The project will promote walking discussions through a series of guided walks in an around Bath. These will focus on green spaces with colonial resonances and global history such as Sydney Gardens, the Bath Botanical Garden, Royal Victoria Park, and the green spaces surrounding Beckford’s Tower and Fairfield House. Walks will be social events encouraging discussions about heritage, displacement, social justice and urban sustainability. A walk about Bath’s Uncomfortable Past will be developed and tested by walkers.
Thursday 17th November 2022 14.30-16.00 @ outside Bath Abbey
Bath’s ‘Uncomfortable’ Past. A student-designed walk about the city’s colonial connections. A walk by Dr Christina Horvath and Benjamin Van Praag.
Designed by a group of students and two lecturers, Dr Christina Horvath and Benjamin Van Praag at the University of Bath, this walk offers insight into how transatlantic slavery contributed to the splendours of 18th century Bath. It engages with the city’s heritage from the viewpoint of both those who benefited from slavery and those who revolted or campaigned against it. It walk covers Bath’s complex colonial connections. It brings to the light the multiple links between the Georgian leisure city and the trafficking and subsequent exploitation of enslaved Africans, which funded many of Bath’s grandiose neo-Palladian building projects. Christina and Ben have been experimenting with Co-Creation strategies using art in Brazil, Mexico and Bath. During the 2020-21 lockdowns, they designed a walk exposing Bath’s involvement in the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans with students from the University of Bath and it 21-22 they worked with British-Tanzanian artist and designer Natasha Sweeting. Together they updated the walk and the related map for audiences to walk and find out more about Bath’s “uncomfortable past”.
Saturday 19th November 2022 10.00-12.30 Meeting: near pizzeria inside Green Park Station
Urban Agriculture Across Latitudes! A walk with Dr Georges Félix
This walk will start at the Green Park Farmers’ Market and take you to the Bath City Farm It will look at places in the city where we encounter edible and useful plants, from farmers markets to urban farms, but also pharmacies, gardens and crops grown in modern-day Bath. The expected outcome is to think about our desired alternative futures for the city while unravelling elements of the present that tell us something about how the city developed in the past – all of it with a botanical entry-point.
Dr Georges Félix is a French-Puerto Rican agroecologist, currently a co-chair of the Stabilisation Agriculture Programme at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) of Coventry University in England, UK. Besides his work with Cultivate!, Georges currently co-teaches the Stabilisation Agriculture module within Coventry University’s MSc Agroecology, Water and Food Sovereignty. He also gives lectures within the BA Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Puerto Rico at Utuado (UPRU) and within the joint MSc Organic Agriculture Programme between Wageningen University (The Netherlands) and ISARA-Lyon (France). In his free time, Georges enjoys cooking self-produced veggies, practicing watercolour painting, and trekking through a variety of nature trails.
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Saturday 11th March 2023 13.00-15.00 @ Sydney Gardens
Botany, Empire, Deep Time… A walk by Dr Richard S. White
This provocative walk uses a blue tooth headset/‘silent disco’ kit to take participants on a sound walking and questioning experience in Bath’s Sydney gardens. It is about layers and entanglements, about obscured history and reluctant heritage, about wealth, power, people and plants. We are going to explore the story of a few trees in this garden mangled through different rollers of time and place, thinking about how things connect and, considering the price paid, perhaps discover something about ourselves here, and now.This is a walk about layers and entanglements, about obscured history and reluctant heritage, about wealth, power, people and plants. We are going to explore the story of a few trees in this garden mangled through different rollers of time and place, thinking about how things connect and, considering the price paid, perhaps discover something about ourselves here, and now.
Dr Richard White is an artist/researcher with a professional background in participatory media and education. His ongoing investigation addresses the physical, sensory, emotional and intellectual experience of walking in particular places. His creative work generates content rooted in the complex layered mesh of embodied memories/ knowledge/experience emerging through intra-action with the material world.
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Saturday 22nd April 2023 14.00-16.00 @ Fairfield House
In the shadow of the magnolia tree. A walk with Ras Benji
This immersive walk will take you to the garden and grounds of Fairfield House, home of Emperor Haile Selassie I and the Ethiopian royal family during their exile in Britain1936 – 1941. The walk will tell the history of the house and the Ethiopian struggle of Emperor and Empress in exile through a journey of plants and trees.
Ras Benji is a Rastafari historian and project manager at Fairfield House in Bath, home of Emperor Haile Selassie I and the Ethiopian royal family 1936 – 1941. He is also a gardener.
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Friday 5th May 2023 14.00-17.00 @ Bath Botanical Garden
“Exotic” vs. Familiar. A drawing walk and picnic at the Bath Botanical Garden with Dr Christina Horvath
Bath is a Georgian spa town where attractive pleasure gardens have been designed to provide wealthy visitors with a wholesome environment and a space for social life and entertainment. Surely, “exotic” plants have a great deal in this story. What stories do they tell? How did they arrive to Bath? This botanising walk across will take you to Bath’s botanical garden to set the perfect scene to visualise of the influence of colonial plant exchange on garden design and contemporary garden aesthetic in Bath.
Dr Christina Horvath is a Reader in French politics at PoLIS, University of Bath. Her research interests include decolonial practices through art, Co-Creation, mapping, and participative walking. She has been leading the Botanical Encounters project in Bath since October 2021. In May-June 2022, she used funding from the British Academy to undertake research in Bath, Jamaica, documenting colonial links between Bath in Britain and Bath in Jamaica.
To book this event: TBC
Friday 2nd June2023 14.00-16.00 @ (TBC)
Bath’s pleasure gardens. A walk with Kirsten Elliott
Bath’s pleasure gardens are gone beyond recall. Yet in their heyday they were as central to the city’s social life as its assembly rooms, pump room or parades. Far from being genteel retreats for the horticulturally minded, they were where well-heeled visitors came to party. With lamplit groves and labyrinths, grottoes and supper boxes, and a seemingly never-ending round of concerts and circus acts, balloon ascents and firework displays, they were loud and lively. But horticulture played an important part – not just to make the gardens attractive but to show off the best flowers and the latest plants. Carnation feasts and auricula competitions were popular. Two gardens in particular set out to promote a love of plants. These were King James’ Palace and the short-lived Walcot Botanical Gardens. The story ends in the 19th century with the grand horticultural shows in Sydney Gardens.
Kirsten Elliott is the author of No Swinging on Sundays (Akeman, 2019) and co-author with Andrew Swift of 11 more books on the history of Bath. She has an interest in industrial archaeology, particularly canals, but her other interests are architecture, dance, literature and the social life of the Georgian period. For over twenty-five years she has taken guided tours of Bath, and she also professionally researches the history of buildings.
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