The Bath Magazine February 2022

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ISSUE 228 | FEBRUARY 2022 | thebathmag.co.uk | £3.95 where sold

FOUR MEN IN A BOBSLEIGH Medal hopes at the Winter Olympics from British bobsleigh and skeleton athletes training at the University of Bath

PLUS...

S O M U C H M O R E I N T H E C I T Y ’ S B I G G E S T G U I D E T O L I V I N G I N B AT H

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Contents 5 THINGS

38 February 2022

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Great things to look forward to this month

THE CITYIST

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To admire, inspire and delight – here’s our monthly round-up

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We chat to Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh about climate change, environmental psychology and her life in Bath

NOTES ON A SMALL CITY

ARTS AND EXHIBITIONS

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OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 No, let’s have a look at them on the walls of the Holburne first – that’s 25 Tudor portraits – and why not have a game of Top Trumps?

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RESTAURANT REVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Emma Clegg is treated to some rather special Italian food at La Terra

Richard Wyatt has lost his crown, which makes him consider the dangers of sugar, and other things

COMMUNITY CROPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 PLATINUM JUBILEE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 The Queen is celebrating 70 years this month – we look at the planned celebrations and remember her visits to Bath

FESTIVAL AHOY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 Here’s some of the recently announced literary and music events coming to the Bath Festival in May

VERY COOL BRITANNIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20 Emma Clegg chats to the head of talent and British skeleton and bobsleigh athletes competing at the Winter Olympics in Beijing

TODAY AND YESTERDAY

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BOOKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Saskia Hayward recommends six biographies and autobiographies and Daisy Game reviews a book about statues

LOVING THE LAKES

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Andrew Swift explores the capital of the Cotswolds

DESIGNING WITH LIGHT

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John Law offers advice about using light in our homes

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Our monthly guide to what’s happening in and around the city

PUPPET LOVE

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Emma Clegg quizzes puppeteer Toby Olié about creating a stage version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, with 30 puppets

Follow us on Twitter @thebathmagazine

More content and updates discover: thebathmag.co.uk

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Come and stay at one of South West Lake’s five lakeside campsites

URBAN WALK

Radio presenter and journalist Justin Webb has written a memoir about his childhood years in Bath – Emma Clegg sounds him out

WHAT’S ON

Hamish Evans tells us about his two-acre orchard and market garden and why every garden needs some chickens

ON THE COVER

A vintage style cover design to wish Team GB the best of luck at the Winter Olympics, from 4–20 February! Cover design by TBM

Follow us on Instagram @thebathmagazine

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FROM THE EDITOR

Editor photograph by TBM

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liding down an ice track at 75 miles per hour on a tea tray isn’t for everyone.

And if you don’t have an ice track nearby – which we don’t – you’d think it’s not an option you’d have to agonise about. However the powerhouse up at the University of Bath where the British Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association (BBSA) are based have a push-start track, the only one of its kind in the UK, and this is where the British skeleton and bobsleigh athletes have been honing their craft. It’s dry, but it helps them to perfect their techniques to assure speed at the very start of the race, where it matters. I spoke to a skeleton and a bobsleigh athlete and the head of talent for skeleton on page 20, ahead of their travels to Beijing. There are 10 athletes and two reserves for these two sports representing Britain – but will any of them achieve the medal-winning performances we’ve had in recent years? The Winter Olympics runs from 4–20 February so we won’t have to wait long to find out.

I had the pleasure of talking to Justin Webb this month, BBC Radio 4’s longest serving Today presenter. He spent his childhood in Bath in the 1970s (just up the road from where I live) and has just written a book about this part of his life. It isn’t a time packed with golden memories for him, what with his rather bizarre family, it being a difficult decade, and the city itself way less elegant and upmarket than today, with many of our beautiful period buildings heavily stained by pollution. He tells me about his silent house, Shostakovitch and the radio that saved him on page 24.

We also have some fun with cards on page 38. But in a very learned way, because we’ve chosen eight of the paintings included in the Holburne’s new Tudor portraits exhibition (The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics) and created Top Trumps out of them. We have also included some excerpts from the exhibition catalogue, which has 25 famous portraits on display of the Tudor monarchs, and many other personalities associated with the period.

I haven’t read Animal Farm for a while, but I brushed up on the story before speaking to director, designer and puppeteer Toby Olié about the new stage production of Orwell’s book, touring soon to Theatre Royal Bath, where 30 animal characters have been created in puppet form. These are puppets with sensitivity and charisma, the dynamic to take centre stage and create heightened emotion – Toby explains to me on page 32 the power of a puppet protagonist and how their expressive presence requires a script to work less hard.

We also gain insight into the life of a non-profit making community farm on page 46, as Hamish Evans talks ecological market gardening, connecting to the land and how chickens manage food waste. And on the other end of the food journey I visit La Terra, the rather special new restaurant in St John’s Street (see page 44).

Puppets, ice, chickens and Top Trumps – that’s Feb for you.

Emma Clegg Editor

HOPE IS EVERYTHING BENCH IN SYDNEY GARDENS

After Life creator Ricky Gervais has teamed up with a campaign group to donate benches where people can go to talk, listen and reflect. The comedian and suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) has placed 25 benches at different locations around the UK, and one bench has been given to Bath's Sydney Gardens (see me sitting on it above).

Since the first series launched on Netflix, the show has proven to be extremely popular – covering issues such as grief, loss, depression and recovery, while simultaneously managing to be funny. Series three aired in January and the bench in the graveyard remains a pivotal part of the show, as it is where Tony (Ricky Gervais) talks to Anne (Penelope Wilton), his graveside confidante. They’ve both experienced the grief of losing their partners and they meet up regularly. All the benches are inscribed with a quote from the third series: “Hope is Everything.”

It is hoped the Netflix benches will help people reach out for help in a time of crisis – whether it's via the unique QR code on the benches, or via the CALM helpline, a kind stranger or a friend. The free and confidential CALM helpline is open from 5pm until midnight on 0800 58 58 58, or visit online: thecalmzone.net/afterlife

All paper used to make this magazine is taken from good sustainable sources and we encourage our suppliers to join an accredited green scheme. Magazines are now fully recyclable. By recycling magazines, you can help to reduce waste and contribute to the six million tonnes of paper already recycled by the UK paper industry each year. Please recycle this magazine, but if you are not able to participate in a recycling scheme, then why not pass your magazine on to a friend or colleague.

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things to do this

February

Follow the light trail

Go on a date from hell For a Valentine’s event to get your heart racing, Bath’s newest attraction Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein becomes ‘Mary Shelley’s House of Valentines’ for four nights only from 11–14 February, as it presents immersive 'Nightmare Dates’. This is the perfect anti-Valentine’s event for friends or those who don’t fancy a romantic dinner for two! Instead, re-live ‘monstrous’ dates with these theatrical comedy horror nights.

Expect immersive theatrical performances, Victor’s Lair (of love) Escape Room, Bloody Mary’s Bar – and more.

Tickets are £12.50 each, and can be purchased at houseoffrankenstein.com/tickets

Visit the drive-in

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Watch a murder mystery A missing body, a country location, a disreputable squire and a village stuck in its age-old traditions: Eastern Angles and Matthew Linley Creative Projects in association with the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough present The Ballad of Maria Marten – a thrilling retelling of the story of Maria Marten and the Red Barn. Told through the eyes of Maria and the women who loved her, this beautifully staged production brings the power of movement, music and storytelling together for a heart-stopping evening of theatrical magic. By Beth Flintoff, and directed by Hal Chambers.

On at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath, 25–26 February. Tickets Image credit: Harry Elletson £14.50/£18.50. theatreroyal.org.uk

Travel to Canada Yukon Territory, Northern Canada is where North America’s coldest temperature ever (-63°C) was recorded.

There are more caribou than people, tossing chainsaws is entertainment, barbecued squirrel is food and watching bears forage for food at the dump is a big Saturday night out. Award-winning choreographer and theatremaker Jennifer Irons was born and raised here, all the while dreaming of leaving. In Yukon Ho! she tells her dark, fearless, original, bizarre and very funny tale of survival and escape.

Saturday 19 February, 8pm at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath. Tickets £18.50/£14.50, from theatreroyal.org.uk

Image credit: Gigi Giannella

Flourish Foodhall & Kitchen, a purpose-driven food and shopping destination in Saltford, is turning their car park into a drive-in cinema on 14 February. Showing 90’s rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You, couples will be served a delicious three course menu straight to their car, as well as a glass of Prosecco upon arrival, and the bar will remain open for the duration of the film for local beers, ciders, wines, hot drinks, cocktails and of course lots of non-alcoholic options for drivers. The film starts at 7.30pm, and tickets will need to be purchased in advance.

Purchase tickets via Eventbrite: bit.ly/34dCZVf

Light at Marston Park, an immersive light exhibition by internationally acclaimed British artist, Bruce Munro, is now at Marston Park, Somerset. Munro’s light-based works have featured in urban landscapes and rural areas around the globe: his world famous Field of Light exhibition is currently illuminating Uluru in Australia, as well as Paso Robles wine country in California. Munro’s Field of Light will be at Marston Park until the end of March.

The experiential light display features thousands of coloured spheres on stems, which are ‘planted’ along the lakeside path and through the woodland. Visitors can book an evening viewing for general admission anytime from 4pm, with drinks and snacks available to buy on Wednesday and Thursday. Tickets from £12. marstonpark.co.uk/light

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The city

ist

THE BUZZ

THE BUZZ

FUNDS FOR HERSCHEL

To help commemorate the bicentenary of the death of astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822), the Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded Bath Preservation Trust £64,000, to be invested into a year-long programme of events in 2022. This will include a new exhibition organised in partnership with the Royal Astronomical Society and the Herschel family, new planetarium shows and free craft workshops.

The Herschel Museum of Astronomy is located where William and his sister Caroline lived, worked and made several important discoveries during the late 1700s – it was in the garden in 1781 that William Herschel became the first person ever to see the planet Uranus.

The Museum is also working with the Herschel Society to research locations throughout the UK that have connections with William Herschel. herschelmuseum.org.uk

CLEAN UP OUR RIVERS Following a new report, engineers and scientists from the University of Bath have called on the Government and stakeholders to renew efforts to protect our river systems and hence to protect human and environmental health from serious harm.

Members of Bath’s Water Innovation & Research Centre (WIRC) say that the release of the Environmental Audit Committee Report on Water Quality in Rivers should be a wake-up call.

Dr Tom Arnot, Co-Director of WIRC, says, “The current state of our rivers arises due to a weak legislative landscape which has led to sewage overspills, runoff of farm slurries and fertilisers, combined sewer overflows, and release of microplastics and other contaminants into the UK river system.

“The current situation has been driven by under-funding, under-regulation, under-reporting, insufficient monitoring and enforcement, and a lack of strong environmental leadership and policy development from Westminster.”

See the full report: bit.ly/3A3fmKQ

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My BATH

Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh is an environmental psychologist based at the University of Bath, specialising in perceptions and behaviour in relation to climate change, energy and transport. She is Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) and has just been awarded an MBE for her work Where do you live?

I live in Bristol and love the city and the surrounding landscape – but being so close to Bath is also brilliant, because I honestly believe it’s the most beautiful city in the UK. It’s a real treat to walk up to the university where I work and to get those amazing views of the city.

What aspects of Bath do you most enjoy?

The architecture and the scale. It’s so beautiful to walk around. I recently took up photography as a hobby and walking around the city provides so many opportunities to take stunning shots. I also love walking up Bathwick Meadow and getting the panoramic views of the city from there.

What are your links with the University of Bath?

I did my Master’s degree and PhD at the university, and when I came back to work here in 2020 it felt like coming home. A lot had changed – psychology now has a big, shiny new building and there are lots of new faces – but it’s been nice to see some things haven’t changed, like the sense of community, the lake, and the Parade Bar (though it’s now vegetarian only, which is different to my student days!).

When did your interest in environmental psychology develop?

During my Master’s at Bath – which was in Science, Culture and Communication – I became interested in environmental communication as a way of connecting people to nature – and was hooked. I decided soon after that I wanted to study for a PhD looking at how people understand climate change and how to encourage action to address it.

How do you think Bath manages these issues?

There are some particular challenges with addressing climate change in the city, like how to make listed and period buildings energy efficient, and how to get people out of cars when there are some very steep hills, like Bathwick Hill. B&NES and other groups in the city are working hard to address these, including engaging with communities to develop solutions that work for people.

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Explain your role as Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations Our Centre is interested in the role that people play in tackling climate change while also improving wellbeing – including the steps we can take to cut our carbon footprint, such as driving and flying less, cutting down on red meat and dairy, and being less wasteful. We do research in collaboration with councils, national government, businesses, charities and community groups to develop and test ways of changing behaviour to cut emissions and achieve wider benefits. Perhaps my proudest moment was being asked by Sir David King to join the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. Sir David was the one who originally inspired me to focus on climate change psychology during my PhD when he came to Bath and gave a talk here saying climate change is ‘the most severe problem we are facing today’ – which in 2004 was the first time anyone had said that.

Why is climate change communication crucial?

Because by designing messages that resonate with people’s values – like family, health, convenience or affordability – and using trusted communicators (real people, like them) we can engage with people about the benefits of taking action on climate change.

Do you try to reduce your own carbon impact?

I try and reduce my own carbon footprint, avoiding driving and flying, but I can still do a lot better. I rarely eat meat, but cheese is my big weakness, so I would struggle to go vegan.

What life moral resonates most for you?

Voltaire’s ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’ (‘we must cultivate our garden’) which I’ve interpreted to mean we should try and make a difference in the ways we can influence people and nature around us for good – but not to be overwhelmed by things outside our control. It’s a good reminder that everyone has power to make a difference in their own ways.

What does your recent MBE mean to you?

When I first got the letter I thought it was a scam – it seemed too good to be true – then I was overwhelmed and delighted! It’s wonderful that our centre’s work and the wider field of climate change psychology has been recognised as important to helping tackle climate change along with climate scientists and engineers. ■ cast.ac.uk

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CITY | NOTEBOOK

Richard Wyatt: Notes on a small city Columnist Richard Wyatt has lost a crown and it’s left a very visible gap. This starts him thinking about past dental emergencies, neck pain, flowering cherries and an accident with a vaulting horse

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Richard Wyatt in the 1970s, then well past his period as ‘Tubs’

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Dental hygience wasn’t such a great topic of conversation when I was a boy when the dangers of sugar were not as well-known

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ooks like 2022 is already shaping up to be something of a ‘gap’ year. No, I am not referring to that period some youngsters use to travel or work between school and university – mine is of a more physical nature. For me the recent festive season was spent trying to hang on to a crowned tooth that was suddenly working loose. Luckily the rather expensive addition to my glittering smile managed to hang on until the last Christmas tree bauble had been bagged before giving up the ghost and detaching itself. I am leaving the most painful detail to last.

Apart from exposing a raw nerve to liquids hot and cold, this crown was near the front of my teeth so the gap was as obvious as the entrance to the Brunel’s Box Tunnel. Or so it felt to me.

Now I happen to have a good dentist, although like others of his profession the paltry proceeds from the National Health system has driven him to go private. It’s an added incentive to look after your teeth of course, but whatever course of action he decides to take now is going to hurt my wallet more than my jaw. Dental hygiene wasn’t such a great topic of conversation when I was a boy. The dangers of sugar were not as well-known in the days before fluoride mixed freely with our drinking water.

It’s taken many years to win me over to feeling comfortable in the dental chair. As a boy I remember having a tooth extracted after receiving laughing gas (Nitrous oxide), and then haemorrhaging overnight and having to go back to have a blood clot extracted from my throat. Coupled with that was the fact that dental drills were not water-cooled. The rest I will leave to your imagination as I don’t want to put you off the rest of this column.

It helped, I think, as an adult that my dentist then was also my best friend, so I felt more relaxed and was taking better care of my teeth.

Age, I suppose, is catching up with me. I have recently found out that while I may have spent much of my life being a pain in other people’s necks, the pain in mine is down to arthritis. This is likely to have come from a lifetime of desk-based typing, all the way back to when keyboards were attached to machines called typewriters. The incident

with the plane back in 1976 when I was KO’d by a low-flying aircraft may also have also contributed. Who knows. I am just going to have to take more care of myself and mind how I go. This is one of my new year’s resolutions.

Another resolution is to watch the weight. I don’t want to return to how I looked in my early teens before the growth hormones kicked in. Then I was ‘Tubs’ to my school mates. I was never into sport and had a games teacher who either didn’t get it or delighted in my physical and mental ‘torture’ as a fat boy. Once I was told to join the queue waiting to jump a vaulting horse in the school gym. Nothing graceful to report about my attempt. I caught my backside on it and went flat on my face onto the floor, spreading my arms to try and break the fall. The right arm didn’t look too well when I was pulled to my feet so Mr X decided I should check things out in the town hospital. I was sent off on the local bus which, picking up passengers along the way, gave enough time for pain to set in. I remember having to use the other arm to stop me pressing against the window next to my seat every time the bus turned a corner. Such contact hurt!

It turned out after x-rays had been taken that I had a badly broken arm. I spent three weeks flat on my back in traction and then several months in full body plaster. Back in those days, Weston General Hospital was on the seaside town’s boulevard which was lined with cherry trees. Pinned to my bed I had a hand mirror I could hold up to see what was going on outside. This all happened one glorious spring, and even now flowering cherries remind me of the colourful view of the blossom outside that hospital ward.

There was one good thing about it all. My metabolism was kickstarted and I shot up in height. It still makes me smile, but excuse me if I don’t, just for the moment, until that tooth is fixed! n Richard Wyatt runs the Bath Newseum: bathnewseum.com

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16 Pierrepont St, Bath BA1 1LA | Tel: 01225 464433 www.kathrynanthony.co.uk

ANTIQUE JEWELLERY REPAIRS AND REMODELLING

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Follow us on Twitter @thebathmagazine

See more online www.thebathmag.co.uk

Contact us: Publisher Email:

Steve Miklos steve@thebathmagazine.co.uk

Editor Tel: Email:

Emma Clegg 01225 424592 emma@thebathmagazine.co.uk

Financial Director Email:

Jane Miklos jane@thebathmagazine.co.uk

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Jeff Osborne production@thebathmagazine.co.uk

Contact the Advertising Sales team tel: 01225 424499 Advertising Sales Email:

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The Bath Magazine and The Bristol Magazine are published by MC Publishing Ltd. We are an independent of all other local publications

The Bath Magazine is delivered free, every month to more than 15,000 residential addresses as well as businesses throughout Bath and the surrounding area. We also have special distribution units in many of Bath’s supermarkets

2 Princes Buildings, George Street, Bath BA1 2ED Telephone: 01225 424499. Fax: 01225 426677 www.thebathmag.co.uk © MC Publishing Ltd 2022 Disclaimer: Whilst every reasonable care is taken with all material submitted to The Bath Magazine, the publisher cannot accept responsibility for loss or damage to such material. Opinions expressed in articles are strictly those of the authors. This publication is copyright and may not be reproduced in any form either in part or whole without written permission from the publishers.

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SHOPPING | ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

Give a Little Love

Sweetheart, Valentine, friend or family – a carefully chosen token of your love and appreciation is a welcome gift at any time of year.

