Avebury or Stonehenge – Which Should You Visit?
March 6, 2026
Ten Years on: A Reflection on a Decade
I started In & Beyond Bath from a spare bedroom with no industry experience, no roadmap, and three lists. Ten years on, here's the honest story of what it took to build something I'm genuinely proud of.
Key Takeaways
- Ten years of guided tours from Bath — and what we've learned: From a spare bedroom startup to one of the region's most trusted tour companies, here's the honest story
- From insolvency to five-star reviews — the decade that built In & Beyond Bath: The unfiltered story of what it actually takes to build something worth being proud of
- Why Bath's best-kept secrets make for better tours than the obvious highlights: And why we deliberately keep half the itinerary hidden until you're already there
- How In & Beyond Bath became what it is today: The people, the setbacks, and the philosophy behind a decade of five-star experiences in Bath and beyond
I turned 36 in Cusco, Peru, sitting in a restaurant with a plate of ceviche in front of me and - if I'm honest - a fair amount of uncertainty about what on earth came next.
I had just spent three years in Zambia setting up schools. Before that, I had been a history and politics teacher in the UK. Teaching overseas had given me something I hadn't fully known I was missing: real freedom. The freedom to actually educate - to engage, to inspire, to connect - without the weight of bureaucracy and box-ticking that has, in my view, slowly strangled so much of what is wonderful about the teaching profession in this country. I had thrived out there in a way I wasn't sure I could replicate at home.
The plan had been to come back to the UK for nine months and then take another posting abroad. Simple enough. But while I was travelling across South America in early 2016, my wife at the time told me she wanted to settle in England permanently - to put down roots, to think about starting a family. I understood and supported it completely, but it meant I had to figure out something else.
The problem was that I genuinely didn't know what that something else should be. I'm not someone who has always had a clear professional calling. I fell into teaching - found I loved it, found I was good at it - but I felt constrained by it, and didn't want to invest years in a new career only to discover, somewhere down the line, that I'd made the same mistake.
Yet, I still didn’t know which direction to turn. So I sat down and made three lists. One of my passions and interests. One of my skills. One that described the kind of working environment I wanted to operate in. It was one of the best things I ever did.
When I looked at what came out, something began to take shape:
- A passion for travel, history, and human connection
- A love of meaning — the kind you find in a landscape, a story, or a conversation with a stranger
- A love of driving and of educating people
- A deep, almost inexplicable love of the England most people take for granted — the ancient villages, the footpaths through fields, the pubs that haven't changed since the seventeenth century, the quiet medieval churches where time seems to have stopped
- A need for autonomy, variety, and no ceiling on what was possible
I wanted to create a tour company that shared the wonders of my home region in the manner that I sought, but had so rarely found — as a traveller myself.
So on my 36th birthday, eating ceviche and watching the people pass by, I realised I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to build a tour company that would share my own beloved region back home in the way I sought to experience the places that I travelled to. I realised that although I always travelled because the must-sees and the well-known called me, it was always the intimate experiences and the unexpected that enthralled me – the people I connected with, the discoveries and the stories, and the moments of reflection and peace that made each and every trip truly magical. Yes, seeing the iconic cities and landmarks I'd always fantasised about visiting was amazing, but the real magic was always elsewhere.
I decided I would go home and build a touring company that shared the England that I loved and missed with travellers looking to go beyond the shiny tourist sites to connect with something a little more authentic. I had no industry experience. I had no roadmap. I had a conviction, three lists, and an opportunity. It felt like enough.
Building From Nothing
I came back and set up at a desk in the spare bedroom of my in-laws' house. The first few months were spent building everything from nothing: a brand, a website, a vehicle, a way of working.
I named the business ‘Around and About Bath’ – I wanted a name that was memorable but could one day scale to other locations if fortune favoured it. After six years away from the Bath region, I had returned.
Our previous van with our old branding
Bath and the surrounding area had been my home for a decade before I left on adventures to London and Africa, and an obvious home for what I had in mind. The city is a UNESCO World Heritage site, one of the most visited cities in England outside London, and the area is the essence of quintessential England – something I felt was almost criminally underappreciated by the people passing through it.
