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city in Somerset, England, United Kingdom
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Bath (RP: , locally [ba(ː)θ]) is a city in Somerset, England, known for and named after its Roman-built baths. The city became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and was later listed as one of the "Great Spa Towns of Europe". Bath is situated in the valley of the River Avon, 97 miles (156 km) west of London and 11 miles (18 km) southeast of Bristol, and is the largest city and urban settlement in Somerset. At the 2021 census, the population of the city was 94,080.
The city became a spa with the Latin name Aquae Sulis ("the waters of Sulis") c. 60 AD when the Romans built baths and a temple in the Avon valley, although hot springs were known even before then. Bath Abbey was founded in the 7th century and became a religious centre; the building was rebuilt in the 12th and 16th centuries. In the 17th century, the spring water was claimed to have curative properties, and Bath became a popular spa town in the Georgian era. Georgian architecture, crafted from Bath stone, includes the Royal Crescent, Circus, Grand Pump Room, and the Assembly Rooms, where Beau Nash presided over the city's social life from 1705 until his death in 1761. Many of the streets and squares were laid out by John Wood, the Elder, and in the 18th century the city became fashionable and the population grew. Further building was undertaken in the 19th century and following the Bath Blitz in World War II.
Bath has over six million yearly visitors, making it one of the ten English cities visited most by overseas tourists. Attractions include the spas, canal boat tours, Royal Crescent, Bath Skyline, Parade Gardens, Sydney Gardens and the Royal Victoria Park. Shopping areas include the SouthGate shopping centre, the Corridor arcade among various artisan shops. Bath is also home to theatres including the Theatre Royal, as well as several museums including the Museum of Bath Architecture, the Victoria Art Gallery, the Museum of East Asian Art, the Herschel Museum of Astronomy, the Fashion Museum, and the Holburne Museum. The city has two universities, the University of Bath and Bath Spa University, with Bath College providing further education. Sporting clubs from the city include Bath Rugby and Bath City F.C.
The Roman name for the settlement that is now the city of Bath was Aquae Sulis, meaning "the waters of Sulis" in Latin. Sulis was a Celtic deity to which the Britons had dedicated the natural hot spring in the area. The Romans made the city a spa town in c. 60 AD, as part of which they built the Roman Baths, from which the modern name of the city is derived. After the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, the settlement was given the name of Hat Bathu, meaning "hot waters", though after the spring rather than the Roman baths.
Victorian churchman Edward Churton wrote that during the Anglo-Saxon era, Bath was known as Acemannesceastre ('Akemanchester'), or 'aching men's city', because the natural spring was seen as being able to heal the sick. During the reign of Edward the Elder, coins were minted in Bath with 'BAD' on the obverse, suggesting that the Anglo-Saxon name for the town at the time was Baðum, Baðan, or Baðon, meaning "at the baths". An inhabitant of Bath is known as a Bathonian ().
The hills in the locality such as Bathampton Down saw human activity from the Mesolithic period. Several Bronze Age round barrows were opened by John Skinner in the 18th century. A long barrow site, believed to be from the Beaker people of the Early Bronze Age, was flattened to make way for RAF Charmy Down. Solsbury Hill, which overlooks the current city, was an Iron Age hill fort, as well as possibly the adjacent Bathampton Camp.
Archaeological evidence shows that the site of the main spring for the Roman Baths may have been treated as a shrine by the Britons, and was dedicated to the water deity Sulis, equivalent to the Roman goddess Minerva; the name Sulis continued to be used after the Roman invasion, appearing in the town's Roman name, Aquae Sulis (literally, "the waters of Sulis"). Messages to her scratched onto metal, known as curse tablets, have been recovered from the sacred spring by archaeologists. The tablets were written in Latin, and laid curses on personal enemies.
