Bath

Bath The Roman settlement of Aquae Sulis developed where a number of thermal springs erupt from the floor of the Avon valley. Chief of these is the King's Bath Spring which delivers nearly 250,000 gallons of water a day and was the focus of Roman activity. Late Iron Age coins recovered from the spring and the presence of a presiding Celtic goddess, Sulis (assimilated to Minerva), suggest pre‐Roman veneration. The religious and thermal precinct at Bath is the earliest and grandest Roman civil building complex in Britain. Round about 200, major refurbishment of the buildings included modifications to the temple, the replacing of the timber roofs of the baths with a tile barrel‐vault, and the enclosing of the reservoir within a barrel‐vaulted containing building. In the later 4th cent. maintenance of the complex started to lapse, with silt accumulating. After the end of Roman rule, the complex fell into ruin, though the town is mentioned in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle for 577. Bath did not slide into total insignificance. Edgar was crowned there in 973 and in 1090 the diocese was transferred from Wells to Bath. The Gesta Stephani of 1138 referred to visitors from all over England making their way to the baths. Leland, in the 1530s, commented that Bath was much frequented by people ‘diseased with lepre, pokkes, scabbes and great aches’. Queen Elizabeth paid a brief visit in 1591 but found the smell disagreeable.

The transformation of Bath into the fashionable spa of Georgian England was the work of two men—Richard ‘Beau’ Nash and John Wood. Nash was master of ceremonies from 1705 to 1761 and imposed order and decency, insisting that rank be put aside—the ‘happy secret of uniting the vulgar and the great’. To the baths were added concerts, receptions, balls, fireworks, the theatre, milliners, booksellers, coffee‐houses, card parties, and pleasure walks in Spring Gardens (1735) and Sydney Gardens (1795). Wood began the massive reconstruction of Bath from medieval huddle to Georgian spaciousness, under the patronage of Ralph Allen, whose estate at rior Park above the city provided the stone. The glory of Bath lasted until the early 19th cent., by which time success had bred disaster and Nash's vulgarians had taken over. Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) found that in the Pump Room on Sundays there was ‘not a genteel face to be Seen’.