Bath

Springs, neighbourhoods and destination dining

The hot spring under Bath rises at 46°C and pushes out 240,000 gallons a day, which it has been doing without interruption since before anyone thought to build a city on top of it. The Romans channelled it into a bathing complex, the Georgians drank it for their health, and today you can still lower yourself into water from the same source on the rooftop pool at Thermae Bath Spa, looking out over a skyline of honey-coloured stone. A two-hour session runs about £42.50 on a weekday. It is the only natural thermal spa in Britain you can actually bathe in, which is the sort of fact that sounds invented until you are standing in the water.

Most people stay in the compact centre, the honey-stone core around the Abbey, the Roman Baths, the Pump Room and Guildhall Market. Everything here is walkable, and you can step out of your front door directly into the World Heritage set pieces. If you would rather sleep somewhere quieter, cross Pulteney Bridge into Bathwick, where Great Pulteney Street runs wide and grand between Georgian townhouses and Jane Austen once lived at number 4 Sydney Place. South of the river is Widcombe, a village-like stretch five minutes from the centre with its own parade of shops and pubs. Up the hill to the north is Lansdown, all curved terraces and green space, with the racecourse and golf club at the top on the edge of the Cotswolds. And north-east is Walcot, the bohemian end, where the antiques shops and indie cafés cluster and Landrace Bakery does its sourdough.

Bath takes its food seriously, and the range is wider than a city this size has any right to sustain. At the top end there is The Olive Tree at the Queensberry Hotel, which has held a Michelin star since 2018 and is Somerset's only four AA-rosette restaurant. Chris Cleghorn cooks there; his signature starter is chalk stream trout with carrot and orange, and the venison and black pudding gets singled out. A short walk away on South Parade is The Elder, Mike Robinson's game and wild-food restaurant in a Grade I listed Georgian terrace, where the seven-course dinner is built around venison from the chef's own estate, described as melt in the mouth. On Wellsway there is Menu Gordon Jones, where the tasting menu is a surprise and the dishes stay secret until they arrive at the table. If you like knowing what you are eating in advance, this is not the place.

Pubs, coffee and market halls

The less formal end is just as good. Noya's Kitchen on St James's Parade does Vietnamese home cooking in a Grade II listed building; the An's Chicken Curry comes from Noya Pawlyn's mother's recipe. The Marlborough Tavern, a stone's throw from the Royal Crescent, is a Georgian dining pub the local foodies rate for seasonal home cooking. Round the corner on Rivers Street, The Chequers has been serving food since 1776 and holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and its Sunday lunches have a following of their own. The Beckford Bottle Shop on Saville Row is a wine bar that does small plates to share, wild Cornish sea bass with charcuterie velouté and cornichons among them. Over in Widcombe, the Ring o' Bells puts on live jazz in the bar every Sunday evening, and up on Widcombe Hill the White Hart, which has appeared in the Michelin Guide, leans on local produce and closes on Mondays.

For coffee, Colonna & Small's on Chapel Row was crowned best coffee shop in Europe in 2016, having opened in 2009 with Melbourne on its mind. Landrace on Walcot Street mills its own South West grain, bakes sourdough, and runs a daily-changing menu upstairs with Round Hill Roastery coffee. And if you only eat one thing here, it is probably the Sally Lunn bun, a large brioche-like batter thing made with cream and eggs, first recorded in Bath in 1780 and still served at Sally Lunn's on North Parade Passage. The house is one of the oldest in the city; the lowest floor dates to the abbey's rebuilding after the great fire of 1137. There is a French Huguenot refugee origin story attached to the bun, involving a woman named Solange Luyon, which food historians regard as fiction apparently invented in the 20th century by a previous owner who bought the run-down townhouse in 1937.

Markets are worth planning around. The Bath Farmers' Market runs Saturday mornings at Green Park Station, a working railway terminus until the 1960s that now shelters stalls, indie shops and cafés under its old roof. Almost everything on sale comes from within a forty-mile radius, the cheeses and breads and meat sold directly by the people who made them. There is a Friday food market too. For a rainy day, the Guildhall Market has been trading, by its own reckoning, for eight hundred years, which makes it the oldest shopping venue in the city.

