10/15/2015
A couple months ago, Groupon UK advertised a day trip deal of
Stonehenge and Bath for 39 pounds per person, transportation and Stonehenge
admission included. Since the admission price for Stonehenge alone is a
whopping 14.50 pounds and train tickets ain’t cheap in UK, we thought this was
a great deal. Plus Groupon had a 20% off coupon, which made this a no-brainer.
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| Bath: The Pump Rooms |
The tour is operated by Day Trips London, a new tour group
that’s been getting really good reviews. I can see why; it really made the day
easy on us (versus us getting the train tickets, riding to Bath, and trying to
figure out how the hell to get to Stonehenge from there—as in, it’s almost
impossible. Getting to Stonehenge by yourself without a car is a bitch) and
it’s very affordable.
Our tour guide, Rosie, was a fount of information about the
conditions of living in modern day London, as well as very informative about
the two destinations we were traveling to today. All in all, 37 people signed
up for this tour. Not bad, considering it’s a weekday! But it’s nearing
half-term for the UK and Europe—one week of vacation for all the school kids.
The tour usually starts in Stonehenge and then goes to Bath,
but they decided to reverse the order today because the M3 highway is under
construction and they closed all the outbound lanes but one. Driving out of
London, you can see the traffic’s worse than the Bay Area! It’s basically stop
traffic. Not stop and go, just stop.
Bath is a 2.5 hour drive away from London. It’s considered a
city because, like most European cities, it can only be called a city if it has
a university or a church. Bath has one abbey and two universities. The
population? 86,000. London’s population? Try 89 million. And yet Bath is still considered
a city! It’s kind of the reverse of Madrid—Madrid didn’t have a church, so it
was considered a village, and not a city. Until 1993, when the cathedral was finally
finished and opened to the public.
Rosie gave us a brief overview on the history of Bath as we
drove into town. The Georgian period was a time of excesses and coined the term
“the idle rich.” Due to advancements and improvements on farming technology,
health, and access to a ready supply of food, these people (the nobility
especially) suddenly had nothing to do with their time. Idleness was
encouraged, and trade was frowned upon. Rule books of etiquette were published
and one spent one’s whole day obsessing over etiquette. There is a difference
between manners and etiquette:
Manner: being good/nice to others
Etiquette: showing others how well-bred you are and how much
you are above them
Jane Austen was disgusted with the obsession the wealthy had
over etiquette. She wrote about this in her books, criticizing Bath citizens.
But as we heard in The Importance of Being Earnest last night, from Lady
Bracknell warning Algie: “Never speak
disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can’t get into it do that.” haha
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| Francis MGallery hotel - the hotel Angel and I stayed in last year |
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| We brought Mom & Dad to the hotel lobby so they could see the beautiful interior design |
Bath had been a sleepy little town prior to this. But since
the nobility had nothing to do, they started traveling for vacation—something
that was almost unheard of until up to this point. Families began exploring
different cities and countries for the sheer pleasure of it, instead of going
there to transact business or some important matter. One day, a wealthy
Londoner showed up in Bath complaining about health issues. The doctor he went
to (quack) said that he knew just the cure for his ailment: Bath water. For a
price, the doctor would write the prescription to obtain the water, but the
treatment must be repeated every so often every few months. Brilliant, right?
Water’s essentially free, but the doc’s making a killing off these
prescriptions. And by dictating that the treatment must be done every so often,
he gets repeat customers. No study has ever proved that anyone got well after
drinking this water.
The hot water that comes up from Bath’s natural springs
contains a whopping 42-43 different minerals. Someone likened the taste to that
of the water after boiling an egg.
This sudden interest by the nobility in Bath sparked a
building boom. John Wood and his son (also named John Wood) designed the layout
of the current city, building everything out of the iconic creamy white stone
you see today all over the facades of buildings. It’s called the Bath stone,
for a local quarry. Because of the construction boom, most of what you see
today is preserved from that time period. In England, historic buildings are
protected by the designations Grade I and Grade II. Grade I are the most
historically significant manors and buildings, and also the most expensive to
upkeep because anytime you want to change something, you have to do it with the
materials and workmanship specific to that time period. Imagine wanting to
change the plumbing in a Tudor home to copper pipes!
Grade I buildings are usually owned by businesses or
charities as it’s just way too expensive an upkeep otherwise. The requirements
to change anything to the property go through an intensive review.
Grade II are also of historic significance, though it’s more
lax to change things. You can’t change anything about the façade, but you can
do whatever you want to the inside.
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| Jane Austen Museum |
Gainsborough lived in Bath on The Circus. There’s a plaque noting his house here. He’d charge triple the going rate for a painting, but because he was fashionable, everyone in the nobility wanted a portrait painted by him. He would tell his clientele that the hats they were wearing were so last season, and suggested them to go to his sister…who just happened to be a milliner. Her business boomed, his business boomed, win-win. He said he often felt like a pickpocket, using his paintbrush as his weapon. I do like his paintings; it has a certain soft romanticism about it that draws me in. I especially like the portrait he did of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire.
