Bath

The Romans built baths and a temple over the hot springs here around 60 AD and called the place Aquae Sulis, the waters of Sulis. Claims for the water’s curative powers in the seventeenth century made it fashionable, and the Georgian city that followed (Royal Crescent, Circus, Pump Room and Assembly Rooms, all in honey-coloured Bath stone, much of it laid out by John Wood the Elder) is what UNESCO listed in 1987 and added to the Great Spa Towns of Europe in 2021. Beau Nash ran the city’s social life from 1705 until his death in 1761. Jane Austen lived here in the early nineteenth century.