10 Top Places to Visit in Bath, England

Bath Abbey stands about 20 paces from the Roman Baths entrance, so the two pair naturally. The current church was begun in 1499 by Bishop Oliver King, replacing a Norman cathedral that had fallen into ruin, and it is often described as the last great medieval church built in England. The fan vaulting over the nave, restored by George Gilbert Scott in the 1860s, is the feature people photograph. The west front is the odder one: carved stone ladders with angels climbing up and, notably, one climbing down, illustrating the bishop's dream.

Inside, 891 wall memorials make the floor and walls a dense record of Georgian Bath's dead. The Footprint project completed in 2021 relaid the collapsing floor and installed an underfloor heating system powered by the thermal springs next door, which is a neat piece of engineering continuity. Entry is by suggested donation of around GBP 8. The Tower Tour, roughly GBP 12, climbs 212 steps to a walkway directly above the vaulting and out onto the roof.

The Royal Crescent is a sweep of 30 terraced houses built between 1767 and 1774 to a design by John Wood the Younger, fronted by 114 Ionic columns and facing a broad lawn that drops away towards Royal Victoria Park. It is the single most recognisable piece of Georgian architecture in Britain. The trick behind the facade is worth knowing: the uniform front was sold as a shell, and each buyer commissioned their own architect for the interior and the rear, so the back of the Crescent is a jumble of different rooflines and window sizes.

No. 1 Royal Crescent, at the eastern end, is the house you can go inside. Restored by the Bath Preservation Trust to how it looked between 1776 and 1796, it runs across two buildings and takes in the withdrawing room, the gentleman's bedroom, the kitchen and the servants' quarters. Admission is around GBP 15 for adults, and the visit takes about an hour. Everything is presented without rope barriers, which makes it far more convincing than most house museums.

Walk 200 metres east from the Royal Crescent along Brock Street and the street opens into the Circus, a ring of 33 houses split into three curved segments by three entrances. John Wood the Elder designed it in 1754 and died three months after the foundation stone went down, leaving his son to finish the job by 1768. The three tiers of columns run Doric, Ionic and Corinthian from bottom to top, and 525 carved emblems circle the frieze above the ground floor, covering everything from serpents to nautical instruments.

Wood was interested in Druidic and Masonic geometry, and the Circus has almost exactly the same diameter as the stone circle at Stonehenge. Seen from above it forms a circle, with Gay Street as the line connecting it to Queen Square, a layout often read as a key symbol. Five large plane trees fill the centre, planted in the 1820s and still the subject of periodic local arguments. There is no ticket and no opening time - it is a residential street, and Thomas Gainsborough lived at No. 17.

Pulteney Bridge is one of only four bridges anywhere with shops built across its full span on both sides, alongside the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the Rialto in Venice and the Krämerbrücke in Erfurt. Robert Adam designed it in Palladian style and it opened in 1774, connecting the city to the Bathwick land the Pulteney family wanted to develop. Cross it and you would barely register you are over water, because the shopfronts block the view on both sides.

The picture everyone wants is the bridge above Pulteney Weir, the three-stepped horseshoe cascade rebuilt in its current form in 1972 as part of the city's flood defences. The best vantage point is Grand Parade on the west bank, or from Parade Gardens below for a small admission fee. Boat trips run from Pulteney Weir landing stage upstream towards Bathampton between roughly April and October, typically around GBP 12 for an hour on the water. There is no charge for the bridge itself.

This is where you get in the water. Thermae Bath Spa draws from the same three springs that feed the Roman Baths, but filters and treats the supply so it is safe to bathe in, which is exactly why the Roman site next door has to stay look-only. The complex opened in 2006 and combines the Nicholas Grimshaw-designed New Royal Bath, a glass and Bath stone cube, with the restored Georgian Cross Bath a few steps away on Bath Street.

The open-air rooftop pool is the reason to come. It holds water at around 33.5 degrees Celsius and looks straight across the rooftops to Bath Abbey and the green hills beyond. Below it sit the Minerva Bath and four aroma steam rooms built into glass pods. A two-hour session runs about GBP 45 on weekdays and slightly more at weekends, with towel, robe and slippers included. Minimum age is 16 for the New Royal Bath, and swimwear is required throughout.

Jane Austen lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806 and set two novels here, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, neither of them especially flattering about the place. The Centre occupies a Georgian townhouse on Gay Street, a few doors from No. 25 where Austen actually stayed in 1805. The visit starts with a costumed 15-minute introductory talk covering her time in the city, then moves through rooms of Regency dress, letters, film adaptations and a waxwork reconstruction of her likeness based on family descriptions.

It is a small museum and it knows it. Purists sometimes find the costumed staff and the dressing-up box too theatrical, but the talk is genuinely informative about how the Bath season worked, and about why Austen wrote so little during her years here. Admission is roughly GBP 16 for adults, and an hour covers it. The Regency Tea Room upstairs serves a decent cream tea for about GBP 20. In September the Jane Austen Festival fills the streets with costumed promenaders.

Great Pulteney Street runs 320 metres dead straight from Pulteney Bridge and terminates at the Holburne Museum, which was built in 1799 as the Sydney Hotel and converted to house Sir William Holburne's collection in 1916. The permanent holdings cover Gainsborough portraits painted during his Bath years, Thomas Lawrence, Italian bronzes, majolica and 18th-century silver. Entry to the permanent collection is free, with temporary exhibitions charged separately at around GBP 12.

The 2011 extension by Eric Parry, a ceramic and glass block grafted onto the Georgian rear, caused a long planning fight and is now widely admired. Behind it lies Sydney Gardens, the oldest surviving 18th-century pleasure garden in Britain, reopened in 2023 after a major restoration. Jane Austen lived across the road at 4 Sydney Place and walked here regularly. The Kennet and Avon Canal cuts through the gardens under two cast-iron footbridges, and Brunel's Great Western Railway runs through a cutting alongside.

Ralph Allen made his fortune from the Bath stone quarries and from reforming the postal service, and Prior Park is where he spent it. The garden was laid out from the 1730s in a steep valley below his mansion, with input from Alexander Pope and Capability Brown. The centrepiece is a Palladian bridge completed in 1755, one of only four of its kind in the world, sitting between two lakes at the bottom of the combe with the whole of Bath framed behind it.

The National Trust took the garden on in 1993 and has since reopened the Wilderness at the top, including the Serpentine Lake, the Cascade and the restored Gothic Temple. Adult admission is around GBP 8 and free to National Trust members. The site is genuinely steep, with a 400-metre descent and climb on grass and gravel paths, so wear proper shoes. There is no visitor car park, which is deliberate - the Trust wants you to arrive on foot or by bus.

The Bath Skyline is a six-mile waymarked circular walk managed by the National Trust across the hills wrapping the eastern and southern edges of the city. It links beech woodland, limestone meadows, an Iron Age hillfort at Bathampton Down, disused stone quarries and a run of viewpoints that show you exactly how the Georgian city sits in its bowl. Sham Castle, an 18th-century folly facade built for Ralph Allen in 1762 to improve the view from his townhouse, sits directly on the route.

Allow three to four hours at a steady pace. The route is free, open all year and waymarked with National Trust discs, though a downloaded map helps at the field boundaries where the signage thins out. Sections cross grazed pasture with cattle, and the ground stays muddy well into spring. Two of the best viewpoints, at Bathwick Fields and above Prior Park, can be reached on short there-and-back walks of under an hour if the full loop is too much.