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❾ 1. Heart pendants in silver from Jody Cory. Polished, textured, winged and many more, visit jodycory.co.uk 2. Chopard Happy Hearts silk and cashmere stole, £312, from mallory-jewellers.com 3. Large ‘Flower’ Pendant 18ct white gold and 0.52ct ‘Wylde Flower Diamond®’, £6,650 from nicholaswylde.com 4. Pink sapphire (1.14ct) and diamond platinum dress ring, £4,995 from ortonjewellery.co.uk 5. Lalique Anemone red crystal sculpture, £85, from mallory-jewellers.com 6. Double-linked bangle with initials in sterling silver. Handmade in Bath, £130 from honeywillow.com 7. Victoria platinum oval-cut diamond ring. Diamond weight: 0.90ct, £8,250 from mallory-jewellers.com 8. Make heart shaped poached eggs (up to four at a time) in the microwave with this great poacher, £3.50 from thebigkitchen.co.uk 9. N°1 de Chanel L’eau Rouge - revitalisiing fragrance mist, £90 ( 100ml ) visit chanel.com

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JUBILEE | CELEBRATION

The Platinum Jubilee

This month is a significant landmark for The Queen because on 6 February she becomes the first British monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee, marking 70 years of service to the people of the United Kingdom, the Realms and the Commonwealth. We look back on her visits to Bath in 1945 and 1973 and look forward to the planned Jubilee celebrations

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o celebrate this unprecedented anniversary, events and initiatives will take place throughout the year, culminating in a four-day UK bank holiday weekend from 2–5 June. The bank holiday will provide an opportunity for communities and people throughout the United Kingdom to come together to celebrate the historic milestone.

The four days will include The Queen’s Birthday Parade (Trooping the Colour) on 2 June where over 1,400 parading soldiers, 200 horses and 400 musicians will come together in the traditional Parade to mark The Queen's official birthday, usually held on the second Saturday in June, closing with the traditional RAF fly-past watched by The Queen and Members of the Royal Family from the Buckingham Palace balcony.

Over 1,500 Platinum Jubilee beacons will also be lit on 2 June throughout the United Kingdom, Channel Islands, Isle of Man and UK Overseas Territories. And for the first time, beacons will also be lit in each of the capital cities of the Commonwealth countries to celebrate.

Other events include a Service of Thanksgiving on 3 June at St Paul’s Cathedral; and the Platinum Party at the Palace on 4 June where the BBC will stage and broadcast a special live concert from Buckingham Palace bringing together some of the world’s big entertainment stars to celebrate the most significant moments from The Queen’s seven-decade reign.

Then there is the Big Jubilee Lunch on 5 June where people will celebrate with street parties and barbecues, encouraging communities to celebrate their connections and get to know each other a little bit better; and a Platinum Jubilee Pageant in London on 5 June where artistic performers, dancers, musicians, military personnel, key workers and volunteers will unite to tell the story of The Queen’s 70 year reign in an awe-inspiring festival of creativity.

In addition, the Queen’s Green Canopy project will see the planting of large, celebration trees, majestic avenues of trees, urban planting, and expansive new forests that will benefit future generations.

We celebrate the Platinum Jubilee this month by remembering the visits to Bath by The Queen, who came to the city as Princess Elizabeth on the occasion of the stand-down of the Women’s Land Army in October 1945 (see image above). She took a salute from the Women’s Land Army outside the Guildhall, went on walkabout in the High Street and sampled the water in the Pump Room with Mayor Clements.

The Queen and Prince Philip visited the city again in August 1973 (see image top left) to commemorate 1,000 years since the first king of all England, King Edgar, was crowned in Bath Abbey – on this occasion they went on a walkabout between the Guildhall and the Abbey before a reception in the Pump Room. The streets were filled with thousands of Bathonians eager to witness this historic occasion.

royal.uk/platinum-jubilee-central-weekend; queensgreencanopy.org THEBATHMAG.CO.UK

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ARTS FESTIVAL CITY || INTERIORS

Bath Festival events

Celebrating music and books in a beautiful city, this year’s Bath Festival will run from 13–21 May – here we profile some of the names that have been revealed ahead of the official line-up announcement at the beginning of March

A return to Bath by the celebrated saxophonist Jess Gillam, who will be bringing her Ensemble to Komedia.

Phil Wang, who went to school in Bath, will be talking about his memoir Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds At Once..

Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021, will be talking to writer Elif Shafak, on themes such as immigration and the notion of home.

Scottish musicians singer-songwriter Karine Polwart and composer David Milligan will be showcasing their latest joint project, Still As Your Sleeping for voice and piano.

Arifa Akbar, author of Consumed: A Sister’s Story, will be guest curator for a number of events at The Bath Festival 2022.

Pioneers of pop-up gigs, Empirical Jazz will be putting on a series of free performances around Bath city centre as well as a more formal concert.

Historian and presenter David Olusoga and geneticist and author Adam Rutherford, author of Control: the Dark History will be in stimulating discussion.

James Runcie, creator of the Granchester series, will be talking about his latest novel, The Great Passion about JS Bach at an event with pianist Joanna MacGregor.

Bath Abbey’s beautifully restored interior will be the setting for a concert by The Tallis Scholars, the early music vocal ensemble specialising in sacred music.

The full festival programme will be announced on Friday 4 March and tickets go on general release on Friday 11 March; bathfestivals.org.uk 18 TheBATHMagazine

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Winter Olympics Team Bath.qxp_Layout 1 28/01/2022 18:30 Page 1

CITY | SPORTS

Taking to the ice: from Bath to Beijing

Sportspeople at the Team Bath Sports Training Village will be looking to extend a remarkable run of medal success when Beijing hosts the 2022 Winter Olympic Games from 4–20 February. Ten athletes and two travelling reserves with the British Bobsleigh & Skeleton Association (BBSA), based at the University of Bath, have been officially selected by Team GB for Beijing – Emma Clegg talks to the head of talent, research and innovation for skeleton and two of the athletes

Danny Holdcroft: head of talent “We only slide for about two hours a year, probably three minutes in a given day,” says Danny Holdcroft, head of performance at the British Bobsleigh & Skeleton Association.

Danny is the longest serving member of the British Skeleton team. This is all very well, but two hours a year just doesn’t sound like an Olympic level effort to me. But when I query this (diplomatically) I discover that there is very good reason for these practice times – there is no ice track in the UK and therefore no opportunity to slide regularly.

There are 17 or 18 ice tracks in the world, the nearest in Winterberg, North Germany, a 10-hour drive. Another one used by the team is in Lillehammer, Norway. “Not having a local ice track is a disadvantage, but it is also one of the things that has made us stand out and has given us the level of recognition that we’ve had,” says Danny.

“In addition, because there are no local ice tracks we have no athlete participation base and no local clubs, which means we have to recruit complete novices at the age of 18 or 19, and then give them four or five years to get to the Games.”

So why then has the British Skeleton team achieved so many medals in recent years, with Alex Coomber winning bronze in 2002,

Shelley Rudman silver in 2006, Amy Williams gold in 2010, Lizzy Yarnold gold in 2014 and 2018 and Dominic Parsons and Laura Deas bronze in 2018?

The most crucial factor is how the BBSA is able to use Team Bath’s push-start track at the University of Bath. This outdoor 140m track – the only one of its type in the UK – enables Britain’s skeleton athletes to hone their starts away from the ice. Another advantage is the great sprinting, strength and conditioning, and performance gym facilities offered by Team Bath, supporting the other aspects of training the skeleton athletes.

Danny joined the skeleton team in 2005 as a start coach, a role that focuses on the first 55 metres of the race from the point where you run with the sled until when you dive on it. “I was one of the first start coaches in the world and that was when we were setting our programme up. That was always our go-to advantage, to make the start the best in the world,” he explains.

“Push-track is all about the start of the race. The key principle is that the start needs to be on a par with the best and then it gives you a stable platform in the race. Because it’s all about accelerating as much as possible – you don’t really drive the sled, you let yourself go and then you guide the sled to

Marcus Wyatt making sure his race start is a fast one

Danny Holdcroft with Lizzy Yarnold at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games

keep it going forwards and accelerating.”

It’s all about creativity and innovation, says Danny. “One of our key pitches as a sport is our ability to be innovative, so we don’t set any perameters. Traditionally the sport will track sprinters in athletics because they are fast runners. We don’t have a specified list of sports – in fact we encourage those who are less well trained and are interested in multi sports, or who just like going fast and love the adrenalin kick. We go as far and wide as ballet, dancing and gymnastics, as well as targeting those who are good at all sports but haven’t tried them at a high level.

“The motto for our programme is ‘Achieving the Impossible’. This was born out of the fact that it was said that it was not possible for us to win Olympic medals. But we have an internal belief that we can. If you have a genuine belief in a vision, and the right work ethic and some natural talent, then you can go all the way.”

Skeleton athletes in Bath train from March until October, doing 13–14 sessions a week, including on the push track. Balance and body awareness work takes place over the summer. Considerable time is spent in the

The push-start track at the University of Bath

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The 4-man bobsleigh team at the start of the race as the pilot leaps onto the sled

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If you have a genuine belief in a vision and the right work ethic and some natural talent, then you can go all the way

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gym, focusing on skills to improve powerbased acceleration at the start of the race.

From October to March the athletes slide five days a week doing around two runs a day.

Alongside this is the psychological training.

“We spend a lot of time talking about the theory of tracks and sliding, and working on mental imagery and focus. We also use videos to build experience in different ways.”

I ask if it might ever be feasible to have an ice track in the UK, but Danny tells me the cost would be prohibitive. “I also don’t think it would be the right investment. We have a way of working within our programme that is successful. To have a home track would be an advantage but we could lose sight of how we operate. It’s a way of life. I don’t think we’d be any better having a home track and sliding every day for six months.

“We’re not a nation that dominates every event – our focus in skeleton is to build a programme that comes back every four years and aims to win Olympic medals.”

Nick Gleeson: bobsleigh athlete Nick Gleeson is Britain’s youngest ever Olympic bobsledder – his inclusion in the Team GB squad for the PyeongChang Games in February 2018 came just four months after his 21st birthday. A member of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment, his first taste of bobsleigh came in the military. “The army has given me an elite sports job role, and they have supported me 100% of the way and I’ll forever be grateful because without them I wouldn’t be doing this.”

Nick has recently been selected for his second Olympic Games, for both the two-man and four-man competitions in Beijing. In the four-man event he will work with fellow athletes Brad Hall, Greg Cackett and Taylor Lawrence. In the two-man team Nick acts as the brakeman, he explains: “The brakeman is at the back of the sled – labelled as the pusher, your job is to accelerate the sled from the top of the track to about 45–55 metres at the top as fast as you can, to give the sled as much speed as possible.”

After the racing start in a four-man sled, athletes 2 and 3 (including Nick) hop in and sit Nick Gleeson (right) with his teammates at the World Cup in Altenberg

down and hold their position. No 4 (the brakeman) at the back jumps in too and sits with the others on the sled until it crosses the finish line when he pulls on two handles, setting off the brake mechanism so the sled comes to a standstill. “I like to learn the track so I know what’s coming,” says Nick, explaining what happens when the team crosess the finish line, adding that “the brakeman needs to react quickly to get the brakes on, to ensure you don’t go flying off the end of the track.”

Team Bath’s push-start track is key for the bobsleigh as well as the skeleton team. “The push-start track has been the pinnacle of all our training. In this country we have to do everything dry, because our nearest ice push house is in the middle of Germany. So we wouldn’t be able to get the results that we’ve had without this track,” says Nick.

What makes a good bobsledder? “The key features that make a good bobsleigh athlete are strength, speed and power. Also you need to be a bit of an idiot because you know what’s coming ahead of you!” laughs Nick. He explains how training on the indoor and outdoor sprint tracks in Bath helps encourage speed and agility. “The facilities are perfect for us because it’s all in the one place, including the gym.”

What about running on ice, though – how different is this to a standard surface? “The techniques are the same,” he says, “you just have to be more mindful on the ice because it’s more slippy. We have ice spikes, with about 300 metal spikes that grip the ice like a brush to stop you slipping.”

Nick has a dramatic scar on his shoulder, an ice burn from a bobsleigh accident in Winterberg in 2016, demonstrating the dangers of travelling at a top speed of 97 miles per hour, but Nick was fairly new to bobsleigh at the time and didn’t know about burns vests.

“The burns only happen when you’re not wearing the right equipment or when something goes wrong. Most injuries are sprained ankles, pulled hamstrings, bad backs.

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CITY | SPORTS

Marcus Wyatt: skeleton athlete Making his World Cup debut in Igls, Austria in December 2017, Marcus Wyatt finished an impressive 10th in his first elite-level skeleton outing. He narrowly missed out on a spot in the Team GB squad for the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang but did travel to South Korea after being selected to join the British Olympic Association's Ambitions Programme for potential future Olympians.

Marcus is one of four skeleton athletes to have been selected by Team GB for the Winter Olympic Games. “It is a dream come true. This season has been tough, but I’m really excited to go out to compete for a medal,” he says.

Marcus’ chance to become a skeleton athlete came in his final year at university in 2014 when he watched Lizzy Yarnold win gold in Sochi. “I was looking at what I was going to do next. And in the Olympic coverage they said that UK Sport wanted people to do trials for skeleton and I thought it sounded amazing – I was always a bit of an adrenalin junkie.

After 10–11 months of trials I was accepted on Marcus Wyatt

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We’ve shown in the past how we’re really good at going to a brand new track and learning it quickly

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A 4-man sled weighs about 410 kilos and this brings risks.”

Nick’s injury has not put him off. “Once you get the bug and when you realise you are half decent at bobsleigh you want to push it as far as you can. That involves making yourself physically and mentally better, and entering competitions. Fortunately it’s spiralled to the point that we’re now heading towards Beijing as serious medal contenders.”

The bobsleigh team spent three weeks in October on the Beijing track to familiarise themselves with it. When the team arrives for the Games they will have six training runs during the week and then four competitive race runs, but they need to be ranked inside the top 20 after the third heat otherwise they won’t get a fourth run.

The four-man bobsleigh event always falls at the end of the competition. “It’s called the blue ribbon event because it’s four big guys jumping into this funny bath tub and travelling at a top speed of 97mph per hour down this little icy track,” says Nick. They had better watch out though because we’ve heard that the Jamaican bobsleigh team have been training at the University of Bath to finalise their preparations. We’ll be watching, Nick – and don’t forget your burns vest.

Marcus Wyatt as he dives on the sled

the team – over 1,000 people applied and they cut us down to four boys and four girls – suddenly I was part of a sports team.”

Just three years later Marcus missed out on being selected for the PyeongChang team.

“That was really tough,” he says. “I always felt I had a chance and I got super close. I knew I was good enough and it was hard for a few weeks, but it was just a case of picking myself back up and getting going again. I like to think it’s made me a stronger, more resilient athlete.”

Now back in force, Marcus won the Olympic Test Event silver in October on the Beijing track. “Beijing is a unique track, unlike any other where we’ve been,” says Marcus.

“There are two different track styles. Europe has one style where the corners are quite low, more like a C-shape – we call it the ‘rollover’, so where the ice goes over vertical it will turn you back down. In North America they have really big corners, so where you roll over the ice is almost flat, so you can be parallel going in a straight line but you might be 3ft or 8ft high. Beijing has mixed the two so you’ve got some corners that feel small and some where you can be going flat in the corner. It can be difficult to tell how high you are, crucial in terms of getting the best exit for the corner.”

The coaching team at British Skeleton taps into every aspect of preparation, says Marcus: “I work with a strength and conditioning coach and we have ice coaches who are more involved in the actual sliding. Then there are physios and psychologists, as well as technology aids and research and innovation – it’s a big coaching team with multiple facilities and they all play their part.”

All this goes a long way to overcoming the lack of a nearby ice track: “We try and use the disadvantage of not having our own track as an advantage. We’ve shown in the past how we’re really good at going to a brand new Marcus Wyatt on the ice track

track and learning it quickly. The Germans will do a couple of hundred runs down their own track every year, whereas we’re really good at turning up to a track and working it out in 10 runs. That’s something we really pride ourselves on and it’s been key to our success.”

The team’s success is also about collaboration: “We sit down as a group when we join the programme – even though it’s an individual sport, our philosophy is that we work as a team, so I’m benefitting from my runs, but also from Matt’s runs and Laura’s runs [Matt Weston and Laura Deas]. If you’re happy to have open, honest discussions as a group then you can learn so much more quickly. Ultimately it’s you versus the clock, but we’re happy to share ideas because it’s how you go and use them when you’re sliding.”

And what about medal hopes? “This year the field has been absolutely wide open,” says Marcus. “There are a couple of Olympic champions there, Sung-Bin Yun of Korea who won in PyeongChang and Russian Aleksandr Tretyakov who won in Sochi, two Latvian Brothers, Martins and Tomass Dukurs, one of whom has won silver at the last three Games, and there are multiple World Cup race winners – honestly this year many races might see up to 15 potential skeleton athletes on the podium.

I’d like to put myself and Matt in the mix as well. This could all come down to a couple of 100ths of a second over four and a half minutes of racing.”

There are of course no medal guarantees, but the preparation has been immaculate.

Good luck, Team GB! n The BBSA run taster sessions and corporate sessions at the push-track from April to September, where GB athletes and coaches coach companies or members of the public to try out the sports. They get the chance to do exactly what Nick and Marcus do on the track and it’s great fun. Email: office@thebbsa.co.uk thebbsa.co.uk; teambath.com; teamgb.com

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Justin Webb.qxp_Layout 1 28/01/2022 12:13 Page 1

ARTS | BOOKS

The radio man

I

t’s the story of one boy and one strange family. It’s not a work of therapy, and it’s certainly not a work of history because I’m not an historian. But it is an effort to try and talk humorously about how odd I was, but also how we are all a bit odd. We’re all so much more complicated than we seem and we should avoid blaming each other in the things we do and just be more aware of each other’s humanity.”

The familiar voice of Justin Webb from Radio 4’s Today programme is telling me about his new book, The Gift of a Radio, which publishes this month. It’s a memoir of his childhood in the 1970s, growing up in Bath. I discovered reading the book that I live just down the road from the house where Justin and his family lived, in Wells Road. I went to have a look at their house, one of three set down a steep tarmacked drive, which brought to life a passage in the book about Justin’s step-father Charles who one Christmas decided in the middle of the night to drive off somewhere. It was snowing and the car stuck on the steep driveway, its wheels rotating on the ice and gravel. Charles was convinced that people were “getting in and Justin Webb, centre, at boarding school in 1977

Justin Webb talked to President Obama for the BBC in 2009

altering things” in the garage and spent some nights sleeping there in his dressing gown to protect its contents.

“I came past the road on the train to Cardiff yesterday, which went through Bath and I looked up to try and see the house, which you can see briefly from the railway, but I couldn’t see much in the darkness,” says Justin. He remembers a very differrent Bath to the one we know today: “The city was bleak and black. It was before the buildings were cleaned – you have to be a certain age to remember this but the stonework of the Royal Crescent or any of the fine Georgian buildings in the centre were really stained by decades of petrol. It was a grimmer, grittier place than it is now.”

Justin’s relationship to Bath is complex, but he feels a close connection to his home city.

“My own circumstances were grim and that colours your memories of a place, but actually I have a huge affection for the city which I will have until my dying day. There are a lot of ghosts that I see when I walk around Bath and not all of them are happy ones. But you feel a sense of belonging to a place where you spent all of your young life.

