Bath: An Architectural Guide

The city of Bath sits in a bowl of hills at the southern tip of the Cotswolds. It was here that the Romans established their city of Aquae Sulis, and it was here too that eighteenth-century English society settled in the refined luxury of the architecture we now call Georgian. These are the elegant and dramatic squares, crescents, and terraces, built in solid golden local stone, that form Bath's core and that give this comparatively small city its international reputation. But Bath is not just a museum of a long-passed phenomenon. It is a living urban organism, of just the right size to live in. The Victorians and Edwardians built here, sometimes indecorously, and contemporary architects including Nicholas Grimsahw, Aaron Evans and the Smithsons have work worth visiting in or near the city. This guide covers all Bath's notable architecture and places it in the context of the social and economic forces that have shaped the city.

Thom Gorst teaches architecture at the University of Bath.