Welcome to the Sunday Post, your lovely little bit of Britain delivered to your inbox every Sunday. First, a few club member updates. Then we're going to tell you a story about a toll bridge (I promise it's interesting!)

I'm excited to report that we have reached 55 members in our first week! Thank you for signing up for the club; we hope this little island of positivity brings joy to your life every week. We're well on our way to our goal of 300 members, so we can remove the Google Ads from Anglotopia for everyone. I suspect it'll take us a few months to get there, but we're off to a great start! Please tell your friends about this special little club. We've also set a new interim target, when we get to 100 members, we can purchase the software we need to setup the new private chat room/forum. I cannot wait to get that set up and for us to start discussing all things British in a safe and private setting. If you have any questions about your membership, please do not hesitate to ask.

Your Private Podcast Feed

We've figured out the podcast solution with the member website. We've created a private podcast feed for the Anglotopia podcast, where new episodes (and, in the future, member-exclusive episodes) will be released early. You can subscribe to this feed using your preferred podcast program. To get your private feed address, go to your account settings --> click podcast --> and then you'll see all the options to add to your preferred program or just grab the feed link. Each of you has your own feed link, and it's dependent on your membership (i.e., if you ever cancel, the feed will stop working). We'll try to release the YouTube videos and links to the episodes two days before they go live for regular listeners (and this is only when we have new episodes, which will be for the foreseeable future).

When people ask me what I love about Britain so much, one of my answers is the anachronisms, and really, the unexpected ones you come across completely by accident. like having to pay 30p to go across a one-lane nineteenth-century stone toll bridge to get into Bath.

We were in residence in Shaftesbury for a couple of weeks, and due to an incident that involved tea and a delicate laptop, I ended up having to make several unexpected trips to Bath when Bath wasn’t really on our itinerary for the trip at all (not out of some neglect or anything, we’ve been to Bath quite a few times and simply didn’t want to go in the winter - we love Bath). But it was the closest Apple store other than one in Southampton or London, and the Apple store could repair my laptop in the time we had in Dorset.

I’ve done the drive from Shaftesbury to Bath enough times that I generally knew the way, but just in case, I had it mapped out with Apple Maps. And this was back when Apple Maps was still new and…. could be rather unreliable. Traffic was really bad coming into Bath, probably due to the popular Christmas market, and we were stuck. So, while stationary, we mapped an alternate route. We quickly turned off onto a side road and followed the map to wherever it was going to take us.

We were driving through a residential area. It was very much a place where people lived. It alternated between newer-built houses, old cottages, and bathstone terraces. It was quite nice. It was not bad for a diversion. Then we came up upon another traffic jam, but we couldn’t turn around, so we had to see this one through. Then we saw the sign that said Toll Bridge ahead.

Toll bridge?

What?

Here?

In a residential neighborhood?

This was most unexpected.

We then got stuck in a single file line, and we clearly saw that the bridge was an old stone bridge, older than probably most houses in our home state of Indiana. It was one lane and definitely not designed for the traffic of all the cars that would use it on a daily basis. The sign informed us that the toll was 30p. We dutifully searched our pockets for enough change to cross the bridge. When we approached the toll house, someone took our change and thanked us, and we crossed the bridge to the other side, which was another neighborhood of stone houses.

We’d just crossed the Bathampton Toll Bridge. Also known as the Bathampton Bridge or the Bathampton Turnpike, it is a historic toll bridge located just outside of Bath. The bridge, which spans the River Avon (one of several River Avons in England), has a rich history dating back to the early 18th century when the crossing was first a ford crossing and then evolved into a ferry crossing. In the 1870s, the current bridge was built. It was originally constructed as part of the turnpike road system, a network of privately maintained roads and bridges that charged tolls for their use. The Bathampton Toll Bridge played a crucial role in facilitating transportation and trade in the region, connecting the city of Bath to its surrounding areas during its heyday as a spa town during the Georgian, Regency, and Victorian eras.

By Heikki Immonen, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60717079

Over the years, the bridge has been witness to significant historical events and has remained an iconic landmark in the region. The tolls collected from the bridge were used for the maintenance and upkeep of the structure, ensuring its continued service to the community. However, in recent years, there has been some controversy surrounding the toll charges. The tolls for crossing the bridge have seen significant increases, leading to debates and discussions among local residents and commuters who rely on the bridge for their daily travels. The rising toll charges have sparked concerns about accessibility and affordability, prompting calls for a review of the toll pricing structure.

It is rather bizarre that a rather anodyne road in the middle of the neighborhood would have a toll bridge. But these toll bridges are usually protected by acts of Parliament, so getting rid of them is a challenge most are uninterested in pursuing, so it continues to exist. The local newspaper SomersetLive recently reported that it is one of the most profitable toll bridges in Britain, which suits the private company that owns and maintains the bridge perfectly fine.  It’s estimated that one year recently, the bridge raked in £1,332,500 (about $2 million). Not bad for a centuries-old investment.

It now costs £1 to cross the bridge, and it’s gone up quite a bit since we crossed it. This has annoyed locals who think it’s a rip-off, but it’s a main route into Bath, so many people are still forced to pay the toll whether they like it or not. I sympathize with the locals, as in Chicagoland, we have to deal with the Chicago Skyway being privatized, with tolls that rise every year, though admittedly, the bridges are slightly different!

I always found the crossing quaint. If I were in the area again, I’d go out of my way to cross it, to play my part in keeping these historical anachronisms going. Bath is lovely anyway. Oh, and the Apple store fixed the computer after a week. However, they gave it a UK keyboard, which was… a challenge to learn after a lifetime on US keyboards!