Why Bath needs a local guide
Bath is built from honey-colored limestone and it knows it. The Royal Crescent, the Circus, Pulteney Bridge — the city is essentially one giant Georgian postcard. But past the tourist zone, Walcot is where the independent shops are, Larkhall has proper local pubs, and Widcombe is the quiet side nobody talks about. The Roman Baths are genuinely impressive. The Thermae Bath Spa on top is where locals actually go.
Bath pulls nearly 6 million visitors a year into a city of just 90,000 people. The ratio is insane. Most of those visitors do the Roman Baths, walk the Royal Crescent, browse the Jane Austen Centre gift shop, and leave by teatime. They never walk up to Walcot for the independent shops and the Saturday flea market that has been running for decades. They never find Larkhall, a neighborhood with proper local pubs where the regulars know each other by name and the beer garden fills up on the first warm evening of spring. To become a tour guide in Bath means showing people the city that continues to exist after the tourists leave at 5pm. The canal walk along the Kennet and Avon to the pub at Bathampton is one of the best walks in Southern England and almost nobody visiting the city does it. To become a tour guide in Bath is to know which Thermae Bath Spa session is the quietest, where to get a Sally Lunn bun without the queue, and why the farmers' market behind the Abbey on a Saturday morning is worth skipping every other plan for. Become a tour guide in Bath and you rescue a beautiful city from being reduced to a day trip.