It’s a love hate thing, and an enormous pull which possibly I wouldn’t have if my early experiences were less intense.”

Justin lived with his mother and his stepfather (he never knew his own father Peter Woods, one of the BBC's best-known broadcasters of his day), who had what would now be called a personality disorder, but in the unenlightened 1970s he was diagnosed by the doctor as “stark staring mad.” It was an eccentric childhood. “Mum was partly a Maoist, partly a Quaker, partly a believer in human rights, partly someone who absolutely loathed her fellow man and woman because she thought they were beneath her. I think we’re all a bit mixed up when it comes to that – although perhaps not quite so mixed up as my mum.”

Justin describes the family house as a deeply strange place to grow up. “It was just the weirdness and the snobbery and the rules we had about words that could or couldn’t be used. And the way it separated us off from people. I do think snobbery is such an interesting subject, not just because it’s so peculiar, but because it’s really difficult to get rid of. I can still feel my mother’s attitudes. I still can’t bring myself to say the word ‘toilet’ on Radio 4. I just can’t do it – it’s a real struggle.”

“My mother’s view of the social classes was typical of the time, but she was at a pretty extreme end of the scale – the odd thing about her social class awareness was how it allowed her to defend herself against 68 TheBathMagazine

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all the things in her life that had gone wrong.

“It’s so insidious because it affects so many parts of your life – it makes you so much less able to enjoy yourself. I think it takes generations to dissipate. We think the sixties came and we gave up on snobbism, but it was very much there, through the seventies and beyond, and to an extent it still is.”

The house was defined by silence – apart from when Charles got up in the middle of the night to play Bach at full volume, mainly

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You feel a sense of belonging to a place where you spent all of your young life. It’s a love hate thing, and an enormous pull...

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“

Justin Webb, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, grew up in Bath in the 1970s. Emma Clegg talks to him about his new book, which tells the story of a childhood dominated by a difficult decade and challenging personalities

to annoy the neighbours – and few friends visited, put off by Charles’ strange behaviour.

There was a television, but tucked away so that watching it (principally Malcolm Muggeridge) involved moving other furniture and readjusting its position in order to plug it in. Listening to music needed to take place with absolute concentration and Justin once listened, seated with his mother, to all three movements of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2, an LP purchased from Bath’s music shop Duck, Son & Pinker. “Play it to a child growing up in strange circumstances and you will allow him to see, to hear, the depths of his despair,” the book recounts.

Living in a small world within an intense maternal relationship must have made Justin’s childhood suffocatingly serious, and I ask what sort of impact it had on the man he became. “I do think that the sort of relationship we had can lead to a reduction of life chances for both parties. The mum who is looking too much to the next generation and the child who has to perform. Your life becomes a performance. I had to pretend for as long as I remember that everything was always OK, although it obviously wasn’t.

And I don’t think that’s a healthy thing.

“It makes you more limited as a person and your ability to form honest, open connections with people is harder. I’ve managed, but maybe my wife and others I’ve been close to have done the managing. I think the emotional ups and downs of life become much less easy when you haven’t been able to have them when you are young and I do think I’ve been damaged by that. But I’m not

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Justin Webb presenting the Today programme

condemning, because in so many other ways she gave me everything.”

Justin was sent to boarding school by his mother to take him away from the disturbing reality of living with his step-father. Sidcot School in Winscombe was a Quaker school, and is today a well-respected independent school. Giving this credit in the book, he goes on to explain that the school in those days provided no lightening of pressure and anxiety: “It wasn’t like that when I was there.

It was grim. It was lost. A place of despair.

A wrecker of already damaged lives.”

Justin’s experience of the 1970s, particularly at school, uncovers standards that are astonishing today – pupils going potholing at the weekends without the school knowing, children being sent to play in seriously rough adult rugby games where beer was drunk from a bucket at half time. “In some ways the seventies were a better time – there was this sense of a collective us that I don’t think exists any more – but in other ways, my goodness, we did things that seem unimaginable now.”

What rescued Justin through these turbulent times was the gift of a radio from his mother.

“The moment that I received it was more transformative than any other single thing in my life. It was a much discussed purchase because it was expensive and it felt like a big step to have a radio in a silent household, although I wasn’t allowed to play it anywhere other than my room. To have the intimacy of a transistor radio, someone talking directly to you, was a complete change in a life that was mostly unconnected, and made a big difference to people’s lives in the late 1960s when portable radios became more common. I went

from being stuck in this peculiar little prison to having the rest of the world available to me.”

“There isn’t a modern equivalent because people are so connected now,” Justin continues. “It’s difficult for my children’s generation to fully understand how unconnected we were to the outside world.

Even if you had a telephone it was expensive to use, but the transistor radio was relatively affordable and you could hold it close to you.”

The irony of what this radio represented to the child who became the adult whose voice now emanates from it is almost overwhelming.

“It provided not only a connection with the outside world, but a really tantalising glimpse of what might be possible. The political changes and the fights with the miners and the various governments coming and going, it took me on the path of a wider world, and if you have that feeling it rescues you from the tiny world that you are in.”

Humour is another thing that sustained him: “Having a weird, miserable upbringing does not denude you of a sense of humour. It doesn’t take it away – if anything it accentuates it, because you’re looking for things that might lighten the mood a bit.”

What is perhaps most astonishing about Justin’s book is that it is written with no iota of bitterness, frustration or anger. “The last thing I wanted it to be was a kind of woe-isme misery memoir or a condemnatory, angry attack. Although emotionally and physically my life was strange, it was not as if we were desperately poor – it’s not a memoir about that, it’s just a set of reflections, really, about what it’s like to be a human being.”

Thankfully Justin’s mother, who died in

2008, lived long enough to see his successful career as a journalist and as the BBC’s chief Washington correspondent, although Justin is keen to add, “I do want to apologise to any person who visited my mother in her flat in Widcombe towards the end of her life, because even if they had just gone to mend a pipe they would have to have seen endless photos of me and hear about the latest things that I was doing in my career.” n

The Gift of a Radio by Justin Webb, Doubleday Books, is published on 10 February, £16.99; penguin.co.uk Justin is also appearing at Topping & Co. Booksellers on 22 March and at the Bath Festival in May.

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LOCAL | EVENTS

What’s on in February Fatal Attraction with Kym Marsh and Oliver Farnworth at Theatre Royal Bath

Tai Chi at the Roman Baths

ARTISTS’ SHOWCASE Throughout February n Out of the Blue Gallery A beautiful gallery right in the heart of Bath is showcasing some of the best British artists and ceramicists. Set across two floors, the gallery is packed with great pieces. outofthebluegallery.com TAI CHI AT THE ROMAN BATHS Until 15 March, Tuesdays 8–8.30am n Roman Baths, Abbey Church Yard Get your day off to a great start with morning Tai Chi sessions on the terrace at The Roman Baths with private instructor Paddy Nisbett. £4 a session. romanbaths.co.uk THE DA VINCI CODE Until 5 February, 7.30pm n Theatre Royal Bath The blockbuster story that captivated the world is now an epic stage thriller. The curator of the Louvre has been brutally murdered, and there are a series of baffling codes and riddles leading to the works of Leonardo Da Vinci and beyond, deep into the vault of history. Tickets from £28. theatreroyal.org.uk SNOW MOUSE Until 6 February n The Egg Theatre, Theatre Royal Bath Winter has arrived and the woods are covered in white. Children playing outside find a sleeping mouse buried under the soft white flakes. They explore the winter wonderland and keep each other safe and warm from the winter freeze. The perfect first theatre experience. Daily (except

Mondays) 9.30am, 11.30am and 1.30pm.

45 minutes long. Tickets £10. theatreroyal.org.uk HOW THE BIBLE CAN HELP IN TIMES LIKE THESE From 1 February, and on the first Tuesday of each month, 7.30–8.30pm n New Oriel Hall, Larkhall, Bath Pastor Pete Dickens from Bible Believing Church has agreed with Bath Bible Institute to visit Bath to talk about how the Bible can help you in times like these. Pete is a missionary from the USA. He studied under Peter Ruckman at Pensacola Bible Institute and has taught in Dorset at his independent, fundamental Baptist King James Church for the last 30 years. Pete believes that the Bible teaches absolute truth and can help anyone find peace and purpose. The group is small and very friendly. Tea and biscuits will be provided. testimonykjv.com U3A: FACING THE DIFFICULT TRUTHS OF THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY 3 February, 10.30am n Bath Pavilion, North Parade Road Admission to the talks is free for members and asks for a donation of £2 for nonmembers. u3ainbath.org.uk THE ART OF COMPASSIONATE BUSINESS 8 February, 7.30pm n Online talk There are several well-ingrained assumptions regarding the dynamics of work and business activities, which can be

refuted. Some examples are employees being viewed as commodities, competitors perceived as threats, companies’ resources seen as limited, and customers perceived as scarce and difficult. All of which leads to the question, “Is there a way to perform business activities more humanely?” Talk

by Dr Bruno C Cignacco. £2–£5. brlsi.org FATAL ATTRACTION 8–12 February, 7.30, plus matinees n Theatre Royal Bath James Dearden’s intoxicating new stage play of Fatal Attraction brings the definitive movie thriller to the UK stage.

Starring British pop and TV sensation Kym Marsh as the iconic Alex Forrest, soap star favourite Oliver Farnworth as Dan Gallagher and Footballer’s Wives siren Susie Amy as Beth Gallagher. Tickets from £27.50. theatreroyal.org.uk JOHN LENNON UK PRESENTS LENNON RETROSPECTIVE 12 February, 8pm n Chapel Arts, Lower Borough Walls, Bath John Lennon Tribute UK’s show Lennon Retrospective will take the audience on a journey through John Lennon’s best-loved songs starting with his solo work and culminating in the early Beatles classics.

The band is fronted by Lennon look-andsound-alike Gaz Keenan. £17. chapelarts.org MEN’S WALK TO SUPPORT 13 February n Start at Dorothy House, Winsley 12pm, finish Bath Pavilion 3pm Take part in this 8-mile walk for men to join together and raise vital funds for end Continued page 28

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LOCAL | EVENTS

Simon Rattle, photograph by Mark Allan

Adam Clutterbuck, Sentinel, Bath Art Fair

of life care in the local community. The walk starts at 12 noon from Dorothy House, Winsley. Participants will set off on the route that follows along the canal and finishes at Bath Pavilion, in time to watch the Six Nations England v Italy match at 3pm. Celebrate your epic achievement with a well-earned free pint and food in the Pavilion! Sign up online: dorothyhouse.org.uk BATH BACHFEST 17–19 February, and live-streamed n Assembly Rooms, Bath Enjoy glorious baroque music beneath the Assembly Rooms’ glittering chandeliers, with five concerts over three days.

Celebrating the music of J S Bach and his contemporaries the concerts encompass music by Vivaldi, Handel and several lesserknown names. Two fine period music ensembles – Arcangelo and the Academy of Ancient Music – and the award-winning choir Tenebrae will give evening concerts, plus a one-hour lunchtime concert from the acclaimed Chinese guitarist Xuefei Yang and a Saturday morning coffee concert from the celebrated duo of recorder player Michala Petri and harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani. Tickets £15–£45. bathbachfest.org.uk

BATH ART FAIR 26–27 February n Bath Pavilion, North Parade Road, Bath Now in its fifth year The Bath Art Fair is back, bringing together over 90 of the most innovative and exciting professional independent artists from all over the country and Europe. The fair is the perfect setting for customers to discover new, original art.

Visitors enjoy meeting the artists, who explain their inspirations and processes, and find an emotional connection with their work that galleries can’t offer. Professional artists with

EUGENE ONEGIN 24–26 February, 7.30pm n Roper Theatre, Hayesfield School, Upper Oldfield Park, Bath Bath Opera’s large-scale, fully staged period production of Eugene Onegin – with up to 70 professional orchestral players, singers and dancers on stage – is a must-see event.

The ever-popular Waltz and Polonaise music will be brought to life as interludes in the unfolding story of youthful passions blighted by jealousy, the whole enriched by the thrilling sound of a large chorus.

Tickets: £20–30. bathopera.com; bathboxoffice.org.uk

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LOOKING AHEAD: U3A: THE ART OF THE STONEMASON AND CONSERVATOR IN THE 21ST CENTURY 3 March, 10.30am n Bath Pavilion, North Parade Road Admission to the talks is free for members and asks for a donation of £2 for non-members. u3ainbath.org.uk U3A OPEN MORNING 10 March, 10.30am–12.30pm n Bath Pavilion, North Parade Road Come and find out about the monthly U3A talks, usually held on the first Thursday in the month at 10.30am.

Admission to the talks is free for members and asks for a donation of £2 for non-members. If you come to the talk and join U3A in Bath at the meeting then your admission fee is refunded. u3ainbath.org.uk LARA MELDA & BATH PHILHARMONIA 8 March, 7.30pm n Bath Forum A grand 19th-century tour through musical Europe, from the rugged beauty of the Scottish Highlands via the sophistication of Paris, ending in the

years of experience exhibit side by side with fresh new talent. Saturday 26 February 10am–6pm; Sunday 27 February 10am–5pm.

Tickets £6 online, £7 on the door. bathartfair.co.uk

Please confirm with organisers that events are running. See our website for updates and new events added throughout the month: thebathmagazine.co.uk

Mediterranean heat of Southern Italy.

Bath Philharmonia performs musical postcards including the stormy shores of Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave and the riotous Tarantella dance of his 4th Symphony. This concert features Lara Melda, the 2010 BBC Young Musician of the Year winner, performing Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.1, a glorious musical love letter and one of the most delicate and sensuous concertos in the repertoire. Tickets: £35/£30/£25/£5. bathboxoffice.org.uk BRISTOL BEACON PRESENTS LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA WITH SIR SIMON RATTLE 14 March, 7pm n Bath Forum Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra return to Bath Forum in the spring, with a concert that will transport you to other worlds. From Hannah Kendall’s 21st-century classic The Spark Catchers, through Dvořák’s playful American Suite, to Schumann’s most personal symphony, this programme will take you on a fantastic emotional journey.

Tickets £10–£55 with limited £10 tickets for under 26s. bristolbeacon.org

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FLEMISH WITHOUT A BLEMISH: DECODING A MYSTERY FROM HISTORY

By RICHARD KAY Sometimes pictures only become interesting when they are unsigned; sometimes they become even more intriguing when they are signed. Just such a conundrum arose with the landscape scene illustrated alongside.

The Somerset-based family who had owned it for over 150 years had always believed it be by Paul Bril (1554-1626), an Antwerp-born artist who travelled to Rome and blended Flemish and Italian styles with great skill and faultless technical aplomb. Helpfully, the picture was even signed, but this was where I began to feel concern rather than reassurance.

I soon discovered that an almost identical subject by Bril himself had been sold by Sotheby’s in New York in January 2015. Could Bril really have painted two such similar pictures? And yet there was more than sufficient quality in the details to make me feel that this perplexing picture really had to be by a rarity

by Paul Bril himself.

As I pondered, I was grateful for the superb – dare I say Bril-liant? – expertise of the noted Flemish art historian Drs. Luuk Pijl. I had sent him a few clear photographs for his thoughts and he responded so eagerly that I knew that I had the attention of just the right man. He noted that `our` picture was a little less refined than the 1619 example that had been offered at Sotheby’s in 2015 and so he worked on the assumption that it predated that composition, placing it in the 1616-1619 period. He also made the remarkable discovery that `our` picture appeared in another painting from the 17th Century.

This lifted the picture above the mire of doubt and linked it, almost beyond any further argument, to the distinguished collection of a noted collector in early 17th Century Antwerp: exactly where one would expect to find a museum-quality work by Bril.

Drs Pijl will be including the picture in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné, a definitive academic survey of all of Paul Bril’s oeuvre in this medium. The cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest painted by Willem van picture is now back in Antwerp. In our The Haeght in 1626. The Paul Bril may be seen on the floor at the October auction, the blend of back of the room in the centre of the picture provenance, quality, expertise and (www.commons.wikimedia.org) rigorous scrutiny ensured that the price topped £55,000.

Richard Kay is a Director at Lawrences Auctioneers in Crewkerne. For more information about the firm’s auctions, events and valuation services, please call (01460) 73041 or email enquiries@lawrences.co.uk

Lawrences AUCTIONEERS The Linen Yard, South Street, Crewkerne, Somerset TA18 8AB. T 01460 73041

lawrences.co.uk

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ARTS | THEATRE

The language of puppetry

We’re all familiar with the maxim “Four legs good; two legs bad.” But what about a scenario with 28 human legs and 90 animal ones? Emma Clegg talks to director, designer and puppeteer Toby Olié about the new production of Animal Farm

A

ll animals are equal – but some animals are more equal than others.” So goes one of the most familiar sentences from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the allegorical story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their farmer, fuelled by the idea of creating a society where all animals are equal, free and happy. The farmyard revolution – a parody of Stalinist Russia which Orwell was criticising – doesn’t end well. His story, first published in 1945, is a political satire showing how inequalities and tyrannies are replicated again and again, whatever the aspirations of those in charge.

Now the story has a new stage production, a touring show that is coming to Theatre Royal Bath from 1–5 March after its launch in Birmingham. Animal Farm is directed by Robert Icke, whose version of 1984 was a smash hit in the West End and on Broadway; features puppetry by Toby Olié, whose credits include War Horse; and is designed by four-time Olivier Award winner Bunny Christie.

Toby had his first meeting with Robert Icke in Sept 2019 – the director introduced the project, explaining that he wanted to use puppets rather than people. “The biggest thing for me from that point was the number of hands available,” says Toby Olié, referring to the planning of the production. There are 10 named characters in the original book, but

Rayo Patel (Cockerel) in Animal Farm

the new production uses a total of 30 puppets, all created by Toby and his team, with the farmers alone portrayed by actors.

“I sat down and decided that every pig would be a two-person puppet and then did a tracking document of the whole show, to see if we could stage it with the maximum cast number of 14 people.” The calculations were based on the medium-sized animals (pigs, sheep and dogs) having two puppeteers; smaller animals (chickens, geese and pigeons) controlled by one person and sometimes two to create an expressive movement or elaborate gesture; and Boxer the carthorse with three puppeteers. “It became a game of puppeteer chess!”, says Toby.

The relative sizes of the animals are mostly correct, although the smaller animals such as pigeons and chickens have slightly largerthan-life puppet representations. Toby explains that this is because it’s more effective for the proportion of puppet to puppeteer to favour the puppet. “Boxer the carthorse feels larger than life, but terrifyingly he is pretty much the size of a Drysdale Carthorse. They are just that big. He is absolutely enormous, controlled by three people. And then we’ve got a full-size dairy cow, all the way down to a one-person pigeon, so it’s a real sliding scale of animals.”

“Because we decided to do more characters, we were keen to introduce more variety, so we mixed up some of the species.

Clover who is a carthorse in the novel has become a dairy cow. And we’ve made Squeela the pig a female because in the novel all the main pigs are male.”

“There’s something particularly exciting about the fact that Animal Farm is not a particularly long novel,” Toby comments.

“It’s short, sharp and packs a punch. Rob said from the beginning that he didn’t want to turn it into a two and a half hour epic – his dream was to have a show without an interval, one that hits just as hard.” This involved condensing the shifts of time (years pass between chapters), and finding a way of keeping the pace going.