My original vision was perhaps a little pure. I wanted to take genuinely curious travellers - the kind who come somewhere not just to tick off the sights but to actually understand a place - out into the wider region to find the things that most visitors would never even know to ask about. The hidden valleys, the forgotten manor houses, the villages that look exactly as they did five hundred years ago. The England I loved.
Jules with guests on the Hidden Cotswolds Tour
It was a friend who, very helpfully, pointed out the flaw in this. “You're planning to set up a business,' he said, 'in an industry you've never worked in, taking people you've never met, to places they've never heard of. How exactly is that going to work?”
It was a valuable truth and a comment that completely reoriented my thinking. Visitors needed a reason to book with me. They needed the familiar before they'd follow me towards the unfamiliar.
And so the formula that has defined In & Beyond Bath ever since was born: the must-sees alongside the extraordinary unknowns, held together in a single experience that is both insightful, relaxed and personal, resulting in an experience that is much richer, deeper and worth considerably more than the sum of its parts.
I also had to make some decisions about how to operate. Several well-meaning advisors gave me confident but entirely opposing advice. Get a minibus and a bus licence. No - get a Mercedes V-Class and a uniform. Be a coach operator or be a private guide. I didn't want to be either.
What I wanted was to offer something that combined the accessibility and convenience of a small group tour; bookable by seat, thoughtfully designed and curated, with the intimacy and genuine care of a private experience. Something that felt personal, not packaged, combining the best and breadth of the region without feeling rushed or iterative.
Guests stood outside the vehicle, about to head onto the
'Cotswolds & Autumn Colours at Westonbirt' tour
For the vehicle, I looked at the Mercedes V-Class and decided against it. Too narrow, too low, too cramped for the kind of countryside driving I had in mind, along narrow, winding lanes that offered stunning views. Instead, I set aside badge and status for comfort and space, picking a top-specification Ford Tourneo Custom: bigger, squarer, more comfortable, and more suitable. With the overall experience being the ultimate deciding factor, a policy that is now well-embedded and one that I think has been proven right.
The First Guests
My first tour ran in August 2016. A young Canadian couple, both working in tech. By the end of the day, they told me it was the best travel experience they had ever had. And that I was charging too little.
The couple after that said the same thing. And the couple after that. That third tour was two couples, one from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and another couple from Georgia, USA. By the end of the tour, they’d become friends, exchanged contact details and invited each other to visit.
From those very first tours, I knew - I really knew - that what I was doing worked. That it was different and that it was genuinely better than what most visitors to this region were experiencing. What I hadn't fully reckoned with was just how difficult the years that followed would turn out to be.
The Hardest Years
I want to be honest about this part, because I think there's very little value in a ten-year reflection that skips over the difficult bits and presents only a tidy arc of progress.
2018
The truth is that building this business has cost me more — personally, financially, emotionally — than I could have imagined when I sat in that restaurant in Cusco. In 2018, my marriage ended. It was sudden, and the fallout was severe. I found myself in a position of real financial vulnerability at exactly the moment I needed stability, and I pushed harder as a result — trying to escape, and trying, if I'm honest, to prove something to people who had made me feel like a failure.
2019
By November 2019, I had no choice but to make the business insolvent. The costs and complexity I'd accumulated had grown faster than the revenue to support them (despite a 100% growth rate), and I couldn't keep it going.
That was the lowest point. Not just because it was a business failure, but because I knew that the business wasn’t failing for the right reasons. Following advice from my accountant, I began insolvency proceedings, with the goal of continuing.
From this point, I was carrying much of the business’s debt personally, as the guarantor, and more alarmingly, I was facing the prospect of bankruptcy.
2020
However, with a busy 2020 ahead, it would hopefully be a matter of time before everything righted itself – and then COVID-19 arrived.
March 2020. Everything closed. The business I had been slowly, painfully trying to piece back together had gone again, overnight, for reasons that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the world.
I took the lockdown as an opportunity to slow down and surrender. To let go. To stop fighting and start listening to what I actually needed.
Faced with yet another seemingly terminal setback, and forced to go onto unemployment benefit, I started to question whether I should begin to accept that maybe trying to make this business work was not the path for me. I decided to meditate and ask the universe for direction.
Turning point & Rebrand
The very next day — I mean this quite literally — I received an email from a well-known screen actor who had been quietly following the business for several years. He told me, simply and sincerely, to keep going. To stick with what I was doing.
