London - Jane Austen is going to be the second British woman, after the Queen, whose face is to be etched on the back of the British pound. It will do as much to elevate Bath, the fashionable Georgian city nestling at the base of seven Cotswold valleys, to legendary tourist status as it will for her reflections on the social ambitions of Regency England.
It was three ambitious men – John Wood sr, an architect, Ralph Allen, a quarry merchant, and Richard Beau Marsh, a master of ceremonies – who, long after the Romans had created the spa using thermal waters, collaborated to transform Bath, a sleepy medieval wool market town, into an iconic neoclassical Palladian masterpiece and the most beautiful 20th-century European urban example of the aesthetic blending of landscaping and architecture.
Their goal was to monumentalise ordinary houses so they could be inhabited and admired for time immemorial.
The original Royal Crescent, Pump Rooms and Assembly rooms so integral to Austens novels, and the Theatre Royal, The Parade Bridge and Victoria Park all harmoniously combine to create a World Heritage Site.
Bath is a mere day trip away from London and most of her tourist attractions are within easy walking distance of each other.
If you want to remain authentic to the lofty aspirations of George III’s subjects, this is not a city in which to camp or stay in a B&B.
Discard your budget books and head straight for Nos 15 and 16 on the Royal Crescent, a stone’s throw from the famous Circus and overlooking the equally majestic Royal Victoria Park, the entire city and the surrounding hills. This is to Bath what Buckingham Palace is to London, the ultimate urban beacon, The Royal Crescent Hotel, beckoning you to luxury (and your own private spa).
I arrived on an equally compelling mission to revisit rugby hero Jeremy Guscott, MBE, who catapulted me to Bath during the 2004 Rugby World Cup while I was filming the Players’ Kingdom series featuring rugby greats at leisure in their backyards.
Bath has one of the oldest rugby clubs in existence, dating from 1865. Players were then required to pay one shilling for the privilege of being selected for the amateur “Blues” – a far cry from today where “The Rec”, a state-of-the-art Premiere League Club, lures its professionals with a king’s ransom.
The club has a reputation for producing innovative and fast-attacking players, of whom Guscott is a prime example: he scored a host of spectacular tries for Bath and England.
Guscott was born, educated and married in Bath and is one of her greatest ambassadors.
These days the still-fit Guscott, with greater responsibilities than scoring hat-tricks for England, prefers gentler pursuits.
He loves hiking around his childhood haunts, on nearby Primrose Hill – popular with long-boarders – where he has donated a park bench in his mother’s memory.
I asked him about his famous Blues Room Bar, which had just opened on my last visit to Bath, but the responsibilities of the cocktail industry – added to those of being a BBC commentator and a dedicated father – proved too demanding. He now frequents a French restaurant, Casanis, and the more casual Ole Tapas in the centre of the city, as a relaxed client rather than a stressed owner.
Guscott, who lives a 10-minute walk from The Royal Crescent Hotel, agrees that “this is about as good as it gets”.
In tune with the garden city, the hotel has a plethora of enclosed gardens with lavender-lined paths and a gargantuan oak tree leading to a modern spa complete with a hammam, steam tubs and a heated swimming pool to rival the Romans’.
These are hugely popular with Bath’s rugby heroes, Mike Catt and company, who are also regulars at the award-winning and newly decorated Dowager Restaurant and Montagu Bar.
The edgy modern, textured design in Regency Blue and the cosmopolitan menu, offering exquisitely presented David Campbell portions – so atypical of fine dining and so well suited to the demands of sporting appetites – is a perfect foil for the refined antique furniture in the lounges of the main hotel. It seems blue is a mandatory colour in Bath.
Having watched – from the comfort of my four-poster bed, in a suite decorated to understated Regency perfection and which boasted an aerial view through a glass cupola – three hot-air balloons ascend from behind the half-moon of terraced houses, I asked Guscott about England’s high-flying World Cup ambitions.
“Well, there are eight players from Bath training at high altitude in Colorado with the English squad. My two favourites are Jonathan Joseph, the winger, and George Ford, the flyhalf, who many reckon is going to be the greatest flyhalf in the history of the game – even better than Jonny Wilkinson. I hate to admit they are probably even faster than I was.”
Guscott is complimentary about the Springboks and South Africa. (Who can forget his lethal 1997 drop-kick for the Lions in Durban, which robbed South Africa of victory?)
“I still believe rugby is a game for all shapes and sizes” (I’d argued that the game was marching inexorably towards American football with the poaching of rugby league players, etc) “and to my mind the forwards still win the game.
“The Springboks have a strong scrumming technique and I rate your lock, Eben Etzebeth… But defences in this era have become so entrenched, it’s going to take mercurial ball-handling skills à la New Zealand to penetrate the line and score tries. In a Rugby World Cup we want to see tries being scored – lots of them.”
The conversation reverts to the city’s attractions with the arrival of high tea – an institution in Bath. The dynamic hotel general manager, Jonathon Stapleton, a former junior Wimbledon star, ran the St Andrews Old Course Hotel in Scotland and knows as much about golf and its celebrity aficionados as Guscott does about Bath and rugby.
They regaled me over an array of cucumber sandwiches and strawberry macaroons delivered on a silver tier higher than The Kennard steeple looming in the background. I decided to venture forth, behind a horse and carriage along cobbled streets, to put their recommendations to the test.
Bypassing the museum at No 1 (my elegant suite was a replica of a Regency house), I cut through the manicured park past the lovely old Victorian tennis club and arrived on Union and Stall streets which, with Milson Place, have been rated among the top five shopping precincts in the UK for the sheer variety of shops and restaurants.
A craft and art market, with fantastic creations, is open every day, This being graduation day, the atmosphere matched D-Day celebrations, with flags, bands and buskers at large and the Pump Rooms and Abbey open for university celebrations. I must have appeared in a thousand selfies with graduate hats flying around me.
My biggest thrill was discovering the 2015 Rugby World Cup garden, with a rugby player created entirely from flowers, in Parade Gardens, while strolling along the banks of the Avon and basking, from under my parasol, in “pride and devoid of prejudice”.
Mrs Bennet would certainly have approved.
l Curtis-Setchell traversed the UK care of Avis/Budget UK and discovered more by road – so be sure to get behind the wheel to explore this sporting kingdom.
Deborah Curtis-Setchell, Saturday Star