Bob Jenkins: Let's hear it for real Bath

Reasons to dislike the Bus Rapid Transit scheme, set for a public inquiry at least over compulsory purchase orders, are plentiful. For a start, the huge expense and potential farce of shaving a few minutes off bus times through suburbs so as to sit like lemons in a city centre jam.

A hint of browbeating also got backs up – even if you don't like the Newbridge project, you'd better lump it or risk losing the dosh for schemes you do like.

Not surprisingly, Newbridge residents were up in arms about losing part of their gardens, but I've detected outrage among people right across the city.

An English person's home and garden is their castle, to update the phrase. Perhaps people are also unsettled by the thought that it could have been their community trampled on because it was in the way of some highfaluting scheme.

I reckon many suburban residents, from Southdown to Larkhall and Lower Weston to Widcombe, have long thought flashy city centre and tourism issues dominate, while everyday life in the real Bath goes on, almost unnoticed.

Years ago, when the council was in crisis over whether to go ahead with the spa project, people I know in Oldfield Park were indifferent, apart from moaning about paying for it. To this day, the spa doesn't matter to them; the nearest they go is Bhs. They also never lie awake at night worrying about World Heritage status and, if pressed about the Holburne extension, reply, "What's the Holburne?"

Their concerns are paying bills, holding on to jobs, school issues, activities for their teenagers, local shops and buses that don't come.

Late last year, at a BetterBath Forum meeting, Councillor Tim Ball refreshingly aired the realities of life in the suburbs, sticking up for his Twerton stamping ground and querying the city centre mania.

Personally, I'd like to see local communities made Bath's big priority in 2010 – citizens made to feel they count and suburbs and villages put at the top of the list.

This is, after all, the real Bath, not just some place in the way of the BRT.