Tour Audio a Bath

Around 60 AD, Roman engineers built a temple and bathing complex over a hot spring in a bend of the Avon River. They called the settlement Aquae Sulis, 'waters of Sulis,' named for the local goddess of healing waters. Those baths are still there, about six meters below the modern street level, the lead pipes intact, the sacred spring still producing 1.17 million liters of hot water daily at a constant 46 degrees Celsius. Standing at the edge of the great bath, looking down at the green water with the Victorian terrace rising above, is one of the stranger time-collapse moments you can have in England.

The city you see above the Roman foundations was almost entirely built between 1720 and 1800, when Bath became the fashionable resort of English society.

Architects John Wood the Elder and his son remade the hilltop in honey-colored Bath stone, building the Circus, the Royal Crescent, and the Assembly Rooms. Everything is from the same quarry, lit the same way. Jane Austen lived here for several years and found it stifling and socially exhausting, which she turned into two novels. The tension between Bath's aspirations and its realities is part of what makes it interesting.