Bath

The last great medieval church raised in England, begun in 1499, and the reason to look up: two stone ladders climb the west front carved with angels, a few of them heading down head-first, from a bishop’s dream. Inside, the floor is close to nine hundred ledger stones laid over the buried dead, so you spend the whole visit walking on other people’s graves.

Best shot The west front at a low angle, angels on their ladders either side of the great window.

• Touristy

The Romans built this around Britain’s only hot spring some two thousand years ago and gave it to Sulis Minerva, a goddess of the deep. A snake-haired Gorgon glares out from the rebuilt temple front, and the green water gave up around a hundred and thirty lead curse tablets, folded scraps on which Romans wished sickness and ruin on whoever had stolen from them. Go late, when it is lit by torchlight.

Best shot The snake-bearded Gorgon on the temple pediment, or the steaming Great Bath at dusk.

• Touristy

Mary Shelley lived in Bath in 1816 and worked on Frankenstein a few doors from here, so the city gave the book its own house: four floors of a Georgian townhouse handed over to her and her monster, with an eight-foot Creature, a basement walkthrough and escape rooms. Camp, dark and entirely on the nose. Go in.

William Beckford, who wrote the feverish gothic novel Vathek and spent a fortune on follies, built himself this hundred-and-twenty-foot tower on the hill in 1827 to look down on everyone. His pink granite tomb sits on a mound in the cemetery below, one side cut with a line from Vathek. Reopened in 2024, grotto and all. Climb it for the view he wanted.

Best shot The full tower with its gilded lantern against the sky, the tomb on its mound below.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A Victorian garden cemetery hidden in a valley on the eastern edge, opened in 1855 and left to run wild after 1988, so ivy and holly have swallowed the graves on its terraced slope. There is an octagonal Gothic mortuary chapel and, most days, no one else. Walk in from Horseshoe Walk and take your time.

Best shot The octagonal mortuary chapel framed by overgrowth, or the ivy-buried graves on the terraces.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

One of the oldest working theatres in Britain, on this site since 1805, and reputedly haunted by the Grey Lady: an eighteenth-century woman in a feathered headdress who turns up in a box to the left of the stage trailing the smell of jasmine. Catch a show and keep an eye on that box.

Best shot The columned Sawclose front lit at dusk.

A narrow Georgian townhouse kept much as it was when the musician and astronomer William Herschel lived here with his sister Caroline, and stepped into the back garden one night in 1781 to find a whole new planet with a telescope he had ground himself. The basement workshop where they cast the mirrors is still down there. Small, quiet, and quietly astonishing.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The gardens the quarry king Ralph Allen laid out down a steep valley with a little help from Alexander Pope and Capability Brown, chiefly so you would look back at Bath and admire it. At the bottom sits a Palladian bridge of 1755, one of only four left in the world, doubled in the lake below. National Trust, a good long downhill wander.

Best shot The Palladian bridge mirrored in the lake, the city behind it.

• Quiet

A five-and-a-half-thousand-year-old burial mound out in the fields south of Bath, thirty metres of grass over a stone passage where the Neolithic dead were once laid. Bring a torch and crawl in: the chambers are intact and you can get right inside. Free, remote, and older than almost anything else you will ever stand in.

Best shot The drystone forecourt and the low dark mouth of the passage.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A castle that is all front: a mock-medieval screen wall with battlements and turrets, thrown up in 1762 so Ralph Allen would have something to look at from his townhouse, and nothing at all behind it. Floodlit after dark, it fakes a ruined fortress on the skyline. A short walk up for a very English absurdity.

Best shot Head-on at the mock fortress, best floodlit at dusk.

• Solo-friendly

A maximalist independent hotel in a big Bath-stone Victorian villa a short walk from the abbey, done in bird-of-paradise colour with chandeliers, a reception desk mosaicked from smashed British china and cabinets of oddities through all thirty-one rooms. A walled garden bar and a larder of treats. Eccentric on purpose, and better for it.

• Adults only

Four Georgian townhouses of 1771 knocked quietly into one grand hotel off the old Assembly Rooms, with four-poster suites, a wood-panelled bar and the Olive Tree, the only Michelin star in the city, down in the basement. Discreet, old-money calm.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A row of Georgian townhouses on the grandest street in Bath, stuffed with curiosities: salvage, old fairground signs, life buoys and a wall of collected art, with a spa down in the vaulted cellars. Georgian bones, magpie soul.

• Adults only

A Georgian townhouse of 1794 just over Pulteney Bridge, built to lodge visitors taking the waters and still doing the job: twelve period rooms, an honesty bar and a walled Georgian garden. Central, characterful and the softest price of the lot.

• Quiet

A candlelit cocktail speakeasy hidden in the stone vaults under Grove Street, done in velvet chaises, gilded tables, gramophones, oil portraits, a mounted stag and skull-print wallpaper. Theatrical, opulent and thoroughly gothic. Evenings only, and worth the hunt for the door.

Best shot The vaulted room in candlelight, stag’s head over the velvet.

• Adults only

An Italian dug into a medieval Bath-stone cellar steps from the Roman Baths, low brick vaults lit almost entirely by candle, handmade pasta carried through a grotto of arches. The room is small and always full, so book ahead. One of the most atmospheric tables in the city.

• Adults only

One of the oldest and least-touched pubs in Bath, licensed since 1759, its little wood-benched rooms fitted out in 1928 and barely altered since, on CAMRA’s national heritage list. Ale still comes from the jug and there is free snuff in the smaller bar. A pint here is time travel.

• Adults only

A tiny free house in a 1716 building on a narrow lane, three small oak-panelled rooms, an open fire, no music and no machines. Local ales, proper quiet, genuinely old. The kind of pub that is nearly extinct.

• Solo-friendly
• Adults only

Reputedly the smallest pub in Bath, one narrow candlelit room down a cobbled alley behind a beautiful old stained-glass front, saved from closure by the locals in 1990. Squeeze in for a quiet ale in the prettiest little bar in town.

• Adults only

One of the great rare-book houses of the world, with a leather bindery going since 1829 still at work above the shop. Fine bindings, first editions and illustrated rarities in a stern listed building where you ring a bell to be let in. Hushed, gothic and dear, but a browse costs nothing. Ring it.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A vintage and retro clothing shop you could not miss if you tried, bright yellow and crammed to the glass, on Walcot Street at the heart of Bath’s alternative strip. Every era, men’s and women’s, plus the boots and bags to go with. Dig in.

• Solo-friendly

A cooperative of secondhand and antiquarian dealers over two floors and a basement off the Royal Crescent, stacked from paperback fiction to a proper old-books room, strong on Bath, Austen and illustrated things. Cramped, paper-scented, easy to lose an hour in.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

Bath’s one dedicated vinyl shop, built into a wooden unit under the Victorian iron roof of Green Park Station, five thousand-odd records deep across every genre with a good seam of the rare and secondhand. A crate-digger’s afternoon.

• Solo-friendly

Sixty-odd dealers under one roof in the old antiques quarter: Victorian to Art Deco, clocks, silver, coins, jewellery, taxidermy and the odder curios in between. A warren to get lost in when you are hunting something strange to carry home.

• Solo-friendly