“With War Horse, we had Joey the horse who you follow through the whole show, but in Animal Farm every scene has about eight or more talking central characters that are animal puppets. It’s been an amazing technical challenge.”

War Horse, first performed at the National Theatre in 2007, was a groundbreaking theatrical production featuring life-sized horses, bringing breathing, galloping, charging horses to life on stage. Toby got involved with the production as puppeteer and associated puppetry director while he was still training at the Central School of 68 TheBathMagazine

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Toby Olié

Speech and Drama. War Horse recharged and reinvented the emotional power of the puppet on stage and spearheaded a whole new world of experimental puppetry (Toby refers to this production as spurring a “Puppet Renaissance”), which Toby has continued to contribute to. “War Horse was the first show where you had a puppet protagonist. I jokingly call it Puppet Hamlet, because when you’re playing the horse you just don’t leave the stage,” he says.

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The puppets are the audience’s way into this story – they have to care about them and invest and believe in them...

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“

“I never quite fathomed how deeply invested in those animal characters people would be, and one of the critical responses was how astonishing it is that the puppets bear the emotional weight of an audience for three and a half hours. And that’s what it’s about, that length of emotional investment.

It’s the same with Animal Farm; the puppets are the audience’s way into this story – they have to care about them and invest and believe in them as much as they would an actor playing the part.”

After War Horse Toby and Finn Caldwell (who he met on the production) set up Gyre & Gimble, a theatre company specialising in puppetry. Moving forward he made a point of working on more projects with a puppet protagonist driving the narrative. He recollects Meryl Streep saying that she often decides whether to do a project when sent a script by taking her character out of it; if the plot is the same without that character, then she is less interested. Toby says, “I think the same way with puppets. I’ve made lots of beautiful puppets for shows that people have

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Photographs by Manuel Harlan

Clover with puppeteers Yana Penrose and Edie Edmundson and Squeela with puppeteers Ailsa Dalling and Matt Churcher

really loved but if you took that puppet out, the story would still be the same.”

The puppets are handmade, all bespoke, created from a clay sculpture that is replicated in a dense foam, which allows it to take impact and not be too brittle. “I come in with drawings and ideas and the team of makers builds a prototype together,” says Toby. “So over the last eight and a half months there has been this sort of animal factory!”

Instead of a marionette or Punch and Judy performance where the puppeteer is invisible, Toby specialises in theatre where puppets and actors are on stage together. “There is something so beautiful in the act of giving a puppet movement and seeing the person pulling the strings. In the initial moments before the revolution in Animal Farm, this is ambiguous when you see the puppets because the puppeteers are in the shadows, but when the animals get liberated so are the puppeteers.

“There’s something wonderful about a puppet peeling back its mechanics, and I think that’s something that Bunny and Rob latched on to in our development workshops. Bunny said she loved the gaps between the ridges that allow them to move and wanted to keep them rather than cover them up. And that was great for me because puppets are so at their best when they need the audience’s imagination to finish them, as well as believe in them.”

Rob, Toby and Bunny had an open collaboration when working together, explains Toby. “So often with puppetry you end up in a trap where the puppet does something that’s already been explained or narrated, but actually a puppet can show it, so why say it too? And Rob’s been incredible at spotting

Boxer with puppeteers Elisa De Gray, Matt Tait and Rayo Patel and Squeela with puppeteers Ailsa Dalling and Matt Churcher

these moments. One that stands out for Toby relates to a line from Mollie the white mare, ‘Will there still be sugar lumps after the revolution?’ “Rob suggested adapting it to put the most interesting bit at the end of the sentence, so the line changed to, ‘After the revolution, will there be sugar lumps?’ So the heat of the thought is at the end. So he was looking at my kind of puppetry language through his lens.”

Orwell wrote Animal Farm from 1943–44 when the United Kingdom was in a wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi

Germany and the story proves itself as relevant than ever – just think of the pigs moving into the farmhouse and having a party while everyone else is working. In Toby’s words, “There is a definite intention on Rob’s behalf to draw parallels to any situation where autocracy or authoritarianism raises its head.” n George Orwell’s Animal Farm, directed by Robert Icke, tours to the Theatre Royal Bath from 1–5 March Tickets from £25; theatreroyal.org.uk

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ART | EXHIBITIONS

ARTS & EXHIBITIONS The Holburne Museum, Great Pulteney Street, Bath

People Make Museums, until 2 May A celebration of the importance of people in museums, who charge them with stories, memories, and ways of seeing.

Mick Peter: Old Ghosts, until 15 May Old Ghosts takes a wry and affectionate look at the idea of history as an industry. In several surprising interventions, inside and outside the Holburne Museum, visitors will encounter amusing tableaux which appear to be cartoons that have come to life.

holburne.org

The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics, until 8 May Come face-to-face with the five Tudor monarchs – Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I and other significant figures of the time (see also page 38)

Impressions on Paper David Simon Contemporary 37 High Street, Castle Cary BA7 7AW 4 February – 1 March The gallery’s annual exhibition dedicated to works on paper coincides with a major exhibition of Francis Bacon: Man & Beast at the Royal Academy. Here is a fine collection of original signed works on paper by Francis Bacon. These are exhibited alongside work by Lucien Freud, David Hockney RA, Henry Moore, John Nash, Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland, figurative engravings by Maynard Hales, and still life and interiors by Steven Hubbard. davidsimoncontemporary.com Triptych Inspired by Oresteia of Aeschylus, by Francis Bacon

Winter Exhibition, Woolverton Gallery, Bath BA2 7RH, Until 30 March The Woolverton Gallery welcomes art lovers to its Winter Exhibition featuring the work of the gallery’s six resident artists. You’ll find wonderful new creations from Ray Jones, Lynn Baxter, Brian Baxter, Amanda Bee, Alex Howell and David Wilkey. bathartsales.com Stall Street Rendezvous by David Wilkie Image by Ray Jones

Launch Exhibition, Frome Gallery, Frome BA11 1EE, from 5 February The Frome Gallery at 22 Christchurch Street, West Frome BA11 1EE is a new gallery from Bath Art Sales featuring works from the six artists exhibiting at the Woolverton Gallery in a beautiful contemporary environment. bathartsales.com

Wildscreen’s Community Exhibition; Protecting our Planet, Central Gallery, Royal United Hospitals Bath, until 21 April

Bristol-based charity Wildscreen are featuring a series of vibrant photographs from indigenous people across the world focusing on the theme of ‘Community’.

Curated in collaboration with If Not Us Then Who, their network of artists have provided their powerful and emotive work, with photography from Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá, Elizabeth Swanson Andi, Irati Dojura, Morena Pérez Joachin and Pablo Franceschi and Adrielle Priscila da Silva Tavares.

Please check current restrictions before visiting the RUH. artatruh.org

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Myths and Monsters Victoria Art Gallery, Bath Until 27 February This colourful celebration of children’s book illustration is a follow-up to the 2017 blockbuster Here Be Dragons exhibition. Myths and Monsters will link the worlds of literature, art and myth with some of the very best (and worst) you could expect to meet. Encounter characters from the Gruffalo to the Iron Man and fearsome dragons to the Little Ogre. There will be a chance for young visitors to get involved by making their own ‘monster in a jar’, which will be displayed as part of the show. victoriagal.org.uk

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The a w a r d w i n n i n g

Bath Art Fair Bath Pavilion BA2 4EU Fri 25th Feb (Private View) Sat 26th Feb 10am to 6pm Sun 27th Feb 10am to 5pm Michael Claxton Stand 54

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ART | EXHIBITIONS

Behind Closed Doors ArtBar, Abbey Hotel, Bath 7 February – 31 March

David Ringsell: Bath Scenes

An exclusive collaborative exhibition by Bath creatives Jason Dorley-Brown and Emma Taylor celebrates Bath’s historic buildings and gives an insight into the life and stories behind their doors. Beautifully created images recounting a slice of Bath history are entwined with contemporary art. The artists are donating 35% of sales to the charity Bath Mind. Free entry to the exhibition via Abbey Hotel Bath entrance. abbeyhotelbath.co.uk

Image: Bath in Bloom

Winter Show, Beaux Arts Bath 12-13 York Street, Bath Throughout February

Image: Tall Twisted Vessel by Paul Philip

Beaux Arts Bath shines out in the winter gloom with their winter show in February with a selection of gallery favourites featuring work by Paul Mount, Nathan Ford, Anna Gillespie, Harriet Porter, Helen Simmonds, Paul Philp, Andrew Crocker, Rachel Ross and Jaejun Lee. beauxartsbath.co.uk

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Local painter David Ringsell’s work is being exhibited at The Artery Art Café in Richmond Place, Conscious Café in Northumberland Place (until 22 February) and at The Claremont Pub, 5 Claremont Road, Bath. He also has prints available at The Art Cohort.

David loves to share his artistic impressions of Bath, his home city. His unique and contemporary art prints of Bath show a different, sometimes darker side of the city and his paintings of the architecture relish the stained stonework and peeling paint.

Custom prints are available in a range of sizes – see the website: real-images.com

Image: Street of Dreams.

A couple walk down a deserted street in Bath past empty shopfronts on a rainy day. This was inspired by the lockdown.

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ARTS | EXHIBITIONS

Facing up to the Tudors

A new exhibition at the Holburne Museum, The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics, features 25 famous Tudor portraits, bringing visitors face to face with the five Tudor monarchs and other significant figures of the period, from Sir Walter Raleigh to Thomas Cromwell. Here are some excerpts from the exhibition catalogue that paint a picture of why these portraits were such a powerful political tool for those who commissioned them

The Tudors are a cultural phenomenon.

TOP: Sir Thomas More, after Hans Holbein the Younger, early 17th century, based on a work of 1527. © National Portrait Gallery, London ABOVE: Queen Elizabeth I by unknown English artist, 1560, when she would have been aged 27. © National Portrait Gallery, London 38 TheBATHMagazine

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For over 400 years since the death of Elizabeth I, the lives of the Tudor monarchs and their subjects have provided rich source material for historians, writers and artists.

The period is filled with memorable characters: the six-times married king, the virgin queen, the ideal courtier, the spymaster, the explorer, the poet, the martyr.

The stories of the central cast and their close social and familial networks can be followed down the generations...

At the same time, the Tudor dynasty presided over a period of seismic change in England and Wales, which fundamentally altered the structure of society and re-shaped the country’s relationship with the wider world. These two factors have encouraged subsequent generations to repeatedly return to re-examine and re-tell the stories of the Tudor period: the break with the Catholic Church in Rome and establishment of the Church of England; conflict with Spain, France and Scotland; the impact of migration triggered by religious persecution; the exploration and piracy that enabled imperial expansion and laid the foundations for trading companies that would bring unimagined wealth to the country; and the extraordinary development of the English language through poetry, drama and translation. All of these threads have been woven together over the centuries, building a cumulative storytelling power and securing the Tudors’ prominence in the popular imagination.

This position has been enhanced through portraiture. Theirs is the first English royal dynasty, court and society whose faces we can encounter on the walls of galleries, in historic houses and reproduced in the books that tell their stories, through both fact and fiction. That the lives of some of the most famous Tudors have proved so engaging is in part due to the fact that it is possible to satisfy our basic human curiosity as to what they looked like. ...Nonetheless, we have only a partial picture, for the majority of Tudor portraits that survive today present an elite social identity. Over the course of the 16th century, portraiture moved beyond being the exclusive preserve of the royal family and aristocracy in London to be commissioned by professionals and gentry families across the country. However, while the market for portraiture diversified, it was only the aristocracy and those with connections to institutions such as the universities and livery

companies, whose portraits were likely to be maintained, and the sitter’s identity preserved, down the centuries. This poses a challenge. As consideration of who and how people contributed to Tudor life and culture expands beyond the people who ran the apparatus of the church and state, and the people who have been granted the spotlight by previous generations, the champions of other stories are not always able to rely on the power of portraiture to fire the historical imagination.

One of the greatest ...portraits of the Tudor period is lost, destroyed in the fire that consumed Whitehall Palace on 4 January 1698. Painted on a wall as part of the lavish development of the palace, the portrait was intended to overwhelm the viewer with the majesty of the second Tudor king. Henry VIII was depicted at full-length, standing square on and staring out at his subjects. While the king was undoubtedly the main focus, the portrait celebrated the Tudor dynasty and its future: Henry’s father stood behind him and on the other side of the composition stood his mother, Elizabeth of York, and Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour. At the time the portrait was conceived Jane was pregnant; Henry’s queen was key to the performance of his power. Following the break with the Catholic Church in Rome in order to secure his divorce from Katherine of Aragon, Henry had assumed the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England. It is therefore not surprising that the potency of the portrait of the king was immediately recognised. The preparatory cartoon for the mural was soon being used to create copies of Henry’s image, stamping his authority on spaces beyond the palace walls as a fitting demonstration of the way in which his temporal and spiritual power was, in the words of the French ambassador, making him ‘not only a King to be obeyed, but an icon to be worshipped’.

The German artist ... Hans Holbein the Younger had a meticulous approach to portraiture, which seems to bring us into the presence of the people who populated Henry VIII’s court, not only the royal family, the aristocracy and statesmen, but also religious leaders and intellectuals, merchants, and fellow members of the royal household.

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That the lives of some of the most famous Tudors have proved so engaging is in part due to the fact that it is possible to satisfy our basic human curiosity as to what they looked like

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The lives of these sitters reveal the opportunities for advancement offered by the court, and the danger of carving out a career under a capricious king who used the appetite for religious reform to seize more power than had been held by any other English monarch, and who demanded absolute loyalty. An anecdote recounted by Holbein’s first biographer, Karel van Mander, in the 17th century suggests that the king prized the artist’s skills, informing a shocked earl who had attempted to complain about Holbein that ‘I can make seven earls (if it pleased me) from seven peasants – but I could not make one Holbein, or so excellent an artist, out of seven earls’.

As Thomas More ... counselled a courtier in a poem: ‘You often boast to me that you have the king’s ear and often have fun with him … This is like having fun with tamed lions – often it is harmless, but just as often there is fear of harm. Often he roars in rage for no known reason, and suddenly the fun becomes fatal.’ Once the king’s most trusted advisor, More was beheaded on 6 July 1535, two weeks after Cardinal John Fisher, after both refused to take the Oath of Supremacy recognising Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.

The execution of such prominent and revered figures sent shockwaves across Europe, and Holbein’s portraits of both came to serve as memorials that were copied repeatedly over the centuries. It was not only religious figures, both the ‘new men’ of Henry’s court and the aristocracy were vulnerable. Cromwell was executed on 28 July 1540, while the Duke of Norfolk was only spared execution by Henry’s death on 28 January 1547...

Elizabeth I’s singular ... approach to queenship is documented through her portraits – even though she occasionally needed to be persuaded to participate in their production. Her ambivalence could perhaps relate to the way Lady Jane Grey by unknown artist, circa 1590–1600 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Henry VIII after Hans Holbein the younger, 1537, © Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

in which the portraits of her predecessors, both as queen’s consort, and her sister as queen regnant, were so closely identified with marriage: the portraits of Jane Seymour that were created to pair with images of Henry VIII; the images of Anne of Cleves that were sent to England in advance of her arrival; and the counterpoint to these examples in the seemingly deliberate destruction of painted portraits of Anne Boleyn, of which only posthumous versions survive...

Of Henry’s queens, only Katherine Parr engaged in portraiture, commissioning works from a number of artists, and it is tempting to speculate as to whether her proactive selfpresentation related to her attempt to secure the position of Governor during Edward VI’s minority. Mary I, by contrast, only briefly explored the possibilities of an iconography for a queen regnant. Once she had committed to marrying Philip II, her image was conceived in relation to his. This could be seen in the portrait commissioned from Philip’s court artist, Anthonis Mor, which was reproduced in order to be shared with his family and with other courts, and which portrayed Mary seated in the manner of her predecessors as Habsburg queens consort.

At first, Elizabeth ... continued to use portraiture as a pragmatic tool for marriage negotiations, but over time portraiture was freed to express new identities for the queen. As Elizabeth and her courtiers navigated her long reign, they used portraiture to place her into roles beyond that of wife and mother. In a court where performance permeated every aspect of life, drawing on classical sources, the Bible, encounters with other cultures through trade and exploration, and stories translated from across Europe, Elizabeth came to be revered not only as a queen, but as a goddess, an empress, and mother to the nation.

Turn the page to find an experimental selection of Tudor Top Trumps. As ever, the scores all depend on the category. Have we graded the scores correctly? Elizabeth I seems to be winning the day, unless it’s a matter of number of children...

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ARTS | EXHIBITIONS Henry VII (1457–1509)

28

Age when became king

Age when became queen

Active years of influence

24

Active years of influence

Lifetime (years)

52

Lifetime (years)

7

Children born

After Hans Holbein the Younger, c.1537

Henry VII of England was the first monarch of the House of Tudor. He came to the throne when his forces defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. He cemented his claim by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of King Edward.

18

Age when became king

38

Active years of influence

3

Children born

56

Lifetime (years)

10

Political cunning

10

Historical renown

After Hans Holbein the younger, c 1537

Henry is best known for his six marriages.

His disagreement with Pope Clement VII about the annulment of his first to Catherine of Aragon led Henry to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority.

He expanded royal power during his reign.

Mary Queen of

7) Scots (1542–158 Age when became queen Active years in power Children born

Lifetime (years)

Political cunning

Historical renown

iard, 1578

After Nicholas Hill

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Age when knighted

Active years

1

Children born

44

Lifetime (years)

2

Political cunning

10

Unknown artist, 1576

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Historical renown

n

Unknown English ar tist, 1588

Historical renown

70

10

10

Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540) Age when became Henry’s advisor

10

Lifetime (years)

55

Political cunning After Hans Holbein the Younger, early 17th century, based on a work of 1532-33

29

Active years in power

Children born

4

9

8

Historical renown

Thomas Cromwell was an English statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII from 1534. He engineered an annulment of the King's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that Henry could marry Anne Boleyn. Cromwell was beheaded in 1540.

Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Design Leicester

by Woodhouse & Law (1532–1588)

Age when became an earl

1

30

Lifetime (years)

56

Political cunning

After Nicholas Hilliard, 1578

32

Years working for Queen Children born

5

5

0

Lifetime (years)

Political cunning

25

45

Children born

31

Sir Philip Sidney was an English poet, courtier, scholar and soldier who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age. His works include Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poesy and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.

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Active ye in power ars

Elizabeth I was Que en of Eng Ireland from land and 1558 until her death 1603. Som in etimes re fe Virgin Que rred to as the en, Elizab eth was th the monar e last of chs of the House of She neve Tudor. r married, sa yi ng married to that she w her kingdo as m and su bjects.

Tudor Top Trumps

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FeBruary 2022

9

The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics is at the Holburne Museum until 8 May. holburne.org

n of Scots was Quee Mary Queen of nsort Co n ee Qu d an 7) Scotland (1542–6 about s ion cis –60). Her de of France (1559 d rebellion ke vo pro s litic po marriage and to nobles. She fled among Scottish ed ad he be er lat she was England, where throne. sh gli En the to t as a threa

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All the portraits featured in the cards here are on display in the Holburne’s The Tudors exhibition.

0

Age whe n became qu ee

29

Historical renown

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)

zabeth I (1 533–1603 )

1

Jane Seymour was the third queen of King Henry VIII from their marriage in 1536 until her death the next year.

Their marriage followed the execution of Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Jane died after the birth of her only child, the future King Edward VI.

