Bath Assembly Rooms

The Assembly Rooms are a symbol of all the romance that this period offered—the painful wait for the gentleman to ask for your hand for the dance, then standing facing each other before the dance, and later hoping that he would ask your father for your hand in marriage. As Ms. Bingley says in Pride and Prejudice, “a lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.” Jane Austen herself frequented these Assembly Rooms when she lived here. As she said, “to be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.” And dancing played a pivotal role in her novels in depicting the society of those times and furthering the romance of her characters. These Assembly Rooms were opened in the late 18th century and were the pulse of entertainment in Bath.
There are four main rooms here—Ball Room, Tea Room, Octagon Room and Card Room. The largest is the 100-feet-long ballroom where dance balls would take place around twice a week and could hold around 800-1200 guests at a time. There are nine Whitefriars crystal chandeliers in the building that are considered to be the finest to have survived from the 18th century. The chandeliers were put into safe storage during the Second World War and thus escaped destruction during the bombing of the Assembly Rooms. The rooms are elegantly decorated and it is not surprising that these Assembly Rooms were said to be “the most noble and elegant of any in the kingdom.” The Bath Assembly Rooms can be seen when not in use for a function or conference. There is a Fashion Museum in the basement.