5 Days in Bath

The Romans arrived around AD 43 and within a few decades had built a temple and a great bathing complex over the hot spring, calling the town Aquae Sulis. They joined the local goddess Sulis to their own Minerva and worshipped her as Sulis Minerva. The Roman Baths you see today were dug out again in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Victorians added the terrace and the statues of emperors that ring the Great Bath, the green, steaming pool that's still lined with Roman lead.

Take your time with the museum underneath. The gilt bronze head of Minerva, found by workmen in 1727, is the star, but the best things are small: the curse tablets, bits of lead on which Romans scratched their complaints to the goddess, mostly about stolen cloaks, and the Sacred Spring itself, where the water comes out orange from the iron.

At the end of the visit you come out next to the Grand Pump Room, built in the 1790s as the social center of Georgian Bath. Fashionable visitors came here every morning to drink the waters and to see and be seen, by rules set earlier in the century by Beau Nash, the Master of Ceremonies, whose statue looks down from a niche. Jane Austen sends her characters here in Northanger Abbey.

The spa water is served from a fountain here. It's warm and tastes strongly of iron, about as good as you'd expect from a cure. Have a coffee under the chandelier, usually with a pianist playing in the morning.

There's been a church on the site of Bath Abbey since 675, and in 973 Edgar was crowned king of the English here, in a service that's still the model for British coronations. The church you see is the last great medieval church built in England, begun in 1499 by Bishop Oliver King, who, the story goes, dreamed of angels climbing up and down a ladder to heaven. Look at the west front: the angels are carved on ladders on both sides of the great window, and a couple are climbing down head first.

Inside, the fan vaulting, a stone ceiling of spreading fans, is wonderfully delicate. The part over the choir is Tudor, and the Victorians finished the nave in the 1860s to the original design. Then climb the tower, 212 steps, on a guided tour that takes you behind the clock face, into the bell chamber and out onto the roof, with a view straight down into the Roman Baths.

Around the corner in North Parade Passage, in a house of 1622 on medieval foundations (the shop says 1482), is where people queue for the Sally Lunn bun, a big, light, brioche-like bun, eaten sweet with butter and jam or savory with toppings. The shop's story is that a French Huguenot refugee, Solange Luyon, baked it here in the 1680s. Historians think the tale was dreamed up to sell buns in the 1930s, but the bun itself is old, real and very good. There's a small kitchen museum in the cellar.

Don't confuse it with the Bath bun, a smaller, sweeter bun with currants and crushed sugar on top. Locals will correct you.

Since the 1930s, volunteer guides chosen by the Mayor of Bath have led free walking tours of the city from outside the Pump Room. They're the best introduction to Bath you can get, two hours of history, gossip and architecture, and they won't take tips. It also takes you past the places you'll see properly in the next two days, so you'll have a map of the city in your head.

For centuries you could bathe in the hot water in Bath, until the old baths closed in 1978. Thermae Bath Spa, a glass cube by Nicholas Grimshaw set behind old stone fronts, opened in 2006 and made Bath the only place in Britain where you can bathe in natural hot spring water. Inside is an indoor pool with currents, steam rooms and, the reason to come, an open-air pool on the roof.

Go at dusk. Floating in the warm water with the Abbey tower lit up across the rooftops, steam rising into the cold air, is the best thing to do in Bath.

Across the street, the same company runs the Cross Bath, a small open-air Georgian bath built over one of the three springs, in sessions of an hour and a half for a few people at a time. It's quieter, cheaper and the one many locals prefer.

In the back garden of 19 New King Street, on 13 March 1781, William Herschel, a German-born musician who played the organ in Bath and built telescopes in his spare time, found a new planet with a telescope he'd made himself. It was the first planet discovered since antiquity, and he named it after King George III. It's now called Uranus. His sister Caroline, who worked with him, became one of the first professional women astronomers.

The Herschel Museum is their house, a modest Georgian townhouse with its kitchen, workshop and music room, and it's a good look at how the middle classes lived in Bath, not just the lords.

Queen Square, laid out by John Wood the Elder from 1728, was his first big piece of Georgian planning, a square of houses designed to look like a single palace. Wood was the architect who made Bath what it is, and his son finished the job. Walk up Gay Street, where Jane Austen lived at No. 25 in 1805. She spent five years in Bath, from 1801 to 1806, set Northanger Abbey and Persuasion here, and may not have much liked it: she wrote of leaving "with what happy feelings of escape".

The Jane Austen Centre at 40 Gay Street is a museum about her and Regency Bath, with costumed guides and a tea room. It isn't one of her homes, and it's really for fans, but they'll love it.

