I’m going to pick the City of Bath as a topic for March and this week my subject is the Upper Assembly Rooms

The assembly rooms in Bath had their heyday in the 1700s. I say assembly room’s’ because there were three in Bath, which was a popular social retreat of the time. The Bath season ran from October to June, and occupancy of Bath increased from 3000 in 1700 to 35,000 in 1800. Jane Austen’s first visit to Bath was in 1797 and it is after this visit she wrote the first draft of Northanger Abbey which includes descriptions of assemblies in the Upper Rooms.

The New Rooms or the Upper Assembly Rooms were completed in 1771. They were considered necessary as the two other assembly rooms were thought old fashioned, too small for the crowds which now flocked to Bath and too far from the now more fashionable areas of Bath, the Circus and the Crescent. The other assembly rooms were originally Harrisons (later Haye’s, Hawley’s and then Simpson’s which was built in 1708) and Lindsey’s (later Lovelace’s and then Wiltshire’s designed in 1728). Some of these various proprietors were women.

These assembly rooms provided visitors with a number of entertainments, dancing, card playing, music, theatre, billiards and refreshments. Harrison’s also had gardens where patrons could walk and take tea. However once the New or Upper Rooms opened, on the 30^th September 1771 at 7 o’clock, both Simpson’s and Wiltshire’s suffered, Wiltshire’s soon closed and Simpson’s burnt down in 1820.

At the time the upper rooms opened it cost ‘One Guinea to admit One Gentleman and two ladies at seven shillings each.’

An ‘assembly’ was described in 1751 as ‘a stated and general meeting of the polite persons of both sexes for the sake of conversation, gallantry, news and play’. Festivities in the Upper Rooms included a Dress Ball on Mondays, a Concert on Wednesdays and a Cotillion Ball on Thursdays. However the rooms were open every day for people to walk and play cards. Each room had a main purpose a Ball Room, Card Room and Tea Room, but their uses did vary.

The Ball Room as described in 1772 is ‘105ft 8in long’ and in the 18^th Century it would have been packed with 800 dancers. Between 6-8 the 11 musicians who sat in a first floor balcony played minuets. A stately dance for couples. ‘It is often remarked by Foreigners that the English Nation of both sexes look as grave when they are dancing, as if they are attending the solemnity of a funeral.’ However more energetic country dances followed between 8-9, until refreshments were provided, and again after refreshments when country dances continued until 11. The term country dances comes from the French ‘contra-dance’ describing the fact that these dances commenced with one line of gentlemen facing a line of women, the pairs and lines then danced in a variety of patterns. The dancers were observed by others at the edge of the room talking, flirting, walking or seated on a three tiered structure.

Jane Austen describes the commencement of an evening in the ballroom in a letter dated 12^th May 1801, ‘Before tea it was a rather dull affair; but then before tea did not last long, for there was only one dance, danced by four couple. Think of four couple, surrounded by an hundred people, dancing in the upper Rooms at Bath! After tea we cheered up; the breaking up of private parties sent scores more to the Ball and though it was shockingly and inhumanely thin for this place, there were people enough I suppose to have made five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies!”

The Ball Room was clearly busy in 1771 however, as rules established at the time insisted women were not permitted to dance the country dances wearing hoops, due to lack of space, a separate room was made available where serving maids assisted ladies who wished to dance in removing their hoops.

Refreshments were served in the Tea Room, which was also the room used for concerts. This location was used in the 2009 film ‘The Duchess’ in the scene where Georgiana is introduced on the balcony in Bath, and in the 2007 version of ‘Persuasion’ When Anne attends a concert which she has encouraged Frederick Wentworth to attend.

Meals were served in the Tea room throughout the day from ‘public breakfasts’ onwards, but during balls a buffet was laid out on side tables, including ‘sweetmeats, jellies, wine, biscuits, cold ham and turkey.’ Jerry Melford’s depiction of the point when the bell rang to announce supper during a tea party in Humphry Clinker is not perhaps as we might imagine genteel society dining. ‘The tea-drinking passes as usual, and the company having risen from their tables, were sauntering in groupes, in expectation of the signal for attack, when the bell beginning to ring, they flew with eagerness to the dessert, and the whole place was instantly in commotion. There was nothing but jostling, scrambling, pulling, snatching, struggling, scolding and screaming.’

