers of Bath’s property industry, or as others much less kindly disposed might say, property racket. It’s great architecture that may have shaped the town in recent centuries but it’s property dealing and development that has sustained it with tourism and retail adding to the creation of its manufactured mystique of being a great place to live. Without a carefully manicured psychology however the mystique could never have taken off as it had, beginning from the mid-Georgian epoch and now in full swing. This is the psychology of status, one-upmanship, being all front, putting yourself about, self-delusion and more often than not the sometimes plain nasty, sometimes plain ignorant little arrogances of its populace. All in all it creates the fundamental core of that characteristic for which the people of the center and inner suburbs may best be described. Jane Austen knew it only too well! In a word, it’s a miserable, oh so utterly provincial PRETENTIOUSNESS!     

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