It was a small thing, perhaps. But it arrived at the exact right moment.
Something had unlocked in me through the act of letting go. I re-engaged with the business — but differently. With clearer eyes, fewer illusions, and a much better understanding of my purpose, I knew what I needed to build.
The name changed too: Around and About Bath became In & Beyond Bath. The 'In & Beyond' represented the broader philosophy I wanted to carry forward — depth of experience, breadth of ambition, and the possibility, one day, of other places and other locations beyond Bath. The 'Bath' piece represented something equally important: that wherever the brand went, it would always be grounded in local knowledge and genuine passion for place. The new name wasn't just a rebrand but a re-orienting, a maturing.
The People who Joined Me
As the pandemic slowly lifted, I hired two young people through the government's Kickstart Scheme — a programme designed to give 18 to 25-year-olds a foothold in the working world, with the government covering six months of wages. One of them was William Davy, a recent graduate in music production who was looking for his first real experience of working life.
Will hasn't left. That was five years ago now.
Will and Jules in the grounds of Lacock on a day photographing locations - something they did frequently building up an extensive library of images.
I don't think I can overstate Will's contribution to what In & Beyond Bath has become. His energy and creativity arrived at a moment when I needed both. His commitment to learning, his refusal to be daunted by the scale of what we were trying to build, his genuine enthusiasm for the work — these things have been a constant source of motivation and inspiration.
He helped me realise a vision for the marketing, the brand and the digital side of the business that I had always imagined but never had the resources to bring to life.
Without Will, I'm honestly not sure In & Beyond Bath would still be here. I am absolutely certain it would not be what it is today.
2022 was our first full year back in operation. Three of us, Will in digital marketing, a guide, Max, and me — starting again, with cleaner foundations, a sharper focus, and a much clearer sense of what we were building and why.
In 2023, Ariane, a friend of a friend, who had been destined to join us in 2020 before Covid struck, joined part time to work as our back-office administrator, and just like Will, her arrival had an immediate and transformative impact, acting as a calm, grounding force, with a fierce intellect and a focus on the numbers, caution and sytemisation that we really needed.Building Stronger Foudations
The years since have been about doing the unglamorous but essential work of turning a passion project into a proper business. Building systems and processes. Writing policies. Hiring carefully. Creating the kind of internal infrastructure that a business needs if it is ever going to be bigger than its founder's ability to hold everything together personally.
It is not the most exciting thing to describe. But it has been, I think, among the most important things I have done.
Where We Are Now
In 2025, our turnover was five times what it was in 2022. We've grown from a team of three to a team of fifteen. Critical team members such as Rache and Simon have arrived and again moved us forward significantly.
- In 2025, we reintroduced Bath walking tours.
- And in 2026, we're launching day tours from London by train.
We work with some of the finest hotels in the region. We have real, growing relationships with travel trade partners across North America and beyond. We receive awards. We get written about.
The Team in 2024 after winning 'International Tourism' at the prestigious Bristol, Bath & Somerset Tourism Awards.
And our guests - reliably, consistently, movingly - tell us that what we do has exceeded every expectation they arrived with. These five-star reviews are not the result of marketing. They are the result of culture. Of a team of people who are not just competent at their jobs but genuinely invested in the experience of every single guest who comes through the door.
I am surrounded, at this point in the business, by people I regard as friends as much as colleagues - people whose talent and passion I find genuinely humbling, and feel genuinely privileged to work alongside every day.
What I'm Most Proud Of
But when I try to pinpoint what I am actually most proud of, it isn't the commercial progress. It's the moments.
I think about an afternoon in a medieval church in the Cotswolds. I'd taken a couple on a private tour, and the lady had mentioned - quietly, almost shyly - that she had always dreamed of hearing a choir singing inside an English church. We walked in and found a choir in the middle of practice. The sound filled the vaulted stone space, and she began to cry - not from sadness, but from the pure unexpected joy of it. You don't plan those moments. You create the conditions in which they become possible.I think about a retired English teacher from California who had spent her whole adult life dreaming of visiting England, and who had finally, bravely, made the trip alone. At the end of the day, she told our small group — and she insisted on saying it to everyone present — that what we had shared with her was the highlight not just of her travels, but of her entire life. She was not speaking loosely. She meant every word of it.
