By Miriam Zaccarelli
Let there be light!
The extra hours of darkness in winter provide great opportunities for creativity. With her plan to light up as much of Bath as possible over Christmas, Bath BID CEO Allison was inspired by the Window Wanderland series of windows in Frome – particularly the intricate tissue paper window art created by Rachel Dahl. The huge Georgian windows of Bath Assembly Rooms would be the perfect place to provide some alluring illuminations, and Allison suggested I get in touch with Rachel to learn her window art technique.
Surrounded by her gorgeous creations and paintings at her home in Frome, Rachel showed me her incredible folder full of intricate window displays, and explained the process of cutting shapes out of black paper to fill with colourful tissue paper, an elaborate version of what most of us enjoyed at primary school. The light shining through the delicate sheets replicated magnificent stained glass windows, and I was excited to create something similar.
Bath Assembly Rooms
Since the Assembly Rooms was built for dances and music, the natural theme for the windows was a Christmas ball, with Regency style figures silhouetted in the windows. I measured the windows and came up with a ballroom scene that would fit across all 42 window panes.
Researching the history of the building, I discovered Jane Austen had not only been to dances there but she included the venue in two of her novels. My intrepid Googling soon unearthed the Jane Austen tour of Bath Assembly Rooms, with one taking place the next day.
Jane Austen at Bath Assembly Rooms
As our tour guide Alice walked us around the magnificent building, she told us of Jane Austen’s descriptions of attending balls there, and read out fascinating passages of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey that were set in the different rooms. My anonymous figures for the window project now had names and stories, and I added little details to the drawings.
Creation
It turns out that what looks great as a simple sketch on A4 paper is incredibly difficult to replicate on 42 massive sheets of black paper, especially working on the floor of our little Melksham flat! So I popped across to Melksham Town Hall that Thursday where the staff helpfully set up the committee room and projector for me to spend a few hours mapping out all eight life size figures on carefully measured black paper panels.
Back home, cutting out was a tedious task that needed an inspiring soundtrack so the movie Persuasion and the audiobook Northanger Abbey kept me in a suitably Austenian ambiance, as my partner Iorwerth kept me in snacks and coffee!
Of course it was taking far longer than anticipated so with the messy adventure of tissue paper sticking to do next, I asked friends for help. On Saturday Charlotte Howard brought Perrine Maillot to the office and with Iorwerth and I we got 12 whole panels complete. We were so pleased with our efforts that we didn’t want to think of the 30 more to go! With Charlotte’s generously provided kitchen table on Sunday and Monday, we spent the next two days surrounded by tissue paper, scissors and PVA glue until the last panel was hung up on her window to dry.
Tuesday was for finishing off the tricky bits of the chandelier and making sure everything was lined up ready to install.
Installation
With a Wednesday installation date (postponed by only two days) Roland, the Bath BID ops manager, brought BID Rangers Kyle and Craig and some substantial (and thoroughly risk assessed) ladders to the Assembly Rooms where I had arrived early to lay out the panels ready to install.
My meticulous measurements of the middle window were perfectly correct, and those 12 panels fit beautifully. However it turns out the panes on the two other windows are 4 cm higher and I stared baffled at the windows, realising the massive bar across the middle window doesn’t exist on the other two. The most complex panels – with all the shoulders and arms and accessories – were now completely wrong.
I had an hour to stare forlornly at my massive error (which my excitedly set up time-lapse captured) before the team arrived, and, accepting that it wouldn’t be finished that afternoon, we set about patching up gaps with strips of black paper and focusing on the high up windows while we had the ladders.
Because the coloured tissue bled bright purple and blue ink at the slightest hint of moisture, we had to add a layer of protective plastic to each panel, to avoid staining the historic white window frames.
Fortunately Ryman’s on Westgate street had the requisite 25 metres of sticky back plastic and with Craig and Iorwerth on the delicate task – along with Dudley from the National Trust – each panel was carefully wrapped, taped up and handed to Roland up the ladder to affix. One by one the windows filled with colour and as it got dark we went outside to check progress.
‘Oh my god it works!!!’ My gleeful relief was (almost as enthusiastically) matched by the others, and I jumped around excitedly to see it take shape. The light from inside was shining though the bright pinks and reds which looked amazing around their (almost finished) silhouetted figures.
We did as much as we could before the guys packed up the ladders and I rolled up the remaining 6 panels to fix that night.
The silver lining was that the extra evening meant I could add a few little touches to the main characters, as well as an intricate National Trust symbol.
By nightfall on Thursday it was complete, but – especially with the street lights reflecting on the windows – not as brightly lit from within as I wanted it to be.
Illumination
Fortunately for me, Paul Weymouth, the lead volunteer of the Melksham Christmas Lights team, was installing lights on the street outside my home in Melksham, so on Friday I borrowed as many of Paul’s spotlights as I could carry on the bus, and Roland and Kyle helped me arrange them under the windows. Alana at the Assembly Rooms had also set up extra lights so the images came to full dazzling colourful life.
Celebration
The following Friday Allison arranged a celebratory gathering at the window to thank everyone who had helped. Bath BID board members and staff, National Trust staff, friends and helpers all enjoyed the window as the rain held off, and I was surprised and delighted to be presented with a lovingly hand tied bouquet (of gorgeously rainbow coloured flowers to match the window) by the National Trust’s Tom Boden .
The project is part of a series of illuminations in Bath this winter, ‘under the same starry sky’ and will be in place until 12th night, serving as a colourful tribute to Jane Austen as we start 2025, a year to celebrate her 250th birthday.
The purple window shows Jane Austen (holding a goose-quill pen), her sister and best friend Cassandra (holding a fan) and her father, Rev George Austen (holding a Bible) who was the reason the Austen family moved to Bath in 1801.
The middle window depicts the main characters from Austen’s 1817 novel Persuasion, Captain Frederick Wentworth and Ann Elliot, under the chandelier in the Octagon Room of Bath Assembly Rooms. The orange window depicts the protagonist from Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, with her arm linked with Mrs Allen as Mr Allen leaves them on their own, from a scene in Northanger Abbey.
Thank you
We would like to share a big thank you to all the people that helped put the project together – Charlotte Howard @capabilitycharlotte , Perrine Maillot, Iorwerth Mitchell, Digby from the National Trust, our Bath BID Rangers; Kyle, Craig and Roland, Rachel Dahl for teaching Miriam the technique and Tom, Alana, Alice, Ruth, Hazel and Duncan at the Assembly Rooms for their support.
