• England Guide

  • Introduction to England
  • Weather
  • Things not to miss
  • Getting around
  • Entry requirements
  • Money
  • Public holidays

• Explore England

  • Kent and Sussex
  • Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire
  • Oxfordshire, the Chilterns and the Cotswolds
  • Bristol, Bath and Somerset
  • Devon and Cornwall
  • East Anglia
  • The West Midlands and the Peak District
  • The East Midlands
  • The Northwest
  • Cumbria and the Lakes
  • Yorkshire
  • The Northeast

• Cities

  • Bath
    
  • Birmingham
    
  • Bradford
    
  • Brighton
    
  • Bristol
    
  • Cambridge
    
  • Canterbury
    
  • Carlisle
    
  • Chester
    
  • Chichester
    
  • Durham
    
  • Ely
    
  • Exeter
    
  • Hereford
    
  • Lancaster
    
  • Leeds
    
  • Lincoln
    
  • Liverpool
    
  • London
    
  • Manchester
    
  • Newcastle upon Tyne
    
  • Norwich
    
  • Nottingham
    
  • Oxford
    
  • Portsmouth
    
  • Salisbury
    
  • Sheffield
    
  • Wells
    
  • Winchester
    
  • York
    

England Guide

Bristol, Bath and Somerset

Bath

• Hotels and B&Bs
• Hostels
• Eating and drinking
• Pubs
• Nightlife and entertainment

The city of BATH is harmonious, compact, leisurely and complacent. Its elegant crescents and Georgian buildings are studded with plaques naming Bath's eminent inhabitants from its heyday as a spa resort; it was here that Jane Austen set Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, and where Gainsborough established himself as a portraitist and landscape painter. Nowadays Bath ranks as one of Britain's top tourist cities, yet the place has never lost the exclusive air those names evoke.

Although Bath could easily be seen on a day-trip from Bristol, it really deserves a stay of a couple of days. The city is chock-full of museums, but some of the greatest enjoyment comes simply from wandering the streets, with their pale gold architecture and sweeping vistas. Certainly no visit is complete without admiring the city's two most famous and elegant crescents: the grand, refined Royal Crescent, designed by the younger John Wood, and the elder John Wood's masterpiece, the Circus, which consists of three crescents arranged in a tight circle of three-storey houses, with a carved frieze running round the entire circle.

Bath owes its name and fame to its hot springs – the only ones in the country – which made it a place of reverence for the local Celtic population, though it had to wait for Roman technology to create a fully fledged bathing establishment. The baths fell into decline with the departure of the Romans, but the town later regained its importance under the Saxons, its abbey seeing the coronation of the first king of all England, Edgar, in 973. A new bathing complex was built in the sixteenth century, popularized by the visit of Elizabeth I in 1574, and the city reached its fashionable zenith in the eighteenth century, when Beau Nash ruled the town's social scene. It was at this time that Bath acquired its ranks of Palladian mansions and Regency townhouses, all of them built in the local Bath stone, which is still the city's leitmotif today.