Henry VIII (1491–1547) Design by Woodhouse & Law

Queen Eli

1

Political cunning

8

Historical renown

28

Children born

10

Political cunning

Unknown Netherlandish artist, 1505

Jane Seymour (1508–1537)

Historical renown

1

7

6

Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, was an English statesman. He was the favourite of Elizabeth I from her accession until his death and a suitor for the Queen's hand for many years. He was involved in domestic and foreign politics alongside William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham.

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What’s new in Antique furniture?

DUNCAN CAMPBELL Antique silver specialist

Nothing

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veryone knows that brown furniture is old fashioned and out of date right?

This extraordinary prejudice has been quoted over and over again in the decorative interiors trade for 2 decades. Extraordinary partly because nearly all furniture is made of wood and wood is brown.

As usual, the truth is more nuanced. Large scale, heavily carved Victorian dining room furniture certainly is, and may remain, very difficult to sell these days. This may be because a large number of the nation’s dining rooms have been incorporated into kitchen diners in keeping with 21st century living requirements.

The sheer variety of antique furniture makes any claim that it is all out of fashion seem daft. Aside from the minimalist designs of the mid-twentieth century, there exists old furniture in every permutation of decoration and style. Even the colour of old furniture can be greatly varied, with inlays of brass, dyed woods and other materials as well as the many figured, exotic and now hard to find timbers that were once routinely used. Add in the marble tops and ormolu fittings to be found on old pieces and the accusations of dull brownness become even harder to maintain.

There is no need to remind anyone paying attention that the quality of Georgian furniture is generally high. The fact that it still exists makes that point clear.

How many Ikea Billy bookcases will still be supporting books in 200 years time ?

I do not mean to be rude about good 20th century design, I am a fan and have several items of furniture in that category at home.

The secret to a beautiful and human interior scheme is to layer the old in with the new - or risk ending up with a sitting room that feels about as relaxing homely as an optician’s waiting room. n beaunashbath.com; 01225 334234

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LA TERRA R E STAU R A N T Mediterranean

We will be open for Valentine Day Dinner Monday 14th of February with a special four-course set menu : Drinks on arrival with canapés, followed by a four-course dinner • £45.00 per person We will be open on Mothers Day Lunch Sunday 27th of March offering a Sunday Roast

La Terra Restaurant 2 john street Bath BA1 2JL 01225 482070 • booking@laterra.co.uk • www.laterra.co.uk

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Jerusalem artichoke and celeriac soup, with black truffle oil and Jerusalem artichoke crisps

£6.80

Black garlic and cashew curd, salt baked beets, white chicory and beet top salad with a honey, chilli and clementine dressing

£7.10

Smoked Cornish mackerel pâté, served on toasted sourdough with a pickled cucumber and dill salad

£7.30

Braised beef shin and dill croquettes, served with a Waldorf salad and a Cropwell Bishop clue cheese dressing

£7.80

Crispy wonton scallops, marinated in coriander, mirin and light soy. Served with Sriracha kimchi and a chilli and garlic caramel dipping sauce

£7.90

Chickpea and quinoa panisses, charred and marinated Somerset halloumi, roasted cauliflower, pomegranate and chermoula

£18.20

A sweet and sour kombu and mushroom broth with glass noodles, pak choi, spring onion, shiitake, sprout tops, fresh herbs with a miso and lemon dressing

£18.90

Kedgeree made with Enderbys undyed smoked haddock and prawns in a leek and curry sauce.

Served with free-range egg and basmati rice

£21.40

Guinea fowl scarpariello, our take on the classic Italian-American recipe with sweet Italian sausage and peppadew peppers. Served with smoked paprika and spinach orzo

£22.10

Flat iron steak, pan fried medium rare in order to be at its best, served with chimichurri sauce, roasted shallot, watercress and chunky chips

£22.30

Ribeye steak, Café de Paris butter, mushrooms, watercress and chunky chips

£26.80

Fish of the day

Please ask

Forced Yorkshire rhubarb and stem ginger sorbet, served on a rhubarb compôte Piña colada brûlée on pineapple, lime and rum served with a coconut macaroon Dark chocolate mousse cake, white chocolate and lime leaf syllabub, toasted pecans and orange gel Banana and date parfait, butterscotch sauce, candied banana and granola Selection of seasonal cheeses, served with crackers and fruit chutney

£6.60 £6.90 £7.70 £7.70 £8.90

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RESTAURANT | REVIEW

La Terra 2 John St, Bath BA1 2JL; tel: 01225 482070; laterra.co.uk

Qual’ è il miglior ristorante Italiano di Bath? Head straight to the new restaurant on St John Street, advises Emma Clegg, who has recently been treated there to scallops, artichoke, rice and all things nice

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Italian eating etiquette, the courses on offer include Aperitivo (homemade Tuscan bread, focaccia, breadsticks, basil butter, dangerously delicious given what’s to come), Antipasti, Primi and Secondi.

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The panache and delicacy of the food here is a real revelation

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T

here’s a new Italian gastronomic experience in town – called La Terra it’s one to pay serious attention to.

First opened in November last year, it’s a collaboration between two Italians, restaurant manager Vito Scaduto and chef Alessandro Scola. The Bath food scene is intimately familiar to both. Most recently Vito implemented and oversaw a restructure at Clayton’s Kitchen (recommended as the top eating destination in Bath by the Evening Standard’s Best City Breaks in the UK guide) and it was here that he met and worked with Alessandro as head chef. Vito was also previously restaurant manager at The Bath Priory and the Three Gables in Bradford on Avon. Alessandro, who is from Lake Como in northern Italy, tells me he spent his childhood surrounded by people cooking real Italian food, including making fresh pasta with his grandma, and that he was destined to work as a chef. His aim at La Terra is to create the Italian tradition within a British product, with a strong emphasis on local produce.

The lights from the restaurant in St John Street – previously Firehouse Rotisserie – glow invitingly from the outside. It has been refurbished with a light touch, the main restaurant soft and welcoming with grey slab tables, wood panelling and a bold viridian wall, with the open kitchen at the back shining in stainless steel glory as the kitchen staff shift and chef behind it.

Served with a sparkling aperitivo, we quickly discovered the menu itself where the restaurant’s riches lie. Following traditional

For Antipasti arrived fresh Italian burrata, red endive, fig purée and pine nuts, and zuppa, a Jerusalem artichoke and chestnut soup with Tuscan toasted bread. This was not chosen as a safe option – I am partial to artichokes – and the actual dish performed way above the standard allure of a warming soup, with the mild nutty flavour of the artichoke blending smoothly with the chestnut. My next dish was leek and gorgonzola risotto with walnuts and white truffle oil from the Primi menu (see above centre) and I dare anyone not to be comforted by its warming, dwelling, flavoured textures.

My companion chose the pescato, grilled Brixham seabass with vegetable concasse and shellfish sauce and was seduced by the delicate flesh and mild, sweet flavour, served with swede and sage mashed potatoes.

Another option on the Antipasti menu was capesate – hand dived scallops, ricotta

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mousse, pistachio and shellfish sauce – and lo and behold the said scallop dish arrived courtesy of Vito for our delectation. I tend to avoid seafood after a reaction many years ago, so may not have chosen this independently, but the sweet, buttery flavours held me firmly in their lure.

Options for Dolce featured some Italian classics: tiramisu; vanilla panna cotta with pear compote; and eggnog mousse with blueberry and hazlenut praline. It was the lemon posset, lemon curd, yogurt and pine nut crumble (see above right) that settled itself in front of me, tantalising my tongue with its rich combinations of creamy and nutty, bitter and sweet. My companion went for Formaggi, with a choice of four cheeses – Taleggio from Lombardy, Pecorina al Fieno from Tuscany, Ubriaco Rosso from Veneto and Robiola from Piedmont – from which you could choose two or three, served with biscuits, grapes and wildflower honey.

Our food choices for two came to just over £100 (without alcohol), which I’d say was impressively good value for the fine dining experience to which we had been treated. The panache and delicacy of the food here is a real revelation, a diamond, as it were, hidden in St John Street; it’s not surprising giving the culinary experience of those running it, and I recommend a visit. n Sample prices: Antipasti – fresh Italian burrata £9; Primi – leek and gorgonzola risotto £16; Secondi – grilled Brixham catch of the day £24; Dolce – vanilla panna cotta £9

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COMMUNITY | FARMING

Crops for the community

Middle Ground Growers grow organically on a two-acre orchard and market garden in Bath. We talked to Head Grower Hamish Evans about how it all started, what it means for the community and his ambitions for the future You live on a solar-powered boat on the Kennet and Avon Canal.

What is life like on a canal boat, especially when it’s chilly?

I moved to live on my own canal boat when I was 16 – my first independent home. This invited me into a way of living that was closer to nature’s cycles, surrounded by a diverse and supportive community. I am still on a boat, eight years on, which is powered entirely by solar panels and a bicycle mechanism that moves the boat, so I don’t have an engine or any need for fossil fuels.

What I enjoy about living on the water is the everyday inspiration and excitement from being immersed in nature and getting to know new people as the community ebbs and flows along the canal. It’s a lifestyle choice, just like farming, and it comes with its own challenges: being off-grid and being responsible for my own waste, filling up the water tank every fortnight, and collecting firewood. Once I even ran out of power as I was in the middle of an online exam at university (I studied Social Sciences at the University of Bath and did much of my coursework from the boat rigged up to solar panels).

What is your background in Bath and what are your favourite natural areas to explore in the region?

I’ve lived in Bath all my life – I was born in Combe Down and moved around rented houses until Mum and I decided to move onto canal boats for a simpler and more natural life with real community. Living on a boat and farming here has completely changed my perspective of place, shifting focus away from the built environment and towards the ancient roots of the bio region itself, including its woodlands, soils,

bird life and water. It is the sacred city of water, and yet our waters have been mostly polluted, and the abundance of springs is largely ignored or taken for granted.

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Our farm is powered by the sun, and the tools are powered by our hands, legs or electric batteries charged from the solar barn

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What was the idea behind your business Middle Ground Growers?

When I finished school I left for two years of travelling and working on organic farms across the world, exploring the best (and worst) models of ecological growing, community organising and sustainable living. This trip took me to the pioneering organic farms of New Zealand and to the ancient indigenous farming practices of the Middle East, India and South East Asia where I learnt about agroecology, food forests and permaculture.

On my return to the UK I volunteered in community growing projects such as Dry Arch Growers and started as a grower at Avonleigh Organic Orchards. In 2020 I quit my paid work to focus on establishing my own market garden enterprise on 1.5 acres of leased land in Bathampton, initially selling a few lettuces to the local shop and then building up to the 120 weekly veg boxes we are supplying this year. We also supply wholesale to restaurants and local outlets who champion our organic produce to those wishing to eat a regenerative and sustainable diet, grown locally and delivered by bike.

What does ecological market gardening mean?

We tick all the boxes for organic growing such as no fertilisers or pesticides, and yet we believe that truly sustainable growing must go a step further. Organic food can still be grown in industrial-scale mono cultures (one crop variety) using deep tillage, a harmful cultivation practice which destroys soil health. Ecological market gardening is the cultivation of diverse crops for local communities, grown in a way which actively improves biodiversity, regenerates soil health and sequesters carbon. Not only this, but the business practice must mirror the growing, so we deliver only by bike and source our 46 TheBATHMagazine

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materials ethically and locally, ideally second-hand and upcycled. Our farm is powered by the sun, and the tools are powered by our hands, legs or electric batteries charged from the solar barn.

Tell us about your vegetable boxes.

We grow over 60 vegetable types – diversity is key to ecosystem functioning, community health and business resilience. We also offer eggs, apple juice, vinegar, fruits, herbs, salads, berries and we are developing mushroom cultivation systems. All this fresh produce goes into seasonal veg boxes, delivered to the communities of Bath on our four cargo bikes every Friday. This year we are growing to cater for 120 veg boxes weekly, plus wholesale supply to over eight local outlets. There is no such thing as a typical box as the seasonal range is excitingly huge, but a summer box could include tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, courgette, carrot, radish, beetroot, onions, beans, blackcurrants and plums. A winter box could include potatoes, garlic, onion, butternut squash, broccoli, cabbage, kale, apples and pears.

Do you cook for yourself with your organic produce?

We cook up big meals on the farm for the crew on a rota – this year we had six growers and the lunch-time ‘cooking from the land’ rota got quite deliciously competitive! We also share what we cook at home with the veg box community on a WhatsApp group where anyone on the box scheme can input ideas and recipes – we learn a lot from it too. It also creates a great sense of community around local food and regenerative diets.

Do you eat meat and what is your view of the meat industry?

We need to cut down meat consumption massively and eliminate factory farming if my generation are to inhabit a healthy earth to steward. However I believe the vegan debate has become too polarised – there are plenty of non-sustainable vegan diets on imported junk food and plenty of regenerative omnivorous diets which consume grass-fed, wild or regenerative meat products in moderation. After years of being vegetarian and vegan, I now choose to eat occasional meat from local and regenerative sources to supplement my home-grown plant-focused diet.

How do you cope with wastage?

Chickens! Our chooks are the true bosses of the farm and manage our fertility, pest control and food ‘waste’. Waste is just an unutilised input into another cycle – the small amount of surplus veg and greens we have are fed to chickens in the orchard who turn this into the richest organic fertiliser for the fruit trees and our composting systems.

Ecological farms are more productive per acre of land. Why is this?

The majority of the world’s food is produced by small-scale organic farms (although they’re just called ‘farms’ in the east and the south, where most of the world lives). Despite less land in cultivation, these farms are able to produce a diversity of crops without depleting soil, applying chemicals or using heavy machinery.

On a market garden scale with hand tools and healthy soil, we’re able to plant crops up to 10 times closer than on an industrial farm where spacings are based on huge machinery and depleted soil. The food is more nutrient-dense and higher quality, and we can deliver to our community within minutes. This compares to months/years in plastic packages on a refrigerated shipping container – how inefficient is that? We also stack functions by growing veg between rows (‘alleys’) of perennial crops such as fruit trees and berry bushes. And we are beginning to grow more staples like nut trees as an additional yield grown between the veg crops in an agroforestry system.

How important is the community to your enterprise?

It is written into our business and farm plan to grow food for community. This is a symbiotic relationship – our veg box community provides us with a livelihood through their trust and subscriptions, while we provide them with their weekly produce and food. We are aiming to build community resilience, linking up producers, consumers, restaurants and shops so that we can all meet our needs within a flourishing biosphere.

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How can people start to renew their connections with the land?

We live in the most connected world ever, through online technology and globalisation – and yet we live among the highest ever rates of loneliness, depression, screen addiction, eco-anxiety and nature disconnection. Access to nature is one thing – difficult due to UK land ownership inequalities – and willingness to access it is another, in a world of disappearing land-based livelihoods and urbanisation.

However, we each connect to the land three times a day when we choose what to eat. We can have a positive impact on the land that we eat from, as we know where the food comes come from and have a direct relationship to the grower. We want to re-engage young people with the joys of working on the land and growing food together, through our volunteer days, courses and traineeship programmes.

Your business is run for people not for profit. How does this work?

It’s fairly simple – 100% of our income is re-invested in the land and community. This includes paying the growers a living wage, training

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Livi Rhodes, Marcus Rees, Xavier Hamon, Hamish Evans, Sammy Elmore and Naomi Lander

new growers for a land-based livelihood, and improving the ethics of our growing practices with every year of income and experience. We don’t see economic and ecological aims as trade-offs but as synergies – for example the greater our soil health the greater our income and customer satisfaction due to the quality and abundance of produce.

Can you explain your aspiration to create a flagship farm project?

We are creating an ecological farm for Bath, to feed over 400 families with weekly produce and supply over 20 local outlets. Our trainees from last year are also starting new market gardens to supply their communities, so the ‘upscaling’ is also about pollinating and scaling out so more small farms can flourish.

We are building the new farm project on 15.5 acres in Weston, Bath.

This will include a diverse fruit and nut orchard, with acres of no-till vegetables grown between the tree rows in an agroforestry system. We will also restore wetland, create wildflower meadow and reforest large areas of the farm through coppice, willow and nut production. We are implementing a model no-till market garden and multiple food forests around the site. We have raised £95,000 on Crowdfunder and will be adding this to our veg box income to cover the full start-up costs for this ecological farm. Fruit trees are going in this week!

We believe that all of Bath’s fresh food supply can come from local, renewable farms which are integrated into the community. It wasn’t long ago that Bath was surrounded by market gardens, and the pandemic has unmasked how insecure our food system is when supermarkets run low from fragile global supply chains. And yet the solutions lie right beneath our feet. n middlegroundgrowers.com; crowdfunder.co.uk/ecological-farm-for-bath

The Community Farm in Chew Valley

OTHER SUSTAINABLE LOCAL COMMUNITY PROJECTS The Community Farm is a not-for-profit social enterprise based in the Chew Valley, just outside Bath. It is a naturefriendly, organic farm, working with a network of producers who share its ethics, to supply fresh, local and organic food to hundreds of households throughout Bath, Bristol, The Chew Valley, Frome and Weston-Super-Mare. Any surplus made is reinvested into its own community programmes and to fund volunteering sessions, wellbeing courses and events at The Farm. It also helps to manage the land in a way that’s beneficial for all life. All members of the local community are welcome to visit The Farm – whether you’re interested in learning, therapy or play, there are plenty of opportunities to get involved for individuals and for groups. thecommunityfarm.co.uk Grow Batheaston is a community group, soon to become a charity, which arose during the first lockdown from a group of residents wanting to improve the village. Its four aims are to strengthen community, create food security, encourage biodiversity and promote sustainable living.

The group has set up junior and walking football, adult netball, and has launched an Art Trail for the village. It has also planted over 40 fruit trees around the Elmhurst estate, has given out free seedling boxes to encourage people to grow their own food, planted 500 native trees across the meadows, created areas of wildflower meadow, set up various clubs including bee, wildlife, hen, and wellbeing clubs. The group is about to create a forest garden at the back section of the secret garden off the riverside car park in Batheaston and launch a pop-up market to promote local suppliers and producers. growbatheaston.co.uk

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Discover our

newsletters

Stay well informed. Stay well entertained.

Our weekly newsletter, The Weekend Edition is a specially curated mini guide to help you get the best of your time in Bath.

Bulletins of news, commentary and culture, as well as lifestyle ideas, things to do, great reads and so much more delivered direct and free to your inbox just in time for the weekend

It’s like a mini Bath Magazine!

Subscribe for free at:

www.thebathmag.co.uk

Are you retired from full time employment?

Would you like to meet new people and learn new skills, or join others in a creative or leisure activity?

Try Bath u3a!

OPEN MORNING Thu. 10th March 2022, 10.30am - 12.30 Venue: The Pavillion, North Parade, BA2 4EU www.u3ainbath.org.uk

Facebook: u3a in Bath

Our Monthly Talks Monthly Talks are usually held on the first Thursday in the month (except in August) and start at 10.30am. Doors open at 9.45am for coffee. Admission is free for members but a donation of £2 for non-members. If you join U3A in Bath at the meeting then your admission fee is refunded.

