Though only twelve miles from Bristol, BATH has a very different feel from its neighbour - more harmonious, compact, leisurely and complacent. The city's elegant crescents and Georgian buildings are studded with plaques naming Bath's eminent inhabitants from its heyday as a spa resort; it was here that Jane Austen wrote Persuasion and Northanger Abbey , and where Gainsborough established himself as a portraitist and landscape painter. Nowadays Bath ranks as one of Britain's top ten tourist cities, yet the place has never lost the exclusive air those names evoke.

Bath owes its name and fame to its hot springs - the only ones in the country - which made it a place of reverence for the local Celtic population, though it had to wait for Roman technology to create a fully fledged bathing establishment. The baths fell into decline with the departure of the Romans, but the town later regained its importance under the Saxons, its abbey seeing the coronation of the first king of all England , Edgar, in 973. A new bathing complex was built in the sixteenth century, popularized by the visit of Elizabeth I in 1574, and the city reached its fashionable zenith in the eighteenth century, when Beau Nash ruled the town's social scene. It was at this time that Bath acquired its ranks of Palladian mansions and town houses, all built in the local Bath stone , which is now enshrined in building regulations as an obligatory element in any new constructions in the city. Three miles southeast of the centre, near the university campus, Claverton holds a museum of Americana amid gorgeous rolling countryside.

The swathes of parkland between Bath's Regency developments lend the city a spacious feel, but the sheer weight of traffic pouring through the central streets can be a major turn-off. Drivers are advised to use one of the Park-and-Ride car parks around the periphery - and if you're coming from Bristol, note that you can cycle all the way along a cycle-path that follows the route of a disused railway line and the course of the Avon.