A temple was constructed in 60–70 AD, and a bathing complex was built up over the next 300 years. Engineers drove oak piles into the mud to provide a stable foundation, and surrounded the spring with an irregular stone chamber lined with lead. In the second century, the spring was enclosed within a wooden barrel-vaulted structure that housed the caldarium (hot bath), tepidarium (warm bath), and frigidarium (cold bath). The town was later given defensive walls, probably in the third century. After the end of Roman rule in Britain, the baths fell into disrepair and were eventually lost as a result of rising water levels and silting. In March 2012, archeologists unearthed a hoard of 30,000 silver Roman coins about 150 metres (490 ft) from the Roman Baths. The hoard is believed to date from the third century is one of the largest discovered in Britain.
It was suggested by Geoffrey of Monmouth that a hillfort on the outskirts of Bath was the site of the 6th century Battle of Badon, in which King Arthur defeated the Anglo-Saxons, though that is not accepted by the majority of modern historians. The town was captured by the West Saxons in 577 after the Battle of Deorham; the Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin may describe the appearance of the Roman site about this time. A monastery was founded at an early date, reputedly by Saint David although more probably in 675 by Osric, King of the Hwicce, perhaps using the walled area as its precinct. Other sources refer to the order founded by Osric as a nunnery, with a date of 676.
Nennius, a 9th-century historian, mentions a "hot lake" in the land of the Hwicce along the River Severn, and adds that "it is surrounded by a wall, made of brick and stone, and men may go there to bathe at any time, and every man can have the kind of bath he likes. If he wants, it will be a cold bath; and if he wants a hot bath, it will be hot". Bede described hot baths in the geographical introduction to the Ecclesiastical History in terms very similar to those of Nennius. King Offa of Mercia gained control of the monastery in 781 and rebuilt the church, which was dedicated to Saint Peter. By the 9th century, the old Roman street pattern had been lost and Bath was a royal possession. King Alfred laid out the town afresh, leaving its south-eastern quadrant as the abbey precinct. In the Burghal Hidage, Bath is recorded as a burh (borough), described as having walls of 1,375 yards (1,257 m), allocated 1000 men for defence. King Edgar of England was crowned in Bath Abbey in 973, in a ceremony that formed the basis of all future English coronations.
William Rufus granted the town, abbey and mint to a royal physician, John of Tours, who, following the sacking of the town during the Rebellion of 1088, became Bishop of Wells and Abbot of Bath. It was papal policy for bishops to move to more urban seats, and John of Tours translated his own from Wells to Bath. The bishop planned and began a much larger church as his cathedral, to which was attached a priory, with the bishop's palace beside it. New baths were built around the three springs. Later bishops returned the episcopal seat to Wells while retaining the name Bath in the title, thus becoming the Bishop of Bath and Wells. St John's Hospital was founded around 1180 by Bishop Reginald Fitz Jocelin and is among the oldest almshouses in England. The 'hospital of the baths' was built beside the hot springs of the Cross Bath, for their health-giving properties and to provide shelter for the poor infirm. Administrative systems fell within the hundreds. The Bath Hundred had various names including the Hundred of Le Buri. The Bath Foreign Hundred or Forinsecum covered the area outside the city and was later combined into the Bath Forum Hundred. Wealthy merchants had no status within the hundred courts and formed guilds to gain influence. Around 1200, the first mayor was appointed, and the first guildhall was probably built in the same century
By the 15th century, Bath's abbey church was dilapidated, and Oliver King, Bishop of Bath and Wells, decided to rebuild it on a smaller scale in 1500. The new church was completed just a few years before Bath Priory was dissolved in 1539 by Henry VIII. The abbey church became derelict before being restored as the city's parish church in the Elizabethan era, when the city experienced a revival as a spa. The baths were improved and the city began to attract the aristocracy. A royal charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1590 confirmed city status. James Montagu, Bishop of Bath and Wells from 1608, spent considerable sums in restoring Bath Abbey and actively supported the Baths themselves, aware that the "towne liveth wholly by them". In 1613, perhaps at his behest, Queen Anne visited the town to take the waters: the Queen's Bath was named after her. The cue for the visit may have been the completion of the restoration work to Bath Abbey, the last instalment of which had been paid for two years previously. Anne of Denmark also visited Bath in 1613 and 1615.
