Roman Baths

The Roman Baths in Bath grew around the only hot springs in Britain, which the UK National Commission for UNESCO says rise from three main springs: the King’s Spring, the Hetling Spring and the Cross Bath Spring. The Roman Baths’ own history trail dates the completed baths and temple to AD 75 and says the complex reached its greatest extent in the 4th century. After that the buildings declined and were prone to flooding, and the trail marks the 18th century as the moment Bath itself was transformed.

The Great Bath was recovered much later. Historic England’s listing (reproduced by British Listed Buildings) records that the city architect, Major Charles Davis, excavated it between 1878 and 1880, and that the Great Bath measures 25 metres by 12 metres and is 1.5 metres deep. The same listing calls the Roman Baths a Scheduled Monument (a site given legal protection as a nationally important archaeological monument). The Roman Baths’ trail credits workmen trying to repair a leak from the spring with the late 19th-century discovery, and invites visitors to find the point on the pillars around the Great Bath where Roman stonework ends and Victorian stonework begins. It treats the Terrace above the bath as a later addition too. The trail also lists the formation of the Bath Excavation Committee in the 1960s as a turning point in the site’s story.

Sulis Minerva

Sulis Minerva was the goddess at the centre of Roman worship in Bath, a Romano-Celtic figure that World History Encyclopedia describes as a blend of Sulis, the Celtic goddess of healing and sacred water, and Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. The Roman Baths Museum’s description of her gilt bronze head calls it one of the best-known objects from Roman Britain. It was found in Stall Street in 1727 and probably comes from the cult statue that stood in her temple beside the Sacred Spring, perhaps dating from the founding of the site in the later first century AD. The museum notes that gilt bronze sculpture is rare in Roman Britain, with only two other fragments known, that small holes in the hairline once held rivets for a tall Corinthian helmet, and that the head has six layers of gilding.

The idea of a temple to Minerva at Bath is far older than that discovery. An article in the journal Antiquity traces it to the 3rd-century writer Solinus, who described British hot springs presided over by Minerva, whose temple kept a perpetual fire. Geoffrey of Monmouth knew Solinus’s work, and by the time of the antiquarians Camden, Guidott and Stukeley the tradition was firmly established, with a belief that the temple lay beneath the Abbey church. The carving from the temple’s pediment, often called a gorgon’s head, is still debated: World History Encyclopedia says no one knows for certain what it was meant to symbolise.

Bath Abbey

Bath Abbey first appears in the historical record in AD 675, according to the Abbey’s own history page, when the Anglo-Saxon king Osric gave land near Bath to Abbess Bertana to found a convent. Historic England’s list entry says a church stood here by the 8th century and that King Edgar was crowned on the site in 973 by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, as the first king of all England. Bath Abbey adds that Dunstan compiled the service, which has been used at every coronation since, and that Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1973 to mark a thousand years.

Almost nothing of the earlier building survives. Historic England records that Bishop Oliver King, Chief Secretary to Henry VII, began a wholesale rebuilding in 1499 that produced one of the last great Gothic churches, with Robert and William Vertue, the royal master masons, as his masons. Visit Bath, drawing on the Abbey’s Head of Interpretation, says the Vertues designed the fan-vaulted ceiling east of the tower and considered it the finest in England and France. The Abbey’s history page also records a legend that King dreamed of angels, an olive tree and a crown, and notes that the west front carries a crown, an olive tree and a bishop’s mitre in his honour.

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 (Henry VIII’s closure of England’s monasteries), Historic England says the church was offered to the citizens of Bath for 500 marks, they refused, and the unfinished building was left gutted and roofless. In the 1570s Elizabeth I authorised a seven-year national collection to pay for its rebuilding.

Pulteney Bridge

Pulteney Bridge was built between 1769 and 1774 to link Bath with Bathwick, across the River Avon, and Historic England says it opened a new phase in the city’s growth. According to the listing, William Pulteney opened talks with the Corporation (the city’s governing council) about a new bridge in 1768 and obtained an Act for the development in 1769. The Sir John Soane’s Museum records that a design by Thomas Paty of Bristol was prepared and partly built in 1769 before Pulteney changed his mind and commissioned his fellow Scot, Robert Adam, to design the bridge and a new town at Bathwick.

Historic England says Adam probably had the idea of making it an inhabited bridge, lined with shops along its length, answering the Italian architect Palladio’s proposals for monumental bridges topped with dwellings. The result, the listing says, is a notable Neoclassical structure (inspired by ancient Greek and Roman design) that embodies the neo-Roman ambition of the Pulteney estate and Adam.

The bridge has not stayed untouched. Historic England records that the western mid-stream pier was rebuilt in 1804, that the bridge was altered in the 1890s and in 1903, and that it was restored to some degree in 1951 and 1975, the last time with the upper structure restored by the Georgian Group and Bath City Council. The Soane Museum adds that the Pulteney estate came through Frances Pulteney, whose lands were mainly in London and Bath, and that her husband sought to develop Bath most of all.

The Circus and Royal Crescent

John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger, father and son, designed The Circus and the Royal Crescent. Historic England records The Circus as built between 1754 and 1769 by Wood the Elder and completed by Wood the Younger, as three curved terraces of houses numbered 1 to 30, listed Grade I (England’s top category of listed building) on 12 June 1950. Visit Bath says it was first called the King’s Circus, that Wood the Elder died less than three months after the first stone was laid, and that he admired the druids and studied Stonehenge, giving the Circus the same diameter. Historic Houses places The Circus in the Woods’ sequence of developments that began with Queen Square, built between 1729 and 1734, and culminated in the Royal Crescent.

Historic England’s listing describes the Royal Crescent as thirty houses in a concave semi-elliptical sweep, by Wood the Younger, also Grade I. No.1 Royal Crescent says its house was the first in the crescent, built to his designs between 1767 and 1774 with a uniform Palladian (classical, inspired by Palladio) front, and that the open view in front was a key element of the design, now partly preserved as Royal Victoria Park and a small lawn. No.1 is today a museum and the headquarters of Bath Preservation Trust. The UK National Commission for UNESCO notes that the uniform scale and height of Bath’s buildings, and the widespread use of local limestone, give the city the look it has today.

Jane Austen in Bath

Jane Austen moved to Bath in 1801, to 4 Sydney Place, after her father’s retirement, according to Visit Bath. Her family’s ties to the city were older: before the move she had stayed with her aunt and uncle, the Leigh-Perrots, at No.1 The Paragon, visits that Visit Bath says inspired her to write Northanger Abbey. All six of her novels mention Bath, and two, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are set there.

While living in the city she revisited Northanger Abbey, then titled Susan, and began The Watsons, which she left unfinished. When the lease on 4 Sydney Place ended, the family moved to lodgings in Green Park Buildings in 1804. After her father’s death, Jane, her mother and her sister took the first floor of 25 Gay Street, which they shared with a lodger, before moving to the less agreeable Trim Street. Jane left Bath in 1806.

Visit Bath notes that 25 Gay Street is now a dental surgery, a few doors from the Jane Austen Centre at 40 Gay Street, and that Austen looked back fondly on her time in Gay Street, placing the Crofts there in Persuasion. Gay Street is on the walk up to The Circus and Royal Crescent.