In Search Of Lost Time

Walking in Bath is time-travelling through 2,000 years of history. But the English city is no dreary museum—its yellow stone buildings live and breathe centuries-old stories.

- Swagata Ghosh

Where do I begin with Bath? It is the story of secret desires and lovers’ trysts, of marauding Romans and their sanitary habits and of cosmic discoveries and distant dreams. It was the showiest city in all England. Still is. This story is over 2,000 years old yet incredibly modern and it begins 185 kilometres west of London.

I first heard of Bath when I was 13. I had borrowed a book from the school library and was so incredibly swept up in its pages that (at great risk) I snuck it in the folds of my school diary and took Northanger Abbey to the morning assembly. There, as my friends prayed for their ‘daily bread’, butter and absolution, I ‘arrived in Bath’ and like Austen’s Catherine ‘was all eager delight…’

University, three jobs, and a decade and three later when I actually arrived in Bath on the train from North West England, it was a grey morning, rain-soaked and dull. And yet again, I ‘was all eager delight… eyes here, there and everywhere.’ The street names appeared familiar. I didn’t need a map. Over the next two days, I went everywhere Catherine took me, Cheap Street, up Milsom Street, left on to Gay Street, the Circus and finally the Assembly Rooms. It seemed nothing had changed in the 200 years from when a young Jane Austen first arrived here for a ball. My eyes climbed the pale duck-egg walls to meet a row of windows set high to provide both ventilation and privacy to dancers on crowded ball nights since 1771.