I
suppose that, like so many other things in my new
life in England, it all began at the Bath Spa Hotel. The
first person I met there was Michael, who, upon hearing
that I was an eighteenth-century scholar, suggested
that I rent the flat that he and
his wife Sandie had inherited
from her mother. It was too
small for them, he said, and it
wouldn't be long before they
would move down Lansdown
Hill to the house they had
recently purchased, not far
from where I had leased
my first apartment. What
they had not reckoned on,
however, was the glacial pace
at which the local planning
commission
approved
any changes to historically
significant buildings – and
Bath is nothing but historically
significant buildings, including
the flat from which they were
attempting to depart.
Anyone who visits Bath soon
succumbs to the Georgian splendor of these buildings,
each one of them erected in the neo-classical style and
clad in the honey-colored stone for which the area is
famous. If you had a bird's-eye view as well as some
sturdy walking shoes, you would immediately sense the
elegant geometry with which John Wood (father and son)
HYLAND