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional love stories.

See the side bar for details of Jane’s books, and Jane’s website www.janelark.co.uk to learn more about Jane. Or click ‘like’ on Jane’s Facebook page to see photo’s and learn historical facts from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras, which Jane publishes there. You can also follow Jane on twitter at @janelark

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Prior Park’s Grotto and Graffiti

The best folly in Prior Park has not survived the passage of time well. It is the Grotto. See these links to get a glimpse of the Prior Park Grotto. Prior Park Grotto 1, Picture 2,

As I said last week, Ralph Allen owned and designed Prior Park with his friend, the poet, Alexander Pope, and undoubtedly the grotto was developed with Alexander’s influence due to its similarity to the one in Alexander’s property in Twickenham.

The development of Alexander’s own grotto took a lifetime. He gained permission to tunnel beneath the road in Twickenham, having built a Palladian Villa facing the river so that he might develop a garden on the far side. And here he built his best grotto, which was out of sheer fortune blessed by a spring which he describes in a letter in 1725,

‘I have put the last hand to my works…happily finishing the subterraneous Way and Grotto: I then found a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual Rill, that echoes thru’ the Cavern day and night. …When you shut the Doors of this Grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera Obscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture…And when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different Scene: it is finished with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular Forms…at which when a Lamp…is hung in the Middle, a thousand pointed Rays glitter and are reflected over the place.’

It was never finished, because of the eclectic nature of the grotto – he was constantly adding things to it.

It became a mixture of two 18^th century gentlemanly pursuits, one to build and design and one to collect precious things.

So much so that Alexander changed the description of his grotto to a museum of mineralogy and mining as he filled it with precious stones from Cornwall, fossils, a stalagmite from Wookey Hole and stone from across the globe, including a section of basalt from the Giant’s Causeway,Ireland.

And as you can see from the links to the pictures of Prior Park’s Grotto above, Ralph Allen’s Grotto mimicked this, with its intact eclectic floor of ammonites, crushed bone and pebbles.

The Grotto at Prior Park was built about 1740 and was Lady Elizabeth Allen’s retreat.

Her beloved dog, a Great Dane named ‘Miss Bounce’, given to her by Alexander Pope in 1739, and named after Alexander’s own Great Dane, is buried beneath the floor. Her epitaph survives;

‘Weep not, Tread lightly my grave, Call me Pet.’

Prior Park’s grotto was described in 1836 by a student of the Seminary Prior Park had become;

‘the roof and sides of this sweet retreat presented to the eye such a dazzling assemblage shells, fossils, minerals etc as perfectly astonished us,… The floor was almost as beautiful as the roof, being composed of a curious kind of stone perforated and inlaid with pie cones, fragments of bone etc, arranged in tasteful forms and the whole place exhibiting such a profusion of ornament and such a combination of taste and skill as I had never before witnessed.’

And so to another of my secret fascinations – historic graffiti.

The best graffiti I have seen is in the Tower of London, and dates from the Tudor times of King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, when men were locked away for months to years and had numerous hours to carve elaborate graffiti in the tower’s walls.

It inspires my imagination to picture the person seated or standing there carving it, and makes me wonder what their story was – what their history was.

I am sure that Prior Park’s transformation from a family home to a Seminary, and later a Roman Catholic public school, following Ralph Allen’s death in 1764, explains the graffiti at Prior Park, as it crudely defaces the Palladian Bridge.

Yet, despite the fact that it despoils the soft Bath stone façade it is still fascinating to think of the 19^th century students, gossiping, laughing and misbehaving as they carved their marks.

Or perhaps they were alone, silent and contemplative as they carved their name to memory, as previously Pope must have once sat in the garden and silently crafted poetry. Images of the graffiti, spanning centuries.