Bath (and the reinvention of spa sociability) [ Cities / Politics & Society ]
… A place of unruly, licentious behaviour in the seventeenth century, it became a centre of mixed sex sociability, ranking just behind London, as a beacon of new social interaction. A city which started as a market town 5 evolved into a … to the shaping of the nation, so much so that it exported some of the attributes of spa sociability to the rest of the kingdom and beyond, in an age nicknamed the ‘age of watering-places.’ 6 Taking the Bath waters In the eighteenth century, taking the waters did not simply mean bathing but it also involved …
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