This is going to sound like a joke because it should be one, but it isn’t. That photo above is of me standing outside 25 Gay Street, Bath, in the UK. It’s a dentist’s.

You can’t just go inside without an appointment and I did try. Too much of a wimp to punch myself in the mouth, I did still do my very best to eat all the chocolate in the city. I tell you, I was diligent. Yet nothing worked and so the outside was as far as I could get.

And I was still starstruck.

Because 25 Gay Street, Bath, is one of the few surviving places where Jane Austen lived. I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to stand there, nor really can I explain why it was such a thrill. By chance I have just started re-reading Austen, so the trip to Bath was well-timed, and she is a favourite writer for a dozen reasons including how swiftly vicious she can be, introducing a character and entirely destroying them in six words or so. But, still, I am rarely that starstruck and even more rarely by a building.

The problem is that you’d never know she lived there.

You have to already know and fortunately there is help. Just down the road at 40 Gay Street there is the Jane Austen Centre. Skip the oddly Benny Hill-like video that plays in one downstairs room and instead talk with the staff. There’s something incongruous about chatting away with a woman whose Regency costume only just covers her tattoo, but it’s a happy incongruity and all the nattering with the staff was my favourite part of the exhibition.

Not quite true. I knew nothing at all about Cassandra Austen, Jane’s mother, and now I know all I need from a poem of hers on display where three lines about a party she went to are enough to paint a picture of someone you’d like.

They came from Mr Bramston’s house,
With Madam, & her maiden Sister;
(Had she been absent who’d have missed her?)

It was funny hearing a laugh at intervals and knowing someone had just read to that point.

But, so, and. Here’s this Jane Austen Centre, set up in a house that is a minute away from where she actually lived and is presumably very like her place. Pop up the road to hers, though, and as I say, you will find a dentist’s.

You just won’t find anything else.

Not a sign, not a thing. Well, obviously there’s one sign or you wouldn’t know it was a dentist’s. And okay, there’s also “25” or you wouldn’t know which house was which. But there is not one single pixel celebrating, boasting or even vaguely acknowledging that Austen lived there.

It’s just wrong. I think of all the wit in her novels and this dentist’s office couldn’t manage one line. They presumably talk about plaque in that office, but they don’t have a blue one outside.

And they don’t even have a sign saying: “It is a tooth universally acknowledged…”