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| The Circus |
Nicolas Cage also lived in The Circus, until the tax man came several years ago. He had to sell his four properties in the UK in a hurry, and left the country soon after. He used to live on Number 7, but once people found out, they began ringing his doorbell every night. He was soon fed up with this and took down the number 7 sign from the front door. But people are smart, and since the houses are sequential, it’s not hard to figure out number 7 comes between 6 and 8.
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| Nicolas Cage's former house |
Royal Crescent houses go for around 3.5-4 million pounds:
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| Royal Crescent |
The child was acting up today so had to punish her:
Victoria Park:
When Queen Victoria was young and still a princess, she traveled to Bath for the opening ceremony of this park, named in her honor. During the ceremony, she overheard two Bath citizens talking about her. It could've been she misheard, but somehow she heard them commenting about her "fat ankles." She was so horrified by this, she never returned to Bath again!
Nicolas Cage's house (again):
Rosie gave us three hours to wander around Bath, but from
one end to the other is only a fifteen-minute walk. That gave us time to eat
some pasties and shop Primark. Primark Bath has the best clearance selection (tops
London!) and Angel swooped up roughly 10 pairs of shoes, averaging about 2
pounds per pair.
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| Bath Abbey |
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| Pulteney Bridge spans the river Avon in Bath |
Which is funny, because in Celt, "Avon" means "river". So River River.
Bath to Stonehenge is a one-hour drive.
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| Heel Stone...looks like a toad |
It’s pretty sad that throughout the centuries, Stonehenge has been subjected to looters and the economics of the times. Rocks have been carried away to be used as construction material in nearby towns. When you get up to Stonehenge, you can see across the valley to these sloping hills now covered in grass. These mounds are called “barrows,” and were made as a final resting place to the rich people of the time. In the 1800s, two amateur archeologists dug up more than 200 of these barrows, took out all the riches they found inside the barrows and left the skeletons there. There were precious metals like gold buried there, much like other cultures where you send someone to the afterlife with gold and jewels. Researches can glean so much from these artifacts, but since there’s been a keen interest in preserving the site for future generations, barrows are rarely opened up anymore for scientists to study. Instead, they must rely on the notes of those who dug into these barrows over a hundred years ago.
Recent analysis puts Stonehenge around 5000 years old. It
wasn’t all built at once. The first formation was a large circular ditch dug up
5000 years ago. 500 years later, people added circles lining the inside of the
ditch. Some years later, the rocks were erected. No one knows precisely why
Stonehenge was built, though it’s speculation that the place was used for
burial rites. A visiting Malaysian scholar said that in Malaysia, stone
architecture was erected to honor the dead. The living lived in wooden or
thatched villages.
You can still book a special tour to go inside the circle
before or after official business hours, but the price is pretty steep (I think
it’s about 100 pounds per person?). And the way it works out, you can only be
inside the circle for about 11 minutes before they boot you out. A new visitors’
center was built about a five-minute drive away from Stonehenge. Coaches for
tour groups drop tourists off at the visitors’ center and from that point on, a
Stonehenge shuttle will take you to the site. Or if you prefer, you can walk
there. It’s about a 25-minute walk along the countryside. Not much to see
unless you just like to take in the rolling hills and grass.
Me to Angel, on what we learned today: What do you want to say about Stonehenge?
Angel: Pile of rocks.
On the drive back to London, Rosie gave us a few historical tidbits:
Why English drive on the left instead of the right. Back in
the day when the main form of transportation was in horse and carriage, the
congestion on London streets got so bad because there was no clear sense of
right-of-way. They pretty much drove however they liked. Imagine trying that
now on the freeways—you’d get mowed over if you drove on the wrong side of the
freeway! Some brilliant genius decided that everyone going in one direction
should drive on one side of the road, leading to the modern day two-lane
streets. Since most people are right-handed, if the coachman drove on the
right-hand side of the street, and whipped his horses with his right hand, he
might end up whipping the passengers passing by on the other side of the
street! So Britain adopted driving the carriages on the left-hand side.
Rosie’s grandfather’s first job was picking up the dung left
by horses. In the 1890s, a newspaper predicted that by 1950, London’s streets
would be 9 feet deep in horse dung. Thank God someone invented the automobile!
The Swiss one day drive on left, wake up the next day,
mandated to drive on right. Carnage in the streets. Rosie said there’s a lot of
photos online of this occurrence.
Congestion charge for driving into London is around 12
pounds per day, which was originally designed to dissuade motorists from
driving into London and take some form of public transportation instead. This
has had absolutely no effect on the citizens; since the charge was introduced,
congestion has increased by 20%. The people who pay this charge daily are
usually the wealthy who are traveling to London on business. As they say, time
is money. They probably just pass along the fee to their clients, driving up
the price of their services.
Mayfair is now a ghost town because it’s the most expensive
zip in London. Only overseas buyers and businesses can afford it. Businesses
will sometimes buy real estate to lower their profits to another tax bracket
because they know that real estate values will only appreciate over time.
Because of this phenomenon, no one is moving into Mayfair. The people who lived
there are now moving out because they have no neighbors. Shops are closing, the
grocery stores and pubs because there’s no one there to frequent them. Sad,
considering it’s vaulted origins as the address of choice for the Georgian
elite.
Rosie and Day Tours London did a wonderful job of giving us a taste of the locations we went to today without it being too rushed or too
slow.
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