Avon Street – Bath

The Avon Street area of Bath was a bad place to live in the 19th Century and not a safe place to visit. There are few surviving pictures of the area. The one above is of one of the more salubrious parts  which survived into the 20th Century. It’s hard to imagine that Avon Street appealed to many artists of the time with so much georgian grandeur on offer in other parts of the city.

My book, “Avon Street” started as a short story.  Its setting was almost incidental. Bath was simply the right sort of back-drop for an historical story which I had initially intended would be set in the Georgian era. Yet the more research I did, the stronger the role of the city became and the greater grew my interest in the Avon Street area.  Bath became a character in its own right, but it was a character with a split personality. Gradually fact began to merge with fiction and the story took on new meaning as the time-frame moved from Georgian, to Victorian Bath.

Bath has always been a city of illusion, as I have tried to demonstrate in previous posts. The magnificent, honey-coloured, bath-stone facades hid poorly finished buildings. The ostentatious trappings of wealth were all available for hire.  The right address, furniture, crockery, silverware and servants could all be hired by the month provided a person had the right accent, manners, clothes, and money. Bath was a city where you could be whoever you wanted to be, provided you had the money or the appearance of of money . The conventions, manners and rules of polite society masked motives and emotions that were sometimes far from genteel.

Jane Austen a writer uniquely associated with the City, only ever hinted at the more unpleasant aspects of Bath. It is apparent from her letters that her personal feelings regarding  the city were at odds with the way she depicted it in her books. In writing “Avon Street” I wanted to take the reader beyond the Georgian facades and polite society of the city and reveal some of its darker secrets – and the Avon Street area of the city was the darkest secret of all.

By 1850, industry was thriving in the city whilst its traditional role as a spa and watering-hole for polite society was declining. The Avon Street area of the city had grown into a sprawling, disease-ridden slum and was subject to frequent flooding. Though it occupied a relatively small part of the city geographically, it was home to twenty per cent of Bath’s population. It was abhorred and for the most part ignored by the city and its visitors, yet the two sides of the city co-existed uneasily, one dependent on the other. Avon Street provided the servants, the labourers, the factory workers and sweat-shop employees. High society employed the servants and bought the goods they made.

Bath as a city did its best to keep Avon Street, the factories and sweat-shops largely out of sight and as far away as possible from the minds of visitors and wealthy residents. The cholera outbreak in 1849 (largely confined to Avon Street) had been the second largest in the country, yet it too was kept out of the public eye. When disreputable behaviour spilled out into the city, it was usually put down to the ethnic origin of the ‘sinner’ or the influence of alcohol and was punished as harshly as the law would permit, and the law permitted a great deal of harshness.

Most of the Avon Street Area is now occupied by Bath Spa University, various commercial properties, bus depots and sundry car parks. The houses are gone: the past, its people and their stories lie buried. Yet their struggles deserve to be remembered. In my book I have tried to explore the tensions that existed between the two aspects of the city, to separate the city from the illusion. I have also tried to give a voice to the forgotten people of Avon Street.