Bath tourist attractions

The city’s premier attraction, the Roman Baths will keep you entertained for hours. The site comprises the baths and an informative museum. Highlights include the Great Bath, the Circular Bath, and the Norman Kings Bath. The museum also contains a fine collection of coins, jewellery and sculpture, as well as models of the location at its peak. The free audio guide is fantastic and there’s even separate commentaries aimed at children, featuring Roman characters and their stories, and some of the highlights are described by the writer Bill Bryson in his usual witty and incisive way.

Right next door to the Roman Baths is the Pump Room, one of the busiest social hubs of Bath since the Georgian era. The Pump Room, built between 1790 and 1795, is a sumptuous building with its great columns, curved recesses and musicians’ gallery. It was here that the therapeutic waters, pumped directly from the source, could be sampled in comfort. As the doctors of the day recommended taking the waters before breakfast, the Pump Room was open from 6am onwards. In the 1800s, the custom was to walk about the room to see and be seen.

Although there has been a church on the site since the 7th-century, what you see today dates back to the 13th-century. It remains one of the few great Medieval churches to have been built to its original design, without the distractions of later additions or alterations. Inside, the vast windows fill the abbey with light, earning it the nickname Lantern of the West during Elizabethan times. The overall feeling inside is of light and height. The east window portrays 56 scenes in the Life of Christ in brilliant stained glass. The stained glass was damaged by World War II bombs and was restored by a direct descendant of the man who created the original glass. Among the delights of the abbey are the memorials to famous city residents and guests who died in Bath (it is estimated that 3,879 bodies lie beneath the stone floors).

At the bottom of the colonnaded Bath Street, the Thermae Bath Spa allows you to take in the waters much the same way that visitors to Bath have done throughout the ages, but with state-of-the-art spa facilities. Heated by the city’s thermal waters, the spa includes two open-air pools, the New Royal Bath and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw’s sleekly futuristic “glass cube”. Various treatments are offered, from massages to hot-stone therapies, and a small visitor centre has displays relating to Bath’s thermal waters.

The Jane Austen Centre has been created with the guidance of the Jane Austen Society. The centre has knowledgeable staff, a period atmosphere, maps, books and exhibits on costumes and Austen film adaptations. It identifies the various Bath houses in which the author lodged or lived, including No. 25 Gay Street just up the hill, where she stayed for a few months following her father’s death.

Chief among the attractions of the Upper Town in Georgian times were the Assembly Rooms. The rooms comprise a ballroom, the largest 18th-century building in Bath at 106ft long, the Octagon, a Card Room and a Tea Room. The ballroom is magnificent, graced by five cut-glass chandeliers. Visit these fantastic rooms and be transported back to Georgian high-society.

Prior Park is now a private school and is not open to the public, but the building’s exterior can still be admired from the lovely landscaped grounds, which are owned by the National Trust. The delightful walk through the 28-acre landscape garden takes in splendid views of Bath with the highlight being a Palladian bridge, one of only four in the world The grounds, which were designed by the famous landscape gardener Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and the poet Alexander Pope, also include a lake, an ice house and a summer house, reconstructed in 2004 from a photograph of 1912.

The River Avon is crossed by the graceful, shop-lined Pulteney Bridge, an Italianate structure designed by Robert Adam, from the other side of which a lengthy vista stretches along Great Pulteney Street to the imposing, classical front of the Holburne Museum. The building, with a surprisingly modern extension at the back, holds an impressive range of decorative and fine art, mostly furniture, silverware, porcelain and paintings. Look out for works by Constable, Stubbs and Angelica Kauffman.