Breakfast at eight, then into your sedan chair and down to the Baths and the Pump Room to take the waters. With your treatment complete, it’s back into the chair and home, so you can change in time for dinner in the mid-afternoon. You relax and read, or perhaps paint a watercolor drawing, or visit friends for a few hours before you change once more in preparation for tonight’s Assembly. The dancing begins at 6pm and ends at midnight (this is a health resort, after all and all-night festivities are not conducive to health), when you head home and to bed, so that you can do it all over again tomorrow.
If you’ve ever wished for a window into this life -- the life of the privileged class during the winter season in Bath’s heyday -- then this is the place to come. One Royal Crescent is a carefully restored townhouse at the Brock Street end of what is still Bath’s most prestigious address. It’s furnished with antiques and art appropriate to the period, rather than the belongings of a specific family who owned the townhouse. This is because the units in the Crescent weren’t owned by a family, but were up-market vacation rentals, and the tennants provided their own furnishings and decorations.
As you enter each of the museum’s rooms, you’re given a card that details the history of the various items contained in it. If you have any questions that the flyer can’t answer, just ask the friendly volunteers who make up the staff. If you are interested in painting or Georgian furnishings, you’ll find Number One fascinating. It contains portraits by Gainsborough, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Francis Cotes, among others.
The most striking piece of furniture, in my opinion, is the painted four-poster bed with stunning hangings of reproduction fabric. As you leave the bedroom and go into the upper hall, you can see a portrait of Ralph Allen, once Bath’s postmaster and one of the men who encouraged (and made his fortune on) the mid-18th-century building boom.
In the lower hall, check out the sedan chair that sits under the stairs. Because Georgian Bath was too small and hilly for carriages to be a practical form of conveyance, these were the town’s taxicabs.
The restored kitchen is in the basement. Kids will especially like the dog wheel, used for turning the spit on which roasts were cooked. Unfortunately for beer aficionados, the brewery —- a staple in most early homes —- no longer exists, and you’ll have to content yourself with the gift shop that has taken its place.
One Royal Crescent is owned and maintained by the Bath Preservation Trust, which also runs the Building of Bath museum. Admission is £4 for adults. Save the ticket, because it’ll save you £1 if you plan to go to The Building of Bath museum.