The Royal Crescent, Bath

We did quite a lot of walking when we were in Bath, the Royal Crescent was one place we had to visit. It was quite  a hot day and there were lots of people relaxing on the patch of green which is opposite the Georgian houses. The crescent was designed by John Wood, the younger between 1767 and 1774. The photo below is a stitch of two photos I took on my phone.

Royal Crescent, Bath, a stitch

The stone that most of the buildings in Bath were built with is cream coloured, and apparently isn’t really ideal for house building, but over they years it has kept a lot of stonemasons busy, replacing blocks which were ravaged by the weather and would have become porous. I think it’s a type of sandstone.

Below is a photo of the right hand end of the crescent which Jack took on his camera. I’m sure if it had been on my phone I could have removed all of the people from it. Anyway, as you can see it’s quite a busy area. After  complaints from the residents about noise from traffic and particularly tourist buses with commentary, traffic has been restricted. I bet the residents of Edinburgh would love it if the same thing happened there. Traffic on cobbles makes life very noisy for them.

end of Royal Crescent, Bath, Georgian houses

I had been under the impression that Bath had avoided being bombed during WW2, but apparently it was bombed during what were called The Baedeker Raids – after the famous tourist guide books. Previously I had read that Hitler had wanted to keep Bath intact as he had plans to make it his British headquarters! Anyway, this crescent has featured in quite  a few films and Bridgerton, but Jack was not too impressed. He didn’t like the grassy patch of land opposite which was full of people. I can see that that might not be a great view for the people living in the houses. On the other hand most of the Georgian houses in Edinburgh have a road between them and the private gardens opposite which only the house owners  are able to get into, they’re well locked up, iron fenced and hedged around so you can’t even see in!

Anyway, if you visit Bath the crescent is definitely worth a look, it isn’t a long walk from the centre of the city.

The houses in the photo below are just to the left hand side of the crescent. As you can see, one of them has had a strange sort of balcony added on to it, instead of the more usual small cast iron balconies.  It looks a bit incongruous.

By Royal Crescent, Bath

Edinburgh

The weekend turned out to be very busy for us and we even ended up having to go to Edinburgh on Sunday to take a coat back to a shop there. I’d left it too long to stick it in the post after ordering it on-line, I’ve never bought clothes that way before. Remind me not to do it again because it turned out to be nothing like I had expected it to look. Why are they so sparse with the descriptions?

Anyway, Sunday turned out to be a good day to go to the shops in Edinburgh because it wasn’t very busy at all and we were able to have a bit of a wander and take a lot of photographs. The street above is Cockburn Street (it’s pronounced Co-burn) which is usually very crowded with students and youngsters, but they were obviously all still in bed at this time. The photo doesn’t really give you the idea of how steep it is. It’s mentioned quite a lot in Ian Rankin’s books.

These ones are of The Royal Mile (High Street) – up and down, bin bags and all.

I like the fairy-tale quality of these very old buildings which are near the castle.

But if I won millions on the lottery I wouldn’t mind buying one of these Georgian ones in the New Town.

We had a look in the shops but didn’t buy anything, really if you’re looking for something in particular then you are unlikely to find it in Edinburgh. There are so few shops there because it’s tiny compared with Glasgow, which is the best place for shopping in Scotland.