England's Georgian Masterpiece — Roman baths still steaming after 2,000 years, the Royal Crescent, Sally Lunn buns, and the most perfectly preserved Georgian city in the world
Bath is the only city in the United Kingdom built almost entirely from a single stone — the honey-coloured Bath limestone that gives the Georgian terraces, crescents, and squares their extraordinary uniformity. The Royal Crescent (1774) and The Circus (1768), designed by John Wood the Elder and Younger, are the finest examples of Palladian urban design in Britain. The Roman Baths beneath the city centre — built around a natural hot spring sacred to the goddess Sulis, still flowing at 45°C — are one of the best-preserved Roman monuments in northern Europe. Jane Austen lived in Bath between 180…
The Romans founded Aquae Sulis (Waters of Sulis) around 60 CE, building the baths complex around the natural hot spring that the Celts had already considered sacred to the goddess Sulis, which the Romans syncretised with Minerva. The baths were one of the most important religious and healing sites in Roman Britain for nearly 400 years. After the Roman withdrawal in the early 5th century the complex fell into disuse and was gradually buried; it was rediscovered only in the 1880s during Victorian construction works. Bath was a prosperous wool-trade town through the medieval period, but its mode…