BATH city, a World Heritage Site in SOMERSET
Bath is a city and World Heritage Site in Somerset in the south west of England. It is situated 99 miles west of London and 13 miles south-east of Bristol. The population of the city is about 80,000. It was granted city status by Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth I in 1590 and was made a county borough in 1889 which gave it administrative independence from its county, Somerset. The city became part of Avon when that county was created in 1974. Since 1996, when Avon was abolished, Bath has been the principal centre of the unitary authority of Bath and North East Somerset , a part of the ceremonial county of Somerset.
The city was founded, among surrounding hills, in the valley of the River Avon around naturally occurring hot springs where the Romans built baths and a temple, giving it the name Aquae Sulis. Edgar was crowned king of England at Bath Abbey in 973. Much later, it became popular as a spa resort during the Georgian era, which led to a major expansion that left a heritage of exemplary Georgian architecture crafted from Bath Stone.
The city became a World Heritage Site in 1987 and has a variety of theatres, museums, and other cultural and sporting venues, which have helped to make it a major centre for tourism, with over one million staying visitors and 3.8 million day visitors to the city each year. The city has two universities and several schools and colleges. There is a large service sector and growing information and communication technologies and creative industries, providing employment for the population of Bath and the surrounding area.
Archaeological evidence shows that the site of the Roman Baths' main spring was treated as a shrine by the Celts and was dedicated to the goddess Sulis, whom the Romans identified with Minerva. However, the name Sulis continued to be used after the Roman invasion, leading to the town's Roman name of Aquae Sulis (literally, "the waters of Sulis"). Messages to her scratched onto metal, known as curse tablets, have been recovered from the Sacred Spring by archaeologists. These curse tablets were written in Latin and usually laid curses on people by whom the writer felt they had been wronged. For example, if a citizen had his clothes stolen at the baths, he would write a curse, naming the suspects, on a tablet to be read by the Goddess Sulis Minerva.
The temple was constructed in 60–70 AD and the bathing complex was gradually built up over the next 300 years. During the Roman occupation of Britain and possibly on the instructions of Emperor Claudius, engineers drove oak piles into the mud to provide a stable foundation and surrounded the spring with an irregular stone chamber lined with lead. In the 2nd century, the spring was enclosed within a wooden barrel-vaulted building, which housed the calidarium (hot bath), tepidarium (warm bath), and frigidarium (cold bath). The city was given defensive walls, probably in the 3rd century. After the Roman withdrawal in the first decade of the 5th century, the baths fell into disrepair and were eventually lost due to silting up.
During the English Civil War, the Battle of Lansdowne was fought on 5 July 1643 on the northern outskirts of the city. Thomas Guidott, who had been a student of chemistry and medicine at Wadham College Oxford, moved to Bath and set up practice in 1668. He became interested in the curative properties of the waters and he wrote A discourse of Bathe, and the hot waters there. Also, Some Enquiries into the Nature of the water in 1676. This brought the health-giving properties of the hot mineral waters to the attention of the country and soon the aristocracy started to arrive to partake in them.
The Royal Crescent from the air: Georgian taste favoured the regularity of Bath's streets and squares and the contrast with adjacent rural nature.
Several areas of the city underwent development during the Stuart period, and this increased during Georgian times in response to the increasing number of visitors to the spa and resort town who required accommodation. The architects John Wood the elder and his son John Wood the younger laid out the new quarters in streets and squares, the identical façades of which gave an impression of palatial scale and classical decorum. Much of the creamy gold Bath stone which was used for construction throughout the city, was obtained from the limestone Combe Down and Bathampton Down Mines, which were owned by Ralph Allen (1694–1764). Allen, in order to advertise the quality of his quarried limestone, commissioned the elder John Wood to build him a country house on his Prior Park estate between the city and the mines. He was also responsible for improving and expanding the postal service in western England, for which he held the contract for over forty years. Though not fond of politics, Allen was a civic-minded man, and served as a member of the Bath Corporation for many years. He was elected Mayor of the city for a single term, in 1742, at age 50.