At the top of Gay Street is the Circus, a ring of about thirty houses split into three curved terraces, begun by John Wood the Elder in 1754 and finished by his son after his death. Look at the columns: each floor has a different classical order, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, stacked like the Colosseum turned inside out. Around the first floor runs a frieze of hundreds of carved symbols, and the parapet is topped with stone acorns. Wood was obsessed with ancient Britain and the legend of King Bladud, who's said to have founded Bath after its waters cured him and his pigs, and some people think the Circus was meant to echo Stonehenge. It's a theory, not a fact, but you'll see Stonehenge on day four and can judge for yourself.

Walk west along Brock Street to the Royal Crescent, the younger Wood's masterpiece of 1767-74: thirty houses joined into one sweeping curve of 114 columns, facing a lawn and the park below. It's the image of Bath, and it's as good in real life. The lawn in front is split by a ha-ha, a hidden ditch: the half nearest the houses is for residents, the half below is public.

At the end, No. 1 Royal Crescent is a museum furnished as it would have been in the 1770s, from the dining room upstairs to the kitchens below, where servants kept it all running. Bridgerton fans will recognize the Crescent: the series filmed all over Bath.

Below the Crescent, Royal Victoria Park was opened in 1830 by an 11-year-old Princess Victoria, years before she became queen. It's the city's biggest park, with a botanical garden at the top and plenty of grass for a picnic lunch. On summer mornings and evenings, hot-air balloons often take off from here.

On the way back into town, walk past the Assembly Rooms on Bennett Street, where Georgian Bath went to dance, play cards and take tea, and where Austen's heroines meet their admirers. They're closed for a big restoration until 2027, but the outside is worth a look. Then walk down Milsom Street, the Georgian shopping street, where Austen sent her characters to buy hats.

Afternoon tea was invented in the 1840s and Bath does it better than almost anywhere. The obvious place is the Pump Room, under the chandelier, with the Pump Room Trio playing at the afternoon sittings: finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, and cakes, with plenty of tea. It's more about the room than the food, and it's worth it once. Put the jam on first in Cornwall and the cream first in Devon, and don't worry about which you're doing in Somerset.

The Theatre Royal opened in 1805 and was rebuilt inside after a fire in 1862, and it's a beautiful theater: a horseshoe of red and gold balconies. It gets touring shows on their way to or from London, and there's a smaller studio for new plays. In December and early January, it puts on the pantomime, the very British Christmas show of jokes, cross-dressing and audience shouting.

Before or after, have a drink or dinner at the Garrick's Head, next door, named after the actor David Garrick, and try Bath chaps if they're on the menu: cured pig's cheek, breadcrumbed and fried.

Pulteney Bridge, designed by Robert Adam and finished in 1774, is one of the very few bridges in the world with shops built along both sides. It was built so the Pulteney family could develop their land across the river, and walking across it you might not notice it's a bridge at all. The famous view is from below: from Grand Parade or the riverside Parade Gardens, with the curved steps of the weir in front. Before you cross, look into the Guildhall Market next to it, a covered market that has traded on this spot for centuries, for a coffee among the stalls.

Next to the bridge, the Victoria Art Gallery has a free collection of paintings by Bath artists, if it's raining. From spring to autumn, boats leave from below the weir for trips on the river.

Across the bridge, Great Pulteney Street runs a straight 300 meters to the Holburne Museum, the widest and grandest street in Bath, and a set for Bridgerton and every period drama with a carriage in it. At the end, the Holburne Museum was built in the 1790s as the Sydney Hotel, the entrance to a pleasure garden, and is now a museum of fine and decorative art, with portraits by Gainsborough, who painted Bath's high society for 16 years, and silver, porcelain and miniatures. It plays Lady Danbury's house in Bridgerton.

Behind the museum, Sydney Gardens opened in 1795 as a Georgian pleasure garden, with concerts, fireworks and a maze. Jane Austen lived across the road at 4 Sydney Place and wrote that she went to the gardens to see the fireworks. It's the last of Bath's pleasure gardens and was restored in 2019-22. Two things cut through it: the Kennet and Avon Canal, crossed by little cast-iron bridges from 1800, and Brunel's Great Western Railway, from the 1840s.

From Sydney Gardens, join the towpath of the Kennet and Avon Canal, which opened in 1810 to carry goods between Bristol and London. It's an easy, flat walk of 30-45 minutes to Bathampton, past moored narrowboats, herons and the backs of Georgian gardens, with Bath spread out on the hills behind. In the village, the George Inn, an old canalside pub, is a good place for lunch.

If you're up for more, the towpath goes on to the Dundas Aqueduct, which carries the canal over the river, about 6 km further. On the hill above the canal at Claverton is the American Museum, the only big museum of American decorative arts outside the US. Otherwise, walk back the way you came, or take the bus.