Talks take place at:

The Pavillion, North Parade Road, Bath BA2 4EU

Upcoming Talks 3rd February 2022 FACING THE DIFFICULT TRUTHS OF THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY 3rd March 2022 THE ART OF THE STONEMASON (AND CONSERVATOR) IN THE 21st CENTURY 7th April 2022 FROM BARROW TO BAGHDAD AND BACK AGAIN 5th May 2022 LANDSCAPE DESIGN IN AN AGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

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CITY | NEWS

CITYNEWS A GARDEN SANCTUARY Estate agent Hamptons are the principal sponsor of a Garden Sanctuary at the 2022 RHS Chelsea Flower Show partnering with award-winning garden designer, Tony Woods from Garden Club London and in collaboration with Koto Design, an architectural and design studio. The garden will create a tranquil and sensory indoor and outdoor space to relax and unwind and will be unveiled at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show from 23-28 May. To complete the scene, Koto Design have created an iconic carbon neutral garden cabin nestled into the garden setting as a space to read, work or just sit and enjoy. brhs.org.uk/showsevents; hamptons.co.uk

THE CRANE IS NAMED Following a close run public vote, the tower crane helping to build the Dyson Cancer Centre at the Royal United Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (RUH) finally has a name – Crane Austen.

Patients, staff and the local community all put forward suggestions for the 40m crane which is a prominent feature on the RUH site. Nicola Cretney from Frome came up with the ultimate winning suggestion, and she explained: “When I saw the RUH was asking for names, 'Crane Austen' popped into my head without me giving it any real thought. I love Jane Austen novels and know she has a strong connection with Bath and I liked the play on words!” ruh.nhs.uk/DysonCancerCentre

FUNDING FOR ULTRAFAST BROADBAND Bath-based Truespeed has secured a second tranche of funding from Aviva Investors, the global asset management business of Aviva PLC. The £100-million investment will help Truespeed accelerate the roll-out of its ultrafast, gigabit-capable full fibre network to more homes and businesses across urban, semi-rural and ultra-rural areas of south west England. It follows an initial £75-million investment made by Aviva Investors in 2017.

A full fibre infrastructure provider and ISP, Truespeed’s mission is to provide ultrafast, ultra-reliable broadband to the south west of England, helping to level up the digital capabilities of the region and acting as a catalyst for local businesses and communities struggling with substandard broadband. truespeed.com

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NEW MANAGING PARTNER South-West based law firm Mogers Drewett has appointed Sean McDonough as its new managing partner. Sean’s appointment comes at an exciting time for the firm as it starts to implement a new business plan, which will see the firm enhance both its client and people experience whilst focussing on becoming a leading provider of legal and financial planning services across its region.

Sean McDonough states “I am proud and excited to lead the team at Mogers Drewett through its next phase of growth and development. As a firm, we pride ourselves on being dedicated to serving the needs of our clients, and that dedication will increasingly involve us providing a more diverse range of legal and non-legal services.” mogersdrewett.com

CHARITABLE PARTNERSHIP Local business Graham & Green have chosen a new charity partner, Jamie’s Farm, who they will support for the next three years. Jamie Feilden's farm acts as a catalyst for change, enabling vulnerable young people to thrive academically, socially and emotionally.

Jamie's Farm was set up in 2005 by Jamie Feilden and his mother with the vision of making vulnerable young people better equipped to thrive during secondary school years and beyond. The programme is designed to improve behaviour, self-esteem and confidence in their ability to achieve. Combining farming, family and therapy, the team have helped more than 9,500 children find a renewed sense of purpose and happiness when all the other odds were stacked against them.

Graham & Green will be found volunteering on-site as a team, joining fundraising efforts, and offering a monthly donation for the next three years, in which time Jamie's Farm hopes to support over 6,000 children. grahamandgreen.co.uk; jamiesfarm.org.uk

WALK TO SUPPORT Join Dorothy House on 13 February for the ‘Men’s Walk To Support’.

This eight-mile walk is an opportunity for guys aged 12+ to join together and raise vital funds to help Dorothy House provide crucial end-of-life care for our local community. The walk starts at 12 noon from Dorothy House, Winsley, and will follow along the canal and finish at Bath Pavilion – just in time to watch the Six Nations England v Italy match at 3pm. Best of all, you get to celebrate your epic achievement with a well-earned free pint and food in the Pavilion at the end! dorothyhouse.org.uk

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Leadership Skills for Tomorrow’s World

Q: What is mediation?

How can it benefit me?

University of Bristol offers part-time Masters in Strategy, Change and Leadership for senior professionals

The University of Bristol is offering a part-time Masters programme in Strategy, Change and Leadership. This part-time programme is for aspiring senior managers and is designed to fit around the demands of a busy job.

Today’s leaders are facing the most challenging operating circumstances for a generation. The necessary skills and competencies have shifted from the motivation of employees in a buoyant economy to change management and strategic leadership in this landscape of budget cuts, increased hours, more sophisticated technology and leaner workforces. Few organisations have escaped these changes whether they are in the private, public or not-for-profit sectors.

The University of Bristol has recognised this and designed a bespoke Masters degree in Strategy, Change and Leadership aimed at providing senior managers with the tools and techniques they require in order to navigate their organisations through such demanding times.

Programme Director, Helen Ballard says “I am delighted that we are able to offer this type of programme. Excellent leadership is critical in this challenging climate, and high performing organisations are recognising the need to further develop their managers. This practical Masters degree will offer a return on investment from day one.”

To find out more about the programme, come along to our open evening at the University and Literary Club on Tuesday 15 March from 6pm – 8pm. Please contact Cheralyn Dark for details: mgmt-scl@bristol.ac.uk

Mediation is a process used to try and resolve any issues that parties may have as a result of a relationship breakdown. These issues may involve arrangements regarding children, child maintenance and finances.

A trained mediator meets with both parties to discuss, with the aim of resolving, any issues that the parties cannot resolve between them. It is not essential that both parties meet with the mediator at the same time, however this usually is the most proactive way of conducting mediation.

The four principles of mediation are impartiality, confidentiality, that it is voluntary and “without prejudice”. As mediators are impartial, they cannot give advice to the parties but are able to provide information.

The aim of mediation is to give the parties control over the decision making.

The mediator cannot make the parties do anything which is against their wishes. Other benefits of mediation are that there is less conflict than in court proceedings and it is quicker and cheaper than court. Mediation is particularly useful where there are children involved as the process can be less upsetting and damaging for a child than the court process.

Before parties can initiate court proceedings in relation to finances or children, there is a requirement that they attend mediation unless they fall within an exception i.e. there are risks posed to either party or a child or there is evidence of domestic violence.

If the parties are unable to resolve the issues during mediation, the mediator will sign a form which confirms this. The parties then have discretion over how they proceed with matters which may require them obtaining independent legal advice.

If the parties are able to resolve the issues during mediation, the decisions are not automatically binding on the parties. The parties can apply to court for the decisions to be made legally binding.

If you are interested in how Mediation may benefit your family please contact Victoria Cobham of Mogers Drewett on 01225 750 000 or email Victoria.cobham@mogersdrewett.com.

For further information about the course please visit: www.bristol.ac.uk/msc-leadership Or scan with your phone camera THEBATHMAG.CO.UK

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BOOKS

Getting-to-know-you reads

We love discovering other people’s stories. So we asked Saskia Hayward at Topping & Co. to recommend six biographies and autobiographies – her choices all explore experiences of cultural or national identity Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao The cover is striking. An enigmatic figure – a woman dressed in black with kohl-lined eyes – stands in a desert city.

The woman is Sanmao, a Taiwanese explorer who travelled to the Western Sahara territory in the 1970s. Hugely popular in China, this is the first translation of her stories into English and, featuring everything from quicksand to cursed necklaces, they’re straight from an adventure book.

Sanmao captures snapshots of life in a fascinating and isolated part of the world, rendered all the more vivid through her focus on domesticity, threatened occasionally by moments of intense violence.

She lacks the arrogance which can sometimes permeate travel writing. Any romanticisation of otherness is dispelled by her compassion and friendships with the local Sahrawi people. Above all she is an inimitable companion, a presence so warm, charismatic, infuriating and funny that it’s impossible not to fall in love with her and her love of life. Bloomsbury, £10.99 Zami: A New Spelling of my Name by Audre Lorde “In the recognition of loving lies an answer to despair.”

Zami by Audre Lorde was without doubt the best book I read last year. It’s described as a “biomythography”, a term which may distract from what is an incredibly readable, straightforward narrativization of the writer’s youth.

Opening with her childhood as a young, almost blind Black girl in 1930s Harlem, the story follows her life right up until she moves to Mexico in her early twenties. We witness the creation of one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century, the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” She recasts the experiences that shaped her in gentle, embodied prose, revealing an interior world that’s thoughtful, sensual, and moving. Lorde’s writing has the remarkable ability to transmit the sense of strength, warmth, and power that emanates from her. This stayed with me long after I finished reading it.

Penguin Classics, £9.99 Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay Bessie Smith is in part a biography of the extraordinary blues singer and in part a memoir from the former Scots Makar Jackie Kay. Kay weaves the threads of own life story, growing up in Glasgow with white adoptive parents who loved the blues, into the tapestry of Smith’s extraordinary life. The result is an intimate and lyrical love letter to Smith’s music and her articulation of 52 TheBATHMagazine

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women’s lives and pain – as well as a testament to its remarkable power to this day. Faber, £9.99 Subtly Worded by Teffi Teffi, born into a wealthy St Petersburg family in 1872, lived as a part of Russian cultural elite until she fled the revolution in 1919, eventually settling in Paris. She’s already known in Russia, especially as a writer of short stories, but recent translations of her work into English are gaining her the international recognition she deserves. Subtly Worded is a collection of stories, mostly fiction, but it includes some remarkable autobiographical writings, most notably her meeting with Rasputin. He is a character “firmly and vividly… etched into my memory, as if with a fine blade.” Pushkin Press, £10.99 Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner In 2018, Michelle Zauner – best known as the lead singer of the experimental American pop band Japanese Breakfast – composed an essay for the New Yorker in which she detailed her experiences of grief following the death of both her mother and aunt to cancer. Zauner details her experience of grief, which “comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary,” like seeing a Korean grandmother eating noodles or a child grabbing a packet of ppeongtwigi.

In her memoir, she expands on her complex relationship with her mother, and the link connecting her mourning and food. This link is solidified in the space of the H Mart, an American supermarket chain specialising in Asian food, which becomes a temple to house her grief.

Zauner describes beautifully the talismanic power of food and cooking – a way of connecting to her Korean heritage – as the primary love language between her and her mother. Macmillan, £16.99 Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi “Things were one way, and then they were another. I was someone, then I became someone else.”

Free is the recent memoir by Lea Ypi, professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. Ypi grew up in Albania, and the memoir charts her coming of age against a country transitioning from an incredibly isolated communist state to a democratic nation.

She brings to life the surreality of a shifting national identity as witnessed through a child’s eyes. She was a child endlessly trying to make sense of the world, while being fed half-truths in coded language. Suddenly, in 1990, she was confronted with the collapse of a regime whose ideology underpinned her entire reality, right down to the definition of freedom. Lea Ypi joins us at the bookshop to discuss the book on 9 March. Allen Lane, £20 n toppingbooks.co.uk

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ocl A C C O U N TA N C Y

141 Englishcombe Lane, Bath BA2 2EL Tel: 01225 445507

www.oclaccountancy.com

A change is coming, with a new CGT deadline for separating couples The government has announced that it will change the law to correct a major tax injustice, so reducing the pressure on separating couples to settle ownership of their assets quickly to avoid a gains tax (CGT) bill.

Generally, married couples and civil partners are in a privileged position when it comes to capital gains tax (CGT) planning, as one spouse/partner can transfer an asset to the other without it being an event for CGT purposes. If for example one spouse is thinking of selling shares that would create a tax liability because they have used their own CGT exemption elsewhere, but their spouse still has an unused exemption, they can transfer the shares to that spouse who in turn can sell them and use their exemption to reduce / cancel the CGT. However, this possibility is only available until the end of the tax year in which a couple is married or in a civil partnership and they are living together. HMRC treats a couple as not living together from the date they permanently separate.

Therefore if a couple separate at the beginning of March, they have just a month to sort their affairs and transfer assets between themselves to avoid CGT. After the end of the tax year (5th April) if one transfers an asset to the other it will be treated as if it were a sale at the asset’s market value to a third party and the gain is taxable.

Most couples are understandably unaware of this tax trap and it can be overlooked at a time when their lives are being substantially disrupted. By the time they have organised their separation it may be too late to reorganise ownership of the assets without a CGT bill.

The good news is that the government has signalled that a change will be made to extend the time separating couples have to organise their lives and transfer the assets; a suggestion is that the period should be extended until the end of the tax year following the one in which separation occurs. No date has been given, but the news is welcome.

Until the system changes, couples going through difficulties should remember that if they separate near the end of the tax year they will be under pressure to reorganise ownership of any assets they own to avoid a CGT bill.

For tax saving tips contact us – call Marie Sheldrake, Matt Bryant or Samantha Taylor on 01225 445507

Call Marie Sheldrake, Matt Bryant or Samantha Taylor on 01225 445507 to arrange a no-obligation meeting

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BOOK REVIEW CITY | |INTERIORS

On a Pedestal: toppling statues

Black Lives Matter has seen public statues coming under frontline debate. This hit close to home as Bristol’s Colston statue was toppled into the harbour, watched by the world. Daisy Game reviews Roger Lytollis’ book on the subject

Colston’s deposed statue on display at M-Shed last year – shown horizontally, there was no pedestal

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sculptors Graham Ibbeson and Antony Gormley – and snippets of statue-side conversation: “Rod Stewart? You think Rod Stewart was in the Beatles?” Lyollis overhears one incensed member of the public shriek at his clueless companion whilst standing beside Andy Edwards’ tribute to the band. On a Pedestal reads like a traveljournal of sorts: a well-known name stuck here; a meditation on pigeons tucked in there. It’s light, breezy and amusing.

Lytollis doesn’t only focus his attention on the past: he also looks to the statues of today and tomorrow, considering how our attitude toward and appetite for them has changed. “There’s not many politicians going up, is there?” Graham Ibbeson wryly observes in part one of the ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ chapters. The statues of today, Lytollis notes, are far more likely to be of celebrity status than they are to be of political character. A Boris Johnson statue? Perhaps not.

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On a Pedestal ... is about who we love to celebrate, who we want to punish, and who we want to see immortalised

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R

oger Lytollis’ On A Pedestal is part essay collection, part travelogue-romp. Hopping between Britain’s towns and cities – from Bristol to London, up through Liverpool and toward the more northerly reaches of Glasgow – Lytollis explores the history of Britain’s statues: those we love and those we hate; those we smile at and those we avoid making eye contact with; those we crown with traffic cone headwear – and those we pull from their plinths, drag to the water’s edge, and plunge into the depths of a murky Bristolian harbour.

To put it mildly, Edward Colston had it coming. Deputy Governor of the Royal African Company (a 17th-century organisation which moved slaves from West Africa to the plantations of the Caribbean and America), Colston was responsible for the transport of over 84,000 African men, women and children and the deaths of 20,000.

To the sculptors of the 19th century, however, such things were hardly relevant: Edward Colston had been something of a philanthropist, hadn’t he? Surely his contributions to Bristol’s hospitals and schools, many of which still bear his name, earned him a gold star – or, at the very least, a bronze statue? And so it was that Colston came to be cast in metal, dubbed one of Bristol’s “most virtuous and wise sons” by a plinth-stuck-plaque, and erected for all to see at Bristol’s harbourside. Until 2020, that is – when, following the murder of George Floyd and the surge in the Black Lives Matter movement – Colston was brought down from on high with globally recognised aplomb.

Published in the wake of Colston’s de-plinthing, 2021’s On a Pedestal responds to the complex subject of statue-toppling with calm sensitivity. The central debate is whether the removal of a statue is “airbrushing history”, as cultural secretary Oliver Dowden suggests, or rather the only way to rectify any wilfully ignorant idolisation of individuals like Colston.

Lytollis maintains a helpful distance from his topic: offering a birdseye view of these “controversial statues” and the debate surrounding them, without drilling too far down into any particular camp. At a time when media coverage on the subject often has an agenda to push, it’s refreshing to find a text that encourages the reader to ask important questions, without demanding that they immediately come up with the important answers. The book is a beginners-friendly guide, welcoming its readers into the fold as curious bystanders, as opposed to die-hard believers.

The text is well researched, and detail rich: chocablock with dates, petition statistics and quotations. But, true to ex-journalist form (Lytollis has previously written for national newspapers and magazines), On a Pedestal’s author prevents his prose from stagnating through the use of varied reportage tactics, sprinkling the book with a selection of interviews – Lytollis sits down to chat with

The way in which members of the public respond to – and interact with – statues is of particular interest to Lytollis. In a chapter on musically inspired idols, the writer recalls watching a gentleman educate his wide-eyed, stroller-sat companion whilst walking past Edwards’ (aforementioned) statue of The Fab Four: “Paul, George, Ringo, John”, the passerby observes aloud. A few hundred miles to the south, and Lytollis stands nearby as a friendly Londoner murmers a “Hello, Amy Winehouse” to the pop-singer’s Camden-based tribute. It’s strangely touching to read about statues somehow giving adults the permission to become children at play again, pausing to have a quick chat with a favourite metal figurine.

Each of On a Pedestal’s chapters stand happily alone, so any reader looking to cherry-pick can do so freely. Art enthusiasts can hear about the Angel of the North from Gormley himself, bookworms might enjoy Lytollis’ comprehensive tour of fictional characters in statue form, and for any animal lovers reading, there is an entire chapter dedicated to cast-iron-critters. But by committing to the entire read, one gets to enjoy the running theme which Lytollis has subtly stitched throughout: who do we love, and why? Because, like most successful non-fiction writing, On a Pedestal is about statues – without being about statues. It’s about the good and the bad in people, and how the two intertwine; it’s about who we love to celebrate, who we want to punish, and who we want to see immortalized. It is, as Lytollis himself correctly asserts, “a book more blood than bronze”.

Reading On a Pedestal on an idle Sunday afternoon, I’m tempted to put it down, head onto the streets of my beloved Bristol, and do some statuegazing myself. Somehow, I don’t think Roger Lytollis would mind.

On A Pedestal by Roger Lytollis (£20) is available from all good bookshops.

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EDUCATION

EDUCATION NEWS SAVING NEW BEACON BOOKS Students at Taunton School have helped to save the only independent black publisher and bookseller in the UK from closure.

The students contributed £110 to the national Crowdfunding campaign ‘Save New Beacon Bookshop’ by organising a bake sale and a raffle of two books written by black writers. New Beacon Books, founded in 1966 and specialising in Black British, Caribbean, African, African-American and Asian literature, has been pivotal to the growth of the Black Education Movement. The shop faced imminent closure last year; however, a Crowdfunding campaign saw almost £85,000 raised in jus eight days to save the shop. The school, which has students from over 40 different nationalities, is looking to grow its relationship with the bookshop. tauntonschool.co.uk

SUCCESS FOR SPORTING SCHOLARS University of Bath sporting scholar Orlando Bailey has been named in the senior England Rugby squad for the first time as preparations begin for the 2022 Guinness Six Nations.