By the beginning of the English Civil War, the city was a first-class resort. However, it lost much of this trade in 1642 upon the outbreak of war, when fiddlers, "ladies who are there", and ale-house guides lost their customers. The city was initially garrisoned for Charles I, and £7000 (equivalent to £1,430,000 in 2025) was spent on fortifications, but upon the appearance of parliamentary forces the gates were thrown open and the city surrendered. It became a significant post for the Western Association army under William Waller. Bath was retaken by the royalists in July 1643 following the Battle of Lansdowne and occupied for two years until 1645. The city was spared events such as widespread destruction of property, overcrowding, bubonic plague, or mass starvation, unlike the nearby cities of Bristol and Gloucester, and safe water was piped in from the surrounding hills. Nevertheless, soldiers who were billeted in private houses contributed to disorder and vandalism, though this never caused the general destruction and plundering seen in Marlborough and other towns. Bath remained a health resort, often for wounded soldiers, its markets continued open and well-regulated, and its shopkeepers and craftsmen continued busy. Nevertheless, council spending, rents and grants all decreased and the finances of the Bath City Council were seriously affected.
Normality to the city quickly recovered after the war when the city council achieved a healthy budget surplus. Thomas Guidott, a student of chemistry and medicine at Wadham College, Oxford, set up a practice in the city in 1668. He was interested in the curative properties of the waters, and he wrote A discourse of Bathe, and the hot waters there. Also, Some Enquiries into the Nature of the water in 1676. It brought the health-giving properties of the hot mineral waters to the attention of the country, and the aristocracy arrived to partake in them.
Several areas of the city were developed in the Stuart period, and more building took place during Georgian times in response to the increasing number of visitors who required accommodation. Architects John Wood the Elder and his son laid out the new quarters in streets and squares, the identical façades of which gave an impression of palatial scale and classical decorum. Much of the creamy gold Bath stone, a type of limestone used for construction in the city, was obtained from the Combe Down and Bathampton Down Mines owned by Ralph Allen. Allen, to advertise the quality of his quarried limestone, commissioned the elder John Wood to build a country house on his Prior Park estate between the city and the mines. Allen was also a member of the Bath Corporation for many years, and was elected mayor for a single term in 1742.
In the early 18th century, Bath acquired its first purpose-built theatre, the Old Orchard Street Theatre. It was rebuilt as the Theatre Royal, along with the Grand Pump Room attached to the Roman Baths and assembly rooms. Master of ceremonies Beau Nash, who presided over the city's social life from 1704 until his death in 1761, drew up a code of behaviour for public entertainments. Bath was, at this time, one of the most fashionable British spa towns, and it attracted many notable visitors. In 1816, it was described as "a seat of amusement and dissipation", where "scenes of extravagance in this receptacle of the wealthy and the idle, the weak and designing" were habitual.
The population of the city grew rapidly, from 2,000 in 1700, to 28,000 in 1801, to 57,000 in 1831. This made it one of the largest cities in Britain by the early 1800s. William Thomas Beckford had bought a house in Lansdown Crescent in 1822, and subsequently two adjacent houses to form his residence. Having acquired all the land between his home and the top of Lansdown Hill, he created a garden more than 1⁄2 mile (800 m) in length with the eponymous Beckford's Tower at the top.
Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia spent four years in exile, from 1936 to 1940, at Fairfield House in Bath. During World War II, between the evening of 25 April and the early morning of 27 April 1942, Bath suffered three air raids in reprisal for RAF raids on the German cities of Lübeck and Rostock, part of the Luftwaffe campaign popularly known as the Baedeker Blitz. During the Bath Blitz, more than 400 people were killed, and more than 19,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Houses in Royal Crescent, Circus and Paragon were burnt out along with the Assembly Rooms. A 500-kilogram (1,100 lb) high explosive bomb landed on the east side of Queen Square, resulting in houses on the south side being damaged and the Francis Hotel losing 24 metres (79 ft) of its frontage. The buildings have all been restored but signs of the bombing remain.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Bath, Somerset”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.