And I think about a couple I met for a private tour more recently. The wife was navigating a deep personal journey catalysed by loss, and as we got talking, I discovered she was a devoted Peter Gabriel fan. I thought: we cannot spend a day together and not visit Solsbury Hill, just outside of Bath.
So we did. And then to Gabriel’s Real World Studios. And watching her stand on that hilltop, in the wind, connecting with music that had been a light in some of her darkest moments was something I know she, and thus I, will carry with us for a long time.
Solsbury Hill, Drone
Every guest is an opportunity to connect on a human level.
That's why I started this. It still is.
I have met extraordinary people through this work. Business leaders and musicians. Actors and academics. Teachers and medics. Families, solo travellers and couples celebrating things large and small.
I have met people from all over the world with every kind of perspective, many very different from my own - and in almost every case, something real has passed between us. Some moment of genuine exchange. Of curiosity meeting curiosity. Of two or more people being, briefly but meaningfully, part of each other's story.
That is what I set out to create, and I’m delighted that ten years in, it’s still exactly what we do, and what we've built.
The Next 1o Years
I'll be honest: the first decade has been a financial and emotional toll. There have been moments when I genuinely wasn't sure we'd make it.
I have sacrificed a great deal to get to this point - relationships, financial security, sleep, certainty. I don't say that with self-pity.
It has also given me more than I can properly account for: a business I am genuinely proud of, a team I love, a sense of purpose I suspect I would have spent a lifetime searching for otherwise. But I would be lying if I said the road here was anything other than hard.
The next ten years, I hope and intend, will be different. Not easier necessarily - building something worthwhile is never really easy - but different in kind.
Less about survival. More about flourishing.
A Bigger Dream
I have always held, fairly quietly, a much larger vision for what In & Beyond Bath could become. The 'In & Beyond' piece of the name was always intentional - a suggestion of something bigger than one city.
My dream is to build a multi-location brand: sharing the most magical corners of the United Kingdom, and eventually beyond, united by a common philosophy and an uncompromising standard of care, but rooted in every location - in the genuine knowledge and passion of the people who actually live there.
Not a franchise. Not a copy-and-paste operation. A family of local experts, each deeply connected to their own part of the world, each as committed as we are to doing this in the right way.
Commitment to Quality
I think sometimes about Apple - not in any self-aggrandising sense, but as a model for what a company built on a passion to do things differently, not just because they’re different but because they’re better, and to make that ‘better‘ as accessible to as many people as possible, while being honest that genuine quality has a cost.
We are not the cheapest option. We never will be. But I want In & Beyond to be the name that people reach for when they want to know, with certainty, that what they're getting is the real thing.
Internally, my ambitions are equally clear. I want to build a business where the people who make it successful share genuinely in that success — through fair pay, real development opportunities, flexible working, and ultimately, through ownership. Two things I'm committed to pursuing:
- Employee ownership — inspired by the John Lewis model, where shared ownership is built into the fabric of how the business works
- B Corporation status — a formal expression of the values we already try to live by in terms of social and environmental responsibility
The Responsibility That Comes With Growth
The communities we work in matter enormously to me. The Cotswolds, Bath, Wiltshire, and Somerset are living places, with residents whose quality of life is genuinely affected by how tourism is done.
We have always tried to be thoughtful: pointing guests towards independent businesses, moving carefully through fragile landscapes, avoiding the worst impacts of mass tourism where we can, and obscuring the places we visit in our itineraries and on social media. As we grow, that responsibility only deepens.
Most of all, though, the next ten years are about allowing this business to become what, somewhere deep down, I always believed it could be. Financially abundant. Widely loved. Recognised by guests, by the industry, and by the communities we serve as a genuinely good thing in the world.
The first ten years taught me everything I needed to know. The next ten are for doing it properly.
Jules taken outside West Kennet Long Barrow, which Silbury Hill in the background. One of Jules' favourite places.
Thank you to every guest, every colleague, and every person who believed in this before it was easy to.
In & Beyond Bath was founded in April 2016.
First tour: August 2016.
Visit the England
Jules fell in love with
Ten years of getting it right, and we're still only showing people what they didn't know to ask for. Come and find out what that means.
