We had a very late night coming home from Regents Park, and a VERY early morning for our trip to Bath. Starting with a trip to Paddington station (a very lovely bear seen below) and then a long train ride to the city, it was looking like a rough morning for me.
The city of Bath, named after its roman bath, has a big old bath in the middle.
The bath was interesting.
There were lots of buskers.
They were interesting.
Jane Austen lived there.
The Jane Austen Centre was interesting.
Mary Shelley lived there.
MARY SHELLEY LIVED THERE!
SHE WROTE MOST OF FRANKENSTEIN THERE
THERE WAS A MARY SHELLEY FRANKENSTEIN MUSEUM!
(Shawn told me I can write about that for my blog post on Bath. I am most certainly taking him up on that.)
This revelation greatly improved my trip to Bath. While the city atmosphere was wonderful and lively (in a more musically inclined way than London. it honestly felt sorta like the markets in London), Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein was a vast upgrade coming right after the Jane Austen Centre.
Bath was all great, but Frankenstein is much more my style.
With an escape room at the top, and a “dank foreboding basement,” the museum does a fantastic job mixing between a museum and an experience. As a museum, it focuses on the life and works of Mary Shelly as well as the legacy of Frankenstein as a story, and a cultural icon. One room full of pop culture memorabilia of the monster (and a pinball machine), another that loops the very first movie adaptation of the story, a room with a giant bust of Shelley, and several others.
I loved every second of this (so much so that when I left and found friends from the group, I made sure to bring them there to share the experience. We even tried to explore the basement scare section as a group (as I am far too cowardly to do on my own, having both a fear of the dark and loud noises), scaring us enough that we failed to see all the rooms (the employee slamming the door behind us upon reaching the bottom of the stairs was both unexpected and scary enough to put us on edge, but the crawl space and the motion-activated sudden burst of air and loud noise had us hastily making our way to the exit looking over our shoulders) My favorite part was easily the life-sized animatronic of the monster. Not only was it accurate to the book, but it was an impressive sight to behold and worth the price of admission alone in my opinion.
Theatre in London U of A 
Braedon, so glad you found this! We need to put Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein on our Bath literary highlight list in addition to the Jane Austen Center.
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