Bath has some of the best old pubs in England. Start at the Old Green Tree on Green Street, off Milsom Street, three tiny wood-paneled rooms in a Georgian building, with good real ale and nowhere to hide. It closes early on Sundays, which is why it's tonight.

Then walk up to Walcot Street, the bohemian side of town, and the Bell Inn, which more than 500 locals bought together in 2013 to save it. It has live music several nights a week and bar billiards.

Salisbury Cathedral was built in one go, from 1220 to 1258, which is why it's so pure and unified in style, and its spire, added in the 1300s, is the tallest in Britain at 123 meters. Inside, look for the medieval clock from around 1386, said to be the oldest working mechanical clock in the world, and walk into the Chapter House to see the best preserved of the four surviving original copies of Magna Carta, the charter King John was forced to agree to in 1215.

The Cathedral Close around it, a big green lawn ringed with old houses, is the largest in Britain and the most peaceful corner of the town.

Stonehenge was built in stages over about 1,500 years, from a circular ditch around 3000 BC to the great stones raised around 2500 BC. The big sarsens came from about 25 km north, but the smaller bluestones were brought from the Preseli Hills in Wales, more than 200 km away, and in 2024 scientists found that the Altar Stone at the center came from the far north of Scotland. Nobody knows exactly how, or why. It's aligned on the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, and it was probably a temple, a burial place and a calendar at once.

You walk around it on a path, not among the stones. The visitor center, with a good museum and re-created Neolithic houses, is 2.5 km away, and a shuttle takes you to the stones, though the walk across the fields is nicer.

On the way back to town, the tour bus stops at Old Sarum, the original Salisbury: an Iron Age hill fort that the Normans turned into a castle, a royal palace and a cathedral town. Windy, short of water and squeezed in next to the castle garrison, the clergy gave up in the 1220s and moved down to the river meadows to build a new cathedral, and the town followed. Only the foundations are left, and the view down to the spire you saw this morning explains the whole story.

Back in town, before the train, walk up to Salisbury's market square for a drink at the Haunch of Venison, an inn since 1320 in a 15th-century building of crooked beams and a pewter-topped bar, which keeps a mummified hand in a glass case by the fire, supposedly a card cheat's. Trains back to Bath run until late in the evening.

Ralph Allen made a fortune from the postal service and from the stone quarries on Combe Down, which supplied the honey-colored Bath stone for most of the Georgian city. In the 1730s and 40s he built himself a mansion on the hill and a garden falling away below it, with advice from the poet Alexander Pope and later from Capability Brown. The house is now a school, but the Prior Park Landscape Garden belongs to the National Trust: a valley of lakes and woods with a Palladian Bridge at the bottom, one of only four like it in the world, and a view down to the city.

Walk down from Prior Park towards Widcombe and climb Beechen Cliff to Alexandra Park, which locals will tell you has the best view of Bath: the whole city in its bowl of hills, the Abbey in the middle and the crescents rising up the slope behind. Coming down, the long flight of steps called Jacob's Ladder drops you near Bath Spa station, a few minutes from the center.

If you want a longer walk instead, the National Trust's Bath Skyline, a 10 km loop through meadows and woods on the eastern hills, with a view of the fake castle ruin called Sham Castle, is the city's best.

Up on Lansdown, a short taxi or bus 31 ride from the center, stands Beckford's Tower, built in 1827 for William Beckford, once called England's richest commoner, whose fortune came from his family's sugar plantations in Jamaica, worked by enslaved people. He was a novelist, a collector and a scandal: in 1784, gossip about his relationship with a teenage boy, William Courtenay, drove him out of society, and he spent his money building towers. This one was his library and retreat, with a gilded lantern on top. It reopened in 2024 after a big restoration, and the museum is honest about where the money came from. Climb the spiral staircase for the view across the hills.

Sunday lunch in an English pub means a roast: roast beef, lamb, pork or chicken with roast potatoes, vegetables, gravy and a Yorkshire pudding, the puffed-up batter cup that comes with the beef but these days often with everything. It's the most British meal there is. From the tower, walk ten minutes down Lansdown Road to the Hare and Hounds, a country pub with a garden and a view across the valley, or head back to town for the Marlborough Tavern near Royal Victoria Park.

Back in town, end at the Star Inn, up on The Vineyards, licensed since 1759, with a 1920s interior so well kept that it's protected as one of the most important historic pub interiors in England: wooden benches, little rooms and beer from Abbey Ales, Bath's own brewery. Ask for the Bellringer, the house bitter. The bench by the door is known as "Death Row", where the old regulars sit.

Then take a last walk past the Abbey and the Roman Baths at night, when the lamps are lit and the streets are empty.