Roman water, medieval craft and Georgian theatre

Then there are the buildings, which is the reason most people come. The Roman Baths are one of the best-preserved Roman sites north of the Alps, grown up over three centuries around a shrine to the goddess Sulis, whom the Romans matched to Minerva rather than getting rid of. The Celts had worshipped her at the spring first. Visitors used to throw curse tablets into the water, inscribed sheets of lead and pewter carrying pleas for justice or curses against people who had wronged them, and more than 12,000 coins were pulled out, the largest votive coin deposit known from Britain. A gilt bronze head of Sulis Minerva, found nearby in 1727, is on display. Next door in the Pump Room you can drink the spa water while the Pump Room Trio plays, as some version of the band has done daily since 1709, when Beau Nash founded it. His statue stands at the east end.

Bath Abbey is the last great medieval cathedral built in England, begun around 1499, and its fan-vaulted ceiling by the Vertue brothers was considered by the Vertues themselves the finest in England and France. The West Front carries carved ladders of angels, taken from Bishop Oliver King's dream of angels going up and down. King Edgar was crowned King of All England on this spot at Whitsun in 973, and the service Archbishop Dunstan compiled for it has underpinned every English coronation since.

Up the hill are the two set pieces of Georgian town planning. The Circus, begun in 1754, is three curved segments forming a full circle; John Wood the Elder designed it and died less than three months after the first stone was laid, leaving his son to finish it in 1768. The younger Wood then built the Royal Crescent, thirty houses in a sweeping arc behind 114 Ionic columns, overlooking Royal Victoria Park. Historians reckon the Circus stands for the sun and the Crescent for the moon on the city's plan. Number 1 Royal Crescent is a restored townhouse museum you can walk through, laid out as a day in the life of a Georgian family and their servants. Down at the river, Pulteney Bridge carries shops across its full span on both sides, one of only four bridges in the world to do so, and overlooks the horseshoe weir.

Green spaces, city makers and wartime loss

For all the stone, Bath has a lot of green. Royal Victoria Park sits below the Royal Crescent with a boating lake, a bandstand, botanical gardens and a large adventure playground with a zip line and a red bus with a slide built in for the smaller ones. Parade Gardens, the most central of the pleasure grounds, looks across the Avon to Pulteney Bridge and is known for its flower beds and its annual 3-D carpet bedding. Sydney Gardens in Bathwick, which Jane Austen loved, has a Jane Austen trail and the Kennet & Avon Canal running through it; you can hire a punt, a canoe or a narrowboat and drift past the architecture. For something more strenuous, the National Trust's Bath Skyline is a circular high-level walk that lifts you above the streets onto limestone downs past prehistoric burial mounds, and Prior Park Landscape Garden climbs a hill south of the city to a Palladian bridge, one of only four of its design left in the world and the last in England, with wide views back over the honey-coloured roofs.

Bath was built on that honey colour. Ralph Allen owned the quarries at Combe Down and made his fortune on the stone that raised the Georgian city; he built Prior Park partly to show the stone off, and put up a folly called Sham Castle above the city apparently just because he could. It was Beau Nash, though, who made Bath fashionable in the first place, ruling its social life as self-styled King of Bath from 1706 until his death in 1761, setting the rules of who danced with whom and banning swords in the city to stop hot-headed men fighting duels.

Not everything survived. Over the weekend of 25 to 27 April 1942, around eighty German aircraft carried out three raids on the city, part of a campaign a Foreign Office spokesman had announced by threatening to bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker guide. More than 400 people died. Many had not taken cover, assuming the bombers were headed for Bristol. The Assembly Rooms were gutted and later restored; they housed the Fashion Museum until 2022 and are now closed for a restoration due to reopen with a new Georgian visitor experience, the signage currently says, in 2027.

Arriving in Bath and Austen's last word

Getting here is easy. Bath Spa station, the busiest in Somerset, was built for the Great Western Railway by Brunel and opened in 1840; around 72 trains a day run to London Paddington, roughly one every half hour, in about an hour and twenty. Bristol is fifteen minutes the other way, described by one guide as Bath's cooler, livelier neighbour, with Banksy murals and a regenerated harbourside. Three park and ride sites ring the city with buses every fifteen minutes and free parking if you come back the same day. Wells, England's smallest city, is forty-five minutes by car, Cheddar Gorge a little beyond it, and Castle Combe, frequently called the prettiest village in England, about half an hour off.

Jane Austen set most of two novels here and had one of her characters ask, in Northanger Abbey, "Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?" The city puts her on the trail through Sydney Gardens all the same, and sells you the bun on the way out.