The early 18th century saw Bath acquire its first purpose-built theatre, the Theatre Royal, along with the pump room attached to the Roman Baths and assembly rooms. Master of Ceremonies Beau Nash, who presided over the city's social life from 1705 until his death in 1761, drew up a code of behaviour for public entertainments.
Bath is at the bottom of the Avon Valley and near the southern edge of the Cotswolds, a range of limestone hills designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The hills that surround and make up the city have a maximum altitude of 780 feet on the Lansdown plateau. It has an area of 11 square miles.
Bath became the leading centre of fashionable life in England during the 18th century. It was during this time that Bath's Theatre Royal was built, as well as architectural developments such as Lansdown Crescent, the Royal Crescent, The Circus and Pulteney Bridge.
Today, Bath has five theatres – Bath Theatre Royal, Ustinov Studio, the egg, the Rondo Theatre, and the Mission Theatre – and attracts internationally renowned companies and directors, including an annual season by Sir Peter Hall. The city also has a long-standing musical tradition. Bath Abbey is home to the Klais Organ and is the largest concert venue in the city, with about 20 concerts and 26 organ recitals each year. Another important concert venue is the Forum, a 1,700-seat art deco building which originated as a cinema. The city holds the Bath International Music Festival and Mozartfest every year. Other festivals include the annual Bath Film Festival, Bath Literature Festival, the Bath Fringe Festival and the Bath Beer Festival, and the Bach Festivals which occur at two and a half year intervals.
The city is home to the Victoria Art Gallery, the Museum of East Asian Art and Holburne Museum of Art, numerous commercial art galleries and antique shops, as well as numerous museums, among them Bath Postal Museum, the Fashion Museum, the Jane Austen Centre, the Herschel Museum of Astronomy and the Roman Baths. The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, now in Queen Square, and founded in 1824 on the base of a 1777 Society for the encouragement of Agriculture, Planting, Manufactures, Commerce and the Fine Arts, has an important collection and holds a programme of talks and discussions.
Many films and television programmes have been filmed in Bath including: the 2004 film of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, The Duchess (2008), The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953).
In August 2003 the Three Tenors sang at a special concert to mark the opening of the Thermae Bath Spa, a new hot water spa in Bath City Centre; delays to the project meant the spa actually opened three years later on 7 August 2006.
The city has several public parks, the main one being Royal Victoria Park, which is a short walk from the centre of the city. It was opened in 1830 by an 11-year-old Princess Victoria, and was the first park to carry her name. The park is overlooked by the Royal Crescent and consists of 57 acres with a variety of attractions. These include a skateboard ramp, tennis courts, bowling, a putting green and a 12- and 18-hole golf course, a pond, open air concerts, and a popular children's play area. Much of its area is lawn; a notable feature is the way in which a ha-ha segregates it from the Royal Crescent, while giving the impression to a viewer from the Crescent of a greensward uninterrupted across the Park down to Royal Avenue. It has received a "Green Flag award", the national standard for parks and green spaces in England and Wales, and is registered by English Heritage as a Park of National Historic Importance. The 9 acres botanical gardens were formed in 1887 and contain one of the finest collections of plants on limestone in the West Country. The replica of a Roman Temple was used at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. In 1987 the gardens were extended to include the Great Dell, a disused quarry that was formally part of the park, which contains a large collection of conifers.
Other parks in Bath include: Alexandra Park, which crowns a hill and overlooks the city; Parade Gardens, along the river front near the Abbey in the centre of the city; Sydney Gardens, known as a pleasure-garden in the 18th century; Henrietta Park; Hedgemead Park; and Alice Park. Jane Austen wrote of Sydney Gardens that "It would be pleasant to be near the Sydney Gardens. We could go into the Labyrinth every day." Alexandra, Alice and Henrietta parks were built into the growing city among the housing developments. There is also a linear park following the old Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway line.
Bath has four twinned towns:
Aix-en-Provence, France
Alkmaar, Netherlands
Braunschweig, Germany
Kaposvár, Hungary
Ōita Prefecture, Japan
Bath also has a partnership agreement with Manly, New South Wales, Australia.