Quintessential Englishness: The Bath Priory

December 21, 2007 at 9:29 AM | by femmefatale | 0 Comments

Monica Guy is fed up with the old guard hotels of the U.K. that may have entertained her grandparents when they were tripping all over the world in their youth but have since been lasting on reputation and little else. In this new feature, she pits her grandma's favorite hotel against some of the new hip hotels popping up across the rainy motherland. Enjoy.

So you'd won in Oxford and won in Cambridge - your slick boutique hotels were a hundred times smoother than gran and granddad's choice. Proves you can't sleep on a bed of reputation.

But your grandparents excelled themselves in Bath with the much discussed (in upper-class circles) Bath Priory. The quintessential hotel image of Englishness in a hotel that's worth its reputation.

Bath is a beautiful University city in the west of England, with hills as steep as the sides of houses and a newly opened working reconstruction of the healing Roman baths after which the city's named. It's increasingly on the tourist trail as visitors venture further and further out from London.

But Bath is as old as, well, the Romans, and there isn't much room for shiny new buildings. Hotels - anything from mangy tourist pickups to stylish boutique hotels such as the Queensbury hide behind Victorian, Edwardian or even Gothic façades and you've got little chance of knowing what you're in for.

You didn't know what you were in for in the Bath Priory.

In the hotel, the clocks stopped long ago - it's an image of perfect Englishness preserved in time. It's more a mansion than a hotel (which, from 1835 until 1994, it was) with only 27 individually decorated rooms. And it's actually located slightly outside of the city centre in the middle of four acres of beautifully landscaped gardens.

You couldn't afford to put your grandparents up for the night. Standard rates even at off-peak times start at £245 ($510) and go up to £360 ($720) for a real old four-poster bed and dressing room experience. The bill would have given your granddad a heart attack.

But you took them for lunch in the Michelin-starred restaurant with its stiff, clipped waiters, snow-white tablecloths and a white list as long as the Complete Works of Shakespeare. The Head Chef Christ Horridge offers wine-tasting courses and serves elegant, British cuisine with a French twist - an influence courtesy of his former tutor Raymond Blanc.

The vegetables and herbs come from - oh! do these things exist any more? - the organic Victorian Kitchen Garden at the side of the mansion. It's cultivated by a lady who wins awards at the Chelsea Flower Show.

She runs flower- and vegetable-growing courses in summer that are the highlight of the year for hatted, booted ladies. It was probably her who decided that all the rooms should be named after a different flower. The Britishness of the place is surreal.

The Bath Priory is the place to come to propose to your beloved, to celebrate your anniversary or graduation, or - if you're stinking rich - to get away from it all for the weekend.

The health spa is one of the best around - sauna, steam room, massage parlours, a solarium and (small) heated indoor and outdoor pools. Only hotel guests can use the facilities, but anyone (smartly dressed and with the correct accent) can come for afternoon tea.

With cucumber sandwiches. No, we're not joking.

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