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Quintessential Englishness: The Bath Priory

Where: Weston Road, Bath, United Kingdom, BA1 2XT

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.

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