International Development with Economics student Bailey, who is supported by a Matrix Scholarship, has been in fine form for Bath Rugby this season and a regular starter in the Premiership at fly-half. He is among six uncapped players named by Eddie Jones in a 36-strong England squad that will meet in Brighton on 24 January for a five-day training camp ahead of the opening Six Nations match at Murrayfield against Scotland on 5 February. Bailey has previous international experience at U20 level and was a key figure in England’s U20 Six Nations Grand Slam last season. rugby.teambath.com

JAMAICA ON ICE The Jamaican bobsleigh team have been at the University of Bath this week to finalise their preparations for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Pilot Shanwayne Stephens and brakemen Nimroy Turgott, Ashley Watson and Matthew Wekpe have been honing their all-important start on the UK’s only outdoor push-start track, based on the University campus, and have also been working out in the Team Bath Gym and Fitness Centre. Jamaica will contest the four-man event at next month’s Olympic Games for the first time since 1998, having famously made their debut at Calgary 1988 in a race which inspired the Disney film Cool Runnings. teambath.com/Beijing2022; teambath.com/bobsleigh 56 TheBATHMagazine

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Wimbleball Lake

Explore the south west lakes

Camping, walking, fishing, sailing, kayaking, paddleboarding, watching wildlife and exploring scenic retreats by the shores of a lake offer many options for a magical spring break for visitors to the south west

W

hether your passion is watersports, angling, walking, cycling or simply enjoying nature with loved ones, you’ll find the perfect setting at South West Lakes’ picturesque locations in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and on Exmoor this spring.

You can choose to escape everyday life at the majestic Wimbleball on Exmoor (less than a two-hour drive from Bath), the idyllic Roadford on the edge of Dartmoor and Cornish lakes including Upper Tamar near Bude, Siblyback near Liskeard and Stithians near Redruth. Hike along the rolling hills of Dartmoor, cycle around the edge of Bodmin Moor or admire Exmoor’s impressive dark skies.

With footpaths and cycle trails to explore, woodlands to discover and play areas to enjoy, everyone can get involved and benefit from being outdoors. It’s your outdoors – so go and explore this spring and stay at one of South West Lakes’ five lakeside campsites.

Wimbleball Lake, Exmoor Nestled within the rolling hills of Exmoor National Park, this 530acre lake has something for the whole family to enjoy. The familyfriendly campsite offers five bell tents and two wooden camping pods as well as a choice of hard standings, electric and non-electric pitches

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for tents, motorhomes and caravans. You can also hire a fire pit, purchase wood and charcoal made onsite, rent a telescope and discover why Exmoor National Park is a designated Dark Skies reserve.

You can explore Exmoor, walk to Haddon Hill from Wimbleball and see if you can spot the great range of wildlife at the lake, such as the iconic Exmoor ponies and deer. The closest town to Wimbleball is Dulverton but it's also worth venturing slightly further to explore the popular towns and villages of Tiverton, Porlock, Minehead, Watchet, Wiviliscombe, Taunton and Wellington. Campsite opens 2 March.

Roadford Lake, Devon Surrounded by countryside, and nestled amongst the beautiful surroundings of the Wolf Valley with the dramatic tors of Dartmoor as its backdrop, Roadford is the perfect location for your next family escape. The scenic campsite offers a choice of spacious electric and non-electric pitches for tents, caravans and motorhomes as well as a bell tent called Bertie. A new play area will be opening in the spring.

Roadford is the perfect base to explore the spectacular Dartmoor National Park. Enjoy a day trip out and discover some more of South West Lakes’ Dartmoor sites including Burrator, Fernworthy, Meldon, Avon Dam, Kennick, Tottiford and Trenchford. Within easy reach of

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Hike along the rolling hills of Dartmoor, cycle around the edge of Bodmin Moor or admire Exmoor’s impressive dark skies

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Fly fishing at Siblyback Lake

Roadford are the historic towns of Launceston and Okehampton and some of the best beaches in Devon and Cornwall are less than an hour away. Campsite opens 18 February.

Siblyback Lake, Cornwall With the striking backdrop of Bodmin Moor, a designated International Dark Sky Landscape, Siblyback Lake lies within the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Right next to the lake, the small campsite has a choice of electric and non-electric pitches for tents and motorhomes.

A must-do on your visit to Bodmin Moor is Dozmary Pool, where, according to legend, King Arthur rowed out to the Lady of the Lake and received the sword Excalibur. Campsite opens 1 May. Stithians Lake, Cornwall Surrounded by farmland and moorland, Stithians is the largest inland water in West Cornwall. Stithians Lake’s family friendly campsite has a choice of electric and non-electric pitches. If glamping is more your style, you can stay in one of the luxury bell tents, furnished with comfy double beds and the option of camp beds for up to two children. Everything you need will be in your tent, including storage for clothes, bean bags, fairy lights, lighting and a charging point for your gadgets. Each bell tent has an undercover outdoor cooking area with table and seating. Just pack your duvet and pillows and you’re all set!

Cornish landmarks the Minack Theatre, Glendurgan Gardens and Pendennis Castle are all within easy reach. Campsite opens 1 April.

Roadford Lake

Kayaking at Roadford

Tamar Lakes, Cornwall Tucked away on the Cornwall and Devon border, Tamar Lakes is bordered by peaceful countryside. The campsite has a choice of electric and non-electric pitches for tents, caravans and motorhomes. Or you can choose the onsite four-berth glamping pod – furnished with two bunk beds, a table and chairs, cutlery and a cool-box – which is perfect for those not wanting to carry lots of camping gear. There’s a solar powered light, but no other electricity supply – so it’s not really cheating, right?

The Cornish coastal town of Bude, with its sea pool and popular beaches, is nearby. Under an hour’s drive from the lake are Dartmoor National Park and the ever-popular beach resort of Newquay. Campsite opens 1 April.

Activities on offer Whichever of the five lakes you choose to stay near, you’ll find an actionpacked programme of adventurous activities. There’s something for all ages and abilities to enjoy, from stand up paddleboarding, canoeing and kayaking to sailing and windsurfing. You can hire a variety of watersports equipment, launch your own craft or learn something new by taking part in an activity session. At Wimbleball and Roadford, you can also enjoy an aerial adventure on the high ropes course or hit the bullseye on the archery range.

If you would rather recharge and escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life, then you can simply sit back, relax and enjoy nature’s soundtrack. Take your own bikes and don’t forget your walking shoes so you can explore the lakes on foot. There is a plethora of wildlife to discover and plenty of quiet spots to enjoy a good book or play some outdoor games. The lakeside cafés also provide the perfect spot to refuel after a fun-filled day at the lake.

And for those who enjoy a spot of fishing, South West Lakes offers 26 different waters for both coarse and trout angling.

Camping at Tamar Lakes

Find out more: swlakestrust.org.uk/activities 2010 THEBATHMAG.CO.UK| NOVEMbEr THEBATHMAG.CO.UK | jaNuary 2020

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I watched two girls approach each other from opposite sides of a bridge, whilst stuck in traffic. Both wrapped in warm winter clothes on a rather dull day. The closer they got to each other the more their expressions changed.

Was it the recognition of a friend, that wonderful human connection?

Maybe they were new acquaintances or old friends but watching the way their faces lit up, smiles beaming, and eyes creased at the corners did something to me in that moment…It made me spontaneously upturn my mouth to form that same smile and gave me a sudden warm flutter across my heart.

Witnessing this scene made me to think about the question why do we smile? I know I smile at lovely, funny, sweet things, puppies etc., etc. and when I do it makes me feel good. I suppose it is like a dog wagging its tail, but there are so many other feelings that go along with a smile. It could be pure excitement, fun, happiness, love it could be a sexy smile in an exchange of passion.

So, what’s the science behind a smile and why do we do it?

The process is simple...

1) Endorphins are released by the brain in response to a positive stimulation.

2) The brain also instructs our face muscles to contract and grin.

3) The contracting muscles send a message to the brain that ays, “Wow, we’re feeling wonderful.”

4) Our brain then releases even more endorphins, filling us with more joy!

As a result, we get this positive feedback cycle.

The first scientist to successfully recognize and report about this facial feedback theory was Charles Darwin. This idea proposed that tensing our face muscles could modify our emotional states. It was discovered that the muscles inside the cheeks (zygomaticus major muscle) and around the eye socket (orbicularis oculi muscle) were critical in enhancing a person's mood. So even faking or forcing a smile lowers stress and increases happiness. If you’re having trouble forcing your facial muscles to contract into a smile, try biting on a pencil. It’s virtually the same motion as smiling, and it sends the same mood-altering information to the brain.

Don’t panic if you think it's difficult to fake a smile. All you have to do is be in the company of someone who smiles. According to a Swedish study, it is difficult to maintain a frown when looking at people who are beaming at you. Smiling spreads like wildfire! Seeing other people smile stimulates our mirror neurons, causing us to suppress our facial muscle control and smile. So, “You smile, I smile” is actually scientifically proven.

We all know that smiling can make us feel better, but did you know that it comes with some serious health benefits? Smiling can help you feel better by lowering your blood pressure and heart rate. Grinning causes the production of endorphins, which are naturally occurring pain relievers.

It also triggers the release of neuropeptides, which counteract stress.

It’s safe to say that smiling is beneficial to both your emotional and physical wellbeing. So, what are you waiting for?

Smile, it’s free therapy!

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ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

Are you struggling to book a GP appointment?

Although things are returning to normal across Bath, you may still be finding it difficult to schedule a GP appointment. Nuffield Health Bristol Hospital offers a private GP service, with minimal waiting times for appointments, prescriptions and referrals.

T

he GP service at Nuffield Health Bristol Hospital offers patients the opportunity to see a GP face-to-face for 30 minutes in a relaxed environment. There are three GPs at the hospital, each working on different days to ensure cover across the week; Dr Claire Winstanley, Dr Gill Jenkins and Dr Sonia Mann.

Meet the team Dr Claire Winstanley has a diverse interest in medicine, and is fascinated by all aspects of health and wellbeing, with a particular interest in diet, lifestyle and alternative therapies. Having worked as a GP in the NHS for over 20 years, Dr Winstanley is experienced in treating a wide range of acute and chronic problems. She enjoys the variety that general practice offers, as well as its challenges, and continues to work in the NHS, based at the Whiteladies Health Centre in Clifton, and for NHS 111.

Dr Gill Jenkins has over 35 years of medical experience, and a career that has spanned several areas of medicine. She has a particular interest in diabetes and cardiovascular disease, but has experience in family planning, accident and emergency, psychiatry, weight management and travel medicine. Dr Jenkins also works as a freelance medical writer and broadcaster, working with a variety of magazines, medical newspapers, websites and on local and national TV and radio.

Dr Sonia Mann began her medical career in London before relocating to Bristol with her family in 2010. Her main areas of interest are women’s health, mental wellbeing and integrative medicine. Dr Mann’s travels abroad and study of alternative health systems has helped her develop a more holistic approach to care, where time is taken to work with a patient’s individual needs, especially incorporating mental wellness and how this relates to their physical health, and visa versa.

Seeing a GP at Nuffield Health Bristol Hospital Appointments with a GP at Nuffield Health Bristol Hospital are usually available within 48 hours, and sometimes on the same day you call.

Appointment slots are 30 minutes, giving you a good amount of time to discuss your concerns or your ongoing medical condition. Our GP will also review your medical history, examine you, and talk with you about medication and lifestyle changes that may be advisable.

With 30 minutes available to discuss your options, you can feel reassured that your GP appointment at Nuffield Health is providing the help you need. The GP team cannot access your NHS notes. Therefore, if you are able to bring along a summary page of your NHS GP notes (available from them on request), along with any blood test results, scans or letters from previous consultations relating to your condition, this can save time during the appointment. Our GP can

also oversee and coordinate your healthcare if you need to see multiple consultants for multiple problems.

Diet is also very important to our health but we all have different dietary needs, which can be made more confusing with the knowledge and advice, often conflicting, available on the internet. Sometimes the internet can be very helpful for our health, but sometimes it can cause unnecessary worry. We are here to have those conversations and signpost you, if needed, to respected, evidence-based websites to help you get well and stay well.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made us all more aware of the importance of our health, both physical and mental. As general practitioners, the team at Nuffield Health see a wide variety of acute and chronic problems, as well as those “odd problems” which might not be so straightforward.

Dr Winstanley says: “Our job is to talk to you about your symptoms (we love a list!), examine you as needed, organise the appropriate investigations and prescribe the necessary medication. Gill, Sonia and I have a wealth of knowledge in all areas of medicine. While we are generalists, not specialists, we know what tests may be necessary and can refer you for diagnostics and then, if needed, to the appropriate specialist.”

A 30-minute GP appointment at Nuffield Health Bristol Hospital costs £110. If you would like to book an appointment with Dr Winstanley, Dr Jenkins or Dr Mann, call our Bookings team on 0117 911 5339, or visit our website.

Nuffield Health Bristol Hospital 3 Clifton Hill, Bristol BS8 1BN nuffieldhealth.com/hospitals/bristol

Nuffield Health Bristol Hospital’s GP team: Dr Claire Winstanley, Dr Gill Jenkins and Dr Sonia Mann.

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THE | WALK

Buildings in Lewis Lane

Church of St John the Baptist

The Roman wall

Cirencester walk

A sunny day in early spring is the ideal time to explore a town known as the ‘Capital of the Cotswolds’, says Andrew Swift. Cirencester was founded by the Romans, and was the second largest city in Britain after Londinium

A

ll there is to show for the original Roman town today, however, is a short length of broken-down wall, a grass-grown amphitheatre and the mosaics and carvings in the town’s museum. From the ruins of the Roman city a new town arose, home to the richest Augustinian abbey in England. After its dissolution in 1539, the abbey was razed to the ground. Today, only a gatehouse and some perimeter walls survive.

Even before the abbey disappeared, though, Cirencester had grown rich on the wool trade. In the centuries that followed, wealthy merchants built grand townhouses in its narrow streets, There was no standing on ceremony, however. They stood amid weavers’ cottages and warehouses, and were built, like them, of local stone, creating a townscape of surprising variety and interest.

It takes around an hour to get to Cirencester, which lies 35 miles north-east of Bath. There are several car parks, but the cheapest long-stay option is the Beeches, just off the ring road on the east side of town. (SP029019; GL7 1BW) Leaving the car park by the main entrance, turn left along Beeches Road, past the Barn Theatre. The London Road, which lies ahead, follows the line of a Roman road. Corinium’s East Gate once stood here. To see the only surviving section of the Roman walls, you need to cross the London Road, but, although there is a 20mph speed limit, it is wide and busy, so you may prefer to turn left, cross at the traffic lights and walk back along the opposite pavement.

From here, head north along a road called Corinium Gate, take the second right and after 50m turn right across a footbridge. After visiting the broken-down wall, which lies over to the right, carry on past a lake which started life as the abbey fishpond. The row of buildings you can see in the distance, to the right of the church, stand on the site of the abbey.

After passing a playground, turn right to find Spital Gate, the only surviving abbey building. Head back along the path and carry on 62 THeBATHMagazine

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towards the church. After passing the site of the abbey, bear right into the Market Place, dominated by St John’s church. Its palatial three-storey porch was built by the monks as an office from where they could regulate the trade of the market.

From here, head west along Castle Street, where you’ll notice a bell carved on the estate agents on the corner – a legacy of the days when it was The Bell Inn. Turn right at the end along Silver Street. Ahead is the Corinium Museum, with one of the finest collections of Roman artefacts in the country.

Before you reach it, turn right along Black Jack Street, the narrowest and busiest in town. At the end turn left along Gosditch Street, with a high wall on the right which once screened the abbey from the eyes of the townsfolk.

Turn left along Coxwell Street. Here the bustle of the streets around the Market Place is left far behind, and you enter a part of town hardly changed for over 300 years. As you walk along, cottages give way to grander buildings. Grandest of all is Woolmongers, a wool merchant’s house set back behind a garden, with a counting house on the left and a warehouse on the right. If you look to the left at the end, you will see that the warehouse’s facade is almost as impressive as that of the house.

Turn right along Thomas Street, towards the end of which is St Thomas’s Hospital, also known as Weaver’s Hall, built in the late 15th century.

Gloucester Street, at the end, is built on the line of the Roman Ermine Street. Before turning left along it, look to the right, where more grand buildings line the east side of the street.

After turning left, a detour to the right along Spitalgate Street leads to the remains of the 12th-century St John’s Hospital. As you carry on along Gloucester Street, look out for the massive blocks of stone in the walls of No 33, reclaimed from the demolished abbey. Another curious feature is the partially revealed threshold mosaic on No 65 – now a hairdressers, but once the Anchor Inn.

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Towards the end, after a spot of Edwardian half-timbering on the left, the street curves round the Old House, once a mill and tannery, built on the line of the Roman road. A little further on, after crossing the fledgling River Churn, turn left along the riverside path. Follow it as it crosses back over the river, and, when you come to a lane, continue along a footpath between walls just over to the right. This leads past an open-air swimming pool to emerge on Thomas Street.

Turn right and right again to walk up Cecily Hill, leading to the entrance to Cirencester Park. Here is a wealth of grand buildings, and given the width of the street there is plenty of room to admire them from afar.

When you reach the gates, there is the option of carrying on into the park – which boasts the longest avenue of trees in England – but to continue with the walk, head back down Cecily Hill and turn right along Park Lane. On the other side of the wall on the right is Cirencester House. Further on is the most surreal sight in Cirencester – a monumental gateway in the wall with a high and seemingly continuous yew hedge behind it.

Cross the road ahead, bear right along Park Lane, and after 150m, turn left into Sheep Street past the Marlborough Arms. The old station, designed by Brunel and closed in 1966, is on the far side of the car park on your right. After 150m, when the road swings right, carry straight on. When you come to another road, cross the zebra crossing and continue along a footpath to Querns Lane, the site of the Roman West Gate.

To return to the starting point, turn left along Querns Lane, where, amid later buildings, old cottages survive, along with impressive warehouses. A short diversion to the left at the traffic lights along Cricklade Street leads past the Brewery Arms to some impressive converted maltings.

Carrying straight on at the lights, past the old waterworks and the converted brewery behind it, you walk through what was the heart of the Roman town – the forum and basilica – although nothing

THE

KI TC HEN PAR TNER S DESIGN STUDIO

St John’s Hospital

Fact file n Length of walk: 3.5 miles; 4.5 miles with optional visit to amphitheatre. n Terrain: On pavements and surfaced paths, and virtually level throughout. n Facilities: A wide selection of cafes, bars, pubs.

survives above ground. After passing a couple of ghost signs – Cabinet Maker on the right, Printing Works on the left – cross ahead at the end and carry straight on to return to the car park. n Many more walks can be found in Andrew Swift’s Country Walks from Bath, published by Akeman Press; akemanpress.com.

www.thekitchenpartners.co.uk 102 Whiteladies Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 2QY 01179 466433

Founders and Lead Designers - Fiona & Clinton

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CITY | INTERIORS

A large roof light and neutral colours ensure that available light bounces around the interior space

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CITY | INTERIORS

The light touch

We have said goodbye to the shortest, darkest days of winter, but not without appreciating the light factors in our homes that carry us through them, or perhaps realising that we need to find some new solutions. So we asked John Law of Woodhouse & Law to give us his expertise in the matter of maximising and improving the light in our homes

I

t’s February and those muchanticipated spring months are almost upon us, and with them the promise of longer days and lighter evenings. The recent months will have seen particular rooms in our homes feel that bit darker than we remembered, perhaps that bit less inviting.

Fortunately, there are some sure-fire ways in which we can improve light levels in any space, even in these winter months.

