Bath and the A46

My idea for a television programme in which I re-enact a journey from Cheltenham to Bath in a Regency coach has run into problems. 

I had always thought that the A46 represented a grand old coach road between these two grand old Regency Spa towns.  It’s our local main road here in Stroud.  Out in the countryside, it is still quite wide for a minor A-road, and has wonderfully relaxed bends.  It passes through villages built almost solely out of beautiful Cotswold stone.  The whole pace of the road is the pace of a by-gone era. What’s more, there are some gorgeous ‘coaching inns’ along it. There’s the Falcon in Painswick, which recently received from The Guardian one of the worst food reviews I have ever read.  There’s the George at Nailsworth, too, or there was not so long ago, an angular and rambling place which used to run at a healthy loss.  Proposals to demolish it resulted in a roof-top protest.  Now it’s being done up and turned into apartments and ‘retail outlets’.

Then there’s the inn by the Chipping Sodbury turn, the Cross Hands, which achieved brief recent fame as the place to which Her Majesty retreated when caught in a blizzard on her way home from her daughter’s place in Stroud.  I remember how they asked to put a plaque up - by appointment to Her Majesty, refuge in a snowstorm, or something - but the Palace refused.  They’ve made their own ersatz version which isn’t very convincing.

Finally, for now, there’s Petty France at the bottom of another dip, and Pennsylvania.  Such names.  Surely, this must have been the greatest Regency highway of them all.  It connects not only the two great spa towns of the west, but also some of its most elegant stately homes.  Dodington Park, conveniently built right by the M4 junction at Todmarton, is an exquisite site, with a house designed by James Wyatt.  I am sure I remember looking over it when I was younger, but it’s closed to the public now.  Wyatt was also responsible, it is alleged, for Lasborough House, in a beautiful coombe just off the A46 a few miles to the north, a coombe which has remained unchanged since Regency times. 

Badminton House is nearby, too, where they invented shuttlecocks and where Charles and Camilla go hunting.  Further south, and a National trust property now, is Dyrham Park.  Once the water-works of Dyrham were so loud that they could be heard from coaches on the main road at the top of the escarpment there.  But then ‘Capability’ Brown and his ‘back to nature’ movement took hold, and the water gardens were torn up, to be replaced by idealised hillsides full of sheep and jazz festivals.

But in Regency times, the A46 was non-existent south of Nailsworth:  no-one could get up the hill there until the Nailsworth burghers clubbed together to build a new turnpike road, with the intention of preventing Nailsworth from being the dead-end town at the end of the line.  They built the road, but whether they succeeded in redefining Nailsworth has to be judged by visiting it for yourself.  The shops are dull and half empty and at the heart of the place there is a big modern space where buses can turn round. 

So, there were no Regency coaches along the A46 from Cheltenham to Bath.  My plan for a televised reconstruction of the journey, along with two gorgeously attractive nineteen-year-olds in those dresses which drop very low before beginning again, was effectively still-born.  I had this idea of combining historic accuracy - the fashion, the diet, the smell of the horses - with the traffic jams and the noise and the so on of the modern world.  I was particularly keen about the food.  It’s hard to believe the quantity of food a nineteen-year-old out of Jane Austen was expected to eat while on a journey in Regency England.

In those days, it turns out, Cirencester was the hub of all communications in this part of the world, as it had been since Roman times.  To get from anywhere round here, say, Cheltenham or Stroud, to anywhere else, such as Oxford or Bath, you had to spend the night in Cirencester, where you would have to put up at an inn before catching a second coach early the next morning.  Coaches east were risky:  little of the Cotswolds was fenced in, so coachmen lost their way in bad weather.  It must have been more like crossing Dartmoor. 

Mind you, other history books have whizzy coaches racing along what is now the A40 from Gloucester and Cheltenham direct to London.  In summer they’d go overnight, leaving Cheltenham at 5 pm and getting to London at midday the next day.  There are pubs called things like The Cheltenham Flyer which refer to these fast coaches.  But the more you get into researching all this, the harder it is to be sure what was going on.  Historical maps don’t even agree about exactly where the roads went.  But they definitely had guards between Oxford and London, those coaches.  And Oxford Street is still really the A40 and definitely goes to Oxford.  Weird, but true.

Cirencester is a precious place now, all Volvo and tack, with a dinky arts centre, a quaint cinema and a fortnightly craft fair.  Imagine, as you stroll down the main street in the spring sunshine, how the overnight stop in Cirencester must have resembled a chapter from Tom Jones or an album of English folk songs: bustling bars; cheap, colossal meals; come-hither eyes;  lost purses;  crowded rooms;  drunkenness and debauchery.  And then, no doubt, mattresses full of horse hair and everyone having to sleep three to a bed.

A good idea for a television programme.