The Newest Bath Guide

     Of all the gay places the world can afford,

By gentle and simple for pastime ador’d,

Fine balls, and fine concerts, fine buildings, and springs,

Fine walks, and fine views, and a thousand fine things

(Not to mention the sweet situation and air),

What place, my dear mother, with Bath can compare?

Christopher Anstey: THE NEW BATH GUIDE, 1766

 

It is two hundred years since he got in his stride

And cantered away with The New Bath Guide.

His spondees and dactyls had quite a success,

And sev’ral editions were called from the press.

That guidebook consisted of letters in rhyme

On the follies and fashions of Bath at the time:

      I notice a quiver come over my pen

      As I think of the follies and fashions since then.…

Proud City of Bath with your crescents and squares,

Your hoary old Abbey and playbills and chairs,

Your plentiful chapels where preachers would preach

(And a different doctrine expounded in each),

Your gallant assemblies where squires took their daughters,

Your medicinal springs where their wives took the waters,

The terraces trim and the comely young wenches,

The cobbled back streets with their privies and stenches—

      How varied and human did Bath then appear

      As the roar of the Avon rolled up from the weir.

In those days, no doubt, there was not so much taste:

But now there’s so much it has all run to waste

In working out methods of cutting down cost—

So that mouldings, proportion and texture are lost

In a uniform nothingness. (This I first find

In the terrible ‘Tech’ with its pointed behind.)

Now houses are ‘units’ and people are digits,

And Bath has been planned into quarters for midgets.

      Official designs are aggressively neuter,

      The Puritan work of an eyeless computer.

Goodbye to old Bath! We who loved you are sorry

They’re carting you off by developer’s lorry.