Light might be borrowed from a neighbouring space for instance; perhaps by glazing the door that links them, adding a window in place of an internal wall, or even introducing a glazed ceiling to lower floors such as a basement. A room can be equally transformed by introducing a roof light or atrium to the space. The feasibility of such options may of course be limited by budget or logistics; there is however plenty of opportunity still to give a greater sense of light to any room. We may just need get that bit more creative, carefully considering each and every component of the room in its own right.

Paints of a white or neutral tone on walls and ceilings instantly lift a space, as will those with a natural sheen to them. This might be complemented by the introduction of bright, vibrant artwork, allowing the injection of colour and character to a space. Reflective surfaces such as metals will help throw the light around further, as will large mirrors, especially when placed directly opposite a window. A floor offers just as much opportunity to brighten a space too; opt here perhaps for a light wooden finish, or a large rug in neutral tones.

These finishes will need to be complemented by layers of artificial lighting throughout the space, not only offering a greater sense of warmth but also making sure the space adapts to its use through the day. In a dark bedroom, celling lights offer more functionality in the day, but at night-time these are likely to be turned off in favour of bedside lamps or wall lights.

The choice of window dressing is also of huge importance. Heavy curtains and wooden shutters tend to reduce light flow considerably. In their place, consider a lessimposing alternative. Roman blinds, for example, add texture and interest without being overbearing; these might be accompanied by sheer Roman blinds to offer greater privacy in spaces such as bedrooms.

Unclean windows can also reduce that muchsought light, so it’s worthwhile investing in a regular window-cleaning regime. Beyond those windows, ensure that unwieldy shrubs

and trees aren’t restricting the natural light on offer to the property; this can be particularly noticeable in the summer months when they are in full leaf.

Before any such changes are introduced, it’s vital to consider the orientation of each room within our home, and how each space is used.

The location of a breakfast room might be chosen to make the most of an eastern aspect for the morning sun, for example, with a more formal dining room enjoying the evening sun to the west. A darker, north-

facing room might also make for the perfect snug; a space in which darker colours might be embraced, complemented by layers of texture for warmth and interest. In the absence of generous, if any, windows, the use of green colour tones and house plants can help counter that lost connection to nature.

The space might not necessarily offer the best habitat for house plants, so it’s reassuring to see a growing range of impressive and convincing faux plants on the market.

In our rush to bring in light, we mustn’t

Large mirrors will reflect light around the room, especially when sited near a window

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This space has roof lights and French doors in the room beyond, and the glass lights and the white walls in the inner room helps to make the light bounce off the different surfaces

❝

“Lower light levels affect not just a room’s ambience, but our own health and well-being”

❝

forget that this can come with its drawbacks, particularly with the fading of much-loved fabrics and paintings. In light-filled rooms such as glass cubes, it is worth considering UV filtering fabrics within discrete, automated blinds that can be dropped when the room is not in use. To protect those pieces of furniture that are subject to plenty of light, advances are also being made in the production of fade-resistant acrylics. One of our go-to resources for such materials is Perennials Fabrics; their range of textiles, rugs and trims are 100% solution-dyed, making them resist not just fading but also most stains. To help preserve artwork, we also use conservation glass when framing; this glazing offers a coating that blocks almost all UV transfer while still providing optical clarity.

Lower light levels affect not just a room’s ambience but our own health and well-being.

Exposure to bright light is believed to increase our levels of serotonin, a crucial hormone that steadies our mood and happiness as well as aiding sleep and digestion. There is unquestionably much incentive, both on a practical and personal level, in ensuring it really is all sweetness and light – not just in the heart but in the home too. n Woodhouse & Law; woodhouseandlaw.co.uk 66 TheBATHMagazine

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A large rooflight and a transparent shower structure makes this bathroom feel bright and large

The large windows, dressed with Roman blinds and curtains enables full daylight when it suits or a more subdued light when it does not; the peachy apricot tones and soft greys increase the feeling of relaxation

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The Newt in Somerset

Know your boundaries

While your plants lay dormant, now is the ideal time to construct some natural boundaries, says Elly West.

Here she explains how to create everything from strong design statements to wildlife-boosting borders

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❝

Lots of native hedge mixes offer berries and flowers, including hawthorn, dog rose, field maple, hazel and blackthorn

❝

G

ardens may vary in size and shape, but one thing they have in common is the need to mark the boundaries in some way. Often this will be with walls or fences, but I personally love the impact of a well-kept hedge. Now is the ideal time to plant a new hedge, while the plants are dormant, and in time for spring and summer.

A hedge is a living wall made of plants. Some are decorative and make a strong design statement, such as the low box-hedge parterres of the Victorian era, or even a hedge maze. Others provide a practical function, acting as a boundary, privacy screen or windbreak. They can be used to break up a space and create different zones, giving structure, leading your eye around the garden and, depending on what plants you choose, they are extremely versatile. A hedge can be formal or informal, evergreen or deciduous, with interesting leaves, flowers or fruits. Hedges are cheaper and easier to install than fencing, as well as being longer-lasting and more interesting. They provide a habitat and shelter for wildlife, and create a good foil for other plants. In spring, you’ll have fresh new growth, in summer, perhaps flowers and a home for nesting birds, then the possibility of autumn fruits, and in winter they are the architecture of the garden, carrying frost and snow.

Choosing a hedge is an important decision. You’ll need to consider the specific requirements such as the height and size you want it to be maintained at, and whether you want it to be evergreen or deciduous.

A formal hedge is likely to be a single species for a uniform look. Yew is a fantastic option and can be kept small as an alternative to box hedging, or left to grow to several metres. Its soft, dark green needles make a beautiful backdrop for other plants. However, it’s fairly slow growing compared to other options, so you’ll need to be patient.

Other conifers can be grown as hedges, including the notorious Leyland cypress, or leylandii. It’s extremely fast-growing (up to a metre per year), and has been at the centre of thousands of disputes between neighbours, so either avoid, or be prepared to cut it back two or three times a year to keep it fully under control.

There are plenty of other evergreen options, including Portuguese laurel, which has attractive slender dark-green leaves and reddish stems, or Griselinia, with glossy apple-green leaves. This dense, lowmaintenance evergreen grows on most soil types in sun or shade, and is tolerant of wind and salt, so is good for coastal gardens.

Semi-evergreens include privet – ever popular for good reason as it’s tough, easy to grow and maintain, and there are attractive variegated varieties available with leaves edged with golden-yellow or cream.

Beech is deciduous when grown as a tree, but beech hedges tend to hold their leaves after they’ve turned brown until the new growth comes through in spring, giving you cover all year round. Beech can be kept fairly low – at around 1.2m – or allowed to grow tall. The tallest hedge in the world is a 30m beech hedge in Perthshire, Scotland. Hornbeam is very similar and is a better choice if you’re planting on heavy clay soil.

Box hedging (Buxus sempervirens) is the classic choice for low hedging and edging around the garden, but it can be susceptible to blight or the dreaded box caterpillar. The latter is still mostly confined to areas of the south east but is present across the UK, so check around your neighbourhood and if you see dead, brown box bushes then it’s probably best to avoid. Ilex crenata, a type of smooth-leaved holly, makes a good alternative. Likewise, on the road where I live any viburnum hedges in the front gardens are ragged with viburnum beetle

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GARDENING by mid-summer. I took mine out and replaced them with silver-leaved privet.

If you want something less formal that will also attract wildlife, then there are lots of native hedge mixes offering berries and flowers. These may include hawthorn, dog rose, field maple, hazel and blackthorn. Since the middle of the last century we’ve lost around 50 per cent of our hedgerows in the UK, so anything we can do in our gardens to benefit birds and other wildlife will help to redress the balance.

Other flowering plants that make good hedging include Rosa rugosa, escallonia and camellia. Lower-growing options are choisya, hardy fuchsia, lavender and hydrangea. In the village where I live there’s even a row of beautiful magnolias grown as a hedge, with pink and white goblet blooms in spring. A hedge can also be a good option in terms of security if you choose plants with prickly leaves such as holly, or thorns such as berberis, pyracantha or hawthorn.

Any time between about November and March is a good time for planting, as long as the ground isn’t frozen. Classic hedging plants are often sold bare-root while they are dormant, often at a fraction of the cost of their pot-grown counterparts. Check the recommended spacing of your chosen plants online, or if you buy from a specialist nursery such as Chew Valley Trees, they will be able to provide you with plenty of advice including how many you’ll need per metre.

Prepare the ground thoroughly by removing any weeds or grass from the planting area, dig it over and add well-rotted manure or compost, along with some handfuls of bone meal fertiliser. Fork the fertiliser into the soil to make sure it doesn’t come into direct contact with the plant roots. Once your hedge is planted, it will benefit from a layer of mulch such as bark chips on the surrounding soil to suppress weeds and conserve moisture. Once established, it’s a case of keeping it tidy and trimming as necessary during the growing season.

This could just be once a year for slower-growing varieties, or two or three times a year for faster-growing plants.

The RHS website (rhs.org.uk/plants/types/hedges/choosing) is a good starting point if you want to narrow down your options. Chew Valley Trees also has an excellent website (chewvalleytrees.co.uk) that will help you choose the right hedge for your garden. n

Plant of the month: silver privet Silver privet (Ligustrum ovalifolium 'Argenteum') is a great choice for a medium-sized hedge, as it is fast growing and has attractive green leaves edged with silvery cream all year round. It also has creamy-white flowers in summer that are attractive to bees. It's a tough, compact plant that's happy in sun or partial shade and will tolerate most soil types. Trim as necessary during the growing season, but avoid pruning from late summer until spring to avoid frost damage on the new growth. Prune out any shoots that have reverted to plain green to maintain the silver variegation.

• ellyswellies.co.uk

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Gracewell of Bath fp.qxp_Layout 1 26/01/2022 15:33 Page 1

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MARDAN, BATH’S BESPOKE REMOVALS AND STORAGE COMPANY, DEVELOPS NEW TALENT

Mardan have a wealth of experience within the removals and storage industry, spanning over 30 years, ensuring customers have a stress-free and seamless move. Mardan are family run and bespoke with the experience, knowledge, skills, equipment and capacity to complete removals of any size; locally, nationally for domestic or commercial customers.

Marcus, Mardan’s founder, has always held fast, with confidence, to his belief that he can deliver a high standard of removals, exceeding that of his competitors. Marcus knows to do this he must have trust and confidence in the skills of his staff, which he does. So when a new office position was required within Mardan instead of recruiting externally Marcus looked to develop a team member which he already had extreme confidence in and who he knew would develop into the role seamlessly, Nik. The role would include; liaising with customers, completing quotes, emailing quotes, planning the removals diary, logistics and managing the storage yard. Nik, had worked with Marcus within removals for over 10 years having a strong knowledge of all aspects of removals and with the skills necessary to lead a team from Mardan on removals.

Nik has risen to the challenge and is thriving. Marcus and Nik work extremely well as a team thus ensuring all customers have a personalised service and a positive move experience.

Both Marcus and Nik enjoy completing the physical removal and Marcus truly believes that to do the ‘office’ role well it’s important to continue to complete removals, thus maintaining

the in depth knowledge developed throughout their earlier careers. Marcus and Nik are able to be flexible with their roles and keep their ‘hand in’ the hard physical work of removals.

Mardan continue to grow their self-storage facility, offering safe, secure and reasonable storage to upward of 100 domestic and commercial customers.

“We used Mardan following a recommendation from a friend.

They moved us in and out of storage and then into our renovated house. I would highly recommend them. The service was super efficient and the guys were quick, polite and courteous. Nothing was too much trouble and all of our possessions arrived safe and sound” Emma Webster, Moon Client

Mob: 07899 847857 Tel: 01225 317645 www.mardanremovals.co.uk

DOMESTIC & COMMERCIAL MOVERS • packers • STORERS • SHIPPERS

Bailbrook Lane, Bath A stunning development of two individual, contemporary, luxury homes in a secluded setting with magnificent views.

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Cobb Farr PIF.qxp_PIF Full Page 26/01/2022 15:35 Page 1

PROPERTY | HOMEPAGE

A pretty 2/3 bedroom top floor apartment in a fine central location, enjoying beautiful elevated views.

15 Belmont is an elegant Grade II listed Georgian town house having been sympathetically converted into 4 lovely apartments. The top floor apartment has a lovely east/west aspect and enjoys beautiful views to the rear towards Solsbury Hill. The property has recently been refurbished and includes a well-appointed compact kitchen and a modern bath and shower room.

The property is approached via elegant communal entrance halls which are shortly due to be re-decorated and entered at 2nd floor level where a carpeted staircase rises to the top floor. To the rear there is an attractive light and airy sitting room with 3 sash windows, which is conveniently linked to the internal kitchen. A feature spiral staircase rises to a charming mezzanine level which could be used as a further sitting room, study or occasional bedroom.

To the front there are 2 further bedrooms, both with plenty of built-in storage and a lovely bath and shower room.

Belmont is on Bath’s sought-after lower Lansdown slopes, within 5 minutes-walk of Bath city centre and within easy striking distance of the world-famous Assembly Rooms, Kings Circus and Royal Crescent.

Lansdown Road, Bath • 2/3 bedrooms • Grade II listed Georgian property • Modern bath and shower room • Spiral staircase • Sought after location • Elevated views • Within a 5 minute walk to Bath city centre

OIEO £400,000

Cobb Farr, 35 Brock Street, The Circus, Bath. Tel: 01225 333332

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3 ed erv s e

R

Avonvale Mews, Bradford on Avon Prices from £725,000

Avonvale Mews is an outstanding collection of luxury townhouses in beautiful Bradford on Avon.

Built with the finest quality materials including Cotswold stone, brimstone ash and natural slate roofs, the five properties have been meticulously designed with both aesthetics and functionality in mind. Arranged over three floors, they have all the touches of modern living requirements - sleek kitchen, underfloor heating and top quality finishes.

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Cobb Farr February.qxp_Layout 1 27/01/2022 18:02 Page 2

Lansdown, Bath OIEO £650,000

An attractive, beautifully presented, sympathetically extended and comprehensively renovated 3 bedroom mid terrace family home, located in a highly prized residential address on Bath’s sought after northern slopes

•

Sympathetically extended Victorian house

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Bi-doors leading onto the sun terrace

• • • •

3 bedrooms

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Potential to extend into the loft

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A beautifully presented four double bedroom family home situated on the southern slopes of Bath in Bear Flat. The property boasts very well balanced, light and airy accommodation set over three floors along with level private gardens and views.

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Peter Greatorex fp.qxp_Layout 1 28/01/2022 14:25 Page 1

How to prepare your unique home for the spring selling season Attention to the details Regardless of the value of your property, it is essential that you always pay attention to the details, and this means ensuring your home is looking its best. We all have clutter in our homes; some rooms may be pristine, whereas others have become more of a storage space than an actual functioning room. Potential buyers want to see that each room has a purpose and that there is enough storage and space for their own personal belongings. This can be hard to do when a room is disorganised.

It isn’t just making sure each room is clean and tidy. There may be little things that need repair: a door knob may be wobbly, or a gate that has seen better days. Buyers expect to see some quirky elements in character properties but not a lack of repair – this will only spark concerns about what else could be lurking underneath the surface.

If a room is looking very tired, a fresh coat of paint and a couple of new soft furnishings can completely transform it.

Don’t leave it to their imagination

T

he start of a new year is the perfect time to get organised if you are planning to be ‘out with the old, in with the new’.

The main principles to selling a house are always the same, even in the busy sellers’ market we are in right now, but when it comes to selling unique and beautiful high-end properties, at Peter Greatorex Unique Homes we believe there are some extra things to consider. Potential buyers will be most interested in your house in the first few weeks, which is why it is essential that you are sale-ready before it goes on the market. This will also ensure that the whole process is a lot quicker. Here is our advice on how to prepare a unique home for the spring selling season.

Our imaginations, our beautiful things, they can bring the words off a page to life, and turn a property you are viewing into your home, complete with all those things you love. But when you only get half a tale, our imaginations can also work against us as we focus on the unknowns and niggles start to appear. All those wonderful features that make your home special can also be reasons for concern. Make sure that you inform your estate agent of any unique qualities your home may have so they can ease any buyers’ fears and not leave them to their own imagination.

Are you ready to leave?

What first impression will your home give as potential buyers approach it for the first time, or they see that first photograph online? The exterior of your home is just as important as its interior, whether it is full of period charm, is a contemporary masterpiece or a stunning countryside idyll with the most breathtaking views, you want to grab and win a buyer’s heart right from the start.

But you are not finished there. Just as you have paid attention to how well your home is presented inside, your gardens and exterior could be the difference between receiving an offer or not. Make sure your gardens are maintained, lawns are cut and seasonal plants and flowers are added so potential buyers will be met with a garden full of colour and wonder.

The one-of-a-kind feel of your home is probably one of the reasons you fell in love with it those many years ago. Although it is very easy to get extremely excited about the prospect of moving, have you thought through the realities? The high-end property market has been extremely busy, and this has driven sales prices up; the potential for achieving a high sales figure for your home can be a very attractive offer. Once the excitement of an offer has passed, and the realisation a move is imminent hits, will you still be ready to leave your unique and beautiful home? It is the memories that are etched on every wall and the laughter on every beam that will never be forgotten. If you can remember these with fondness yet get excited for your next chapter, then you know you are ready to say goodbye to the old and hello to the new.

Experience in the luxury market When you start to look for an estate agent to sell your home, we would always advise that you find one who is experienced in selling luxury-end properties and can do so quickly. You want an agent who also thoroughly understands the Bath housing market and how to attract the right potential buyers. We have a wealth of experience in this field, which can be seen in the results they achieve for their clients. Our strategy is not to rush your home to market, instead we create a comprehensive and structured marketing strategy and bespoke materials that give your home the attention it deserves.

This means that when your home hits the market every detail of our bespoke material strategy has been carefully crafted and seamlessly brought together – we know you will love the result.

Going through this process will see you reminisce about the years you’ve lived, loved and grown in your home – we find many sellers fall in love with their house all over again.

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Start as you mean to go on

Let’s get you moving Spring is a busy time for home sales, and if you follow our advice your home will no doubt entice buyers with its unique beauty. Are you ready to start the next chapter of your story? If so, give Peter or Sharon a call on 01225 904999.

Scan here and see what the market is like for your home

www.petergreatorex.co.uk

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Englishcombe Lane - OIEO £1,850,000 An impressive three storey, seven bedroom detached period residence, situated in an elevated position on the southern slopes of Bath with spacious garden to front and rear, garage, far-reaching views over Moorlands Park and the Georgian City and within easy access to the local facilities at Bear Flat and to Bath Spa Station. EPC rating: D

Peter Greatorex Unique Homes 01225 904999

www.petergreatorex.co.uk Peter Greatorex Managing Director

Sharon Clesham Head of Sales

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Percy Place, Bath - OIEO £690,000 A contemporary three bedroom property, designed for easy, comfortable living, with high end fixtures and fittings. Located to the east of the city “The Lodge” boasts a private south facing walled garden with good-sized patio area and low-maintenance pebbled area with borders.

The ground floor is open plan and is tiled with underfloor heating throughout. Accommodation also includes master bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, two further bedrooms with en-suite shower rooms as well as study and parking space. EPC rating: C

Peter Greatorex Unique Homes 01225 904999

www.petergreatorex.co.uk Peter Greatorex Managing Director

Sharon Clesham Head of Sales

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