Bath
— — a honey-coloured city built on a hot spring.
Not only on a wall.
“Bath sits in a bowl of the Cotswold hills, where a bend of the Avon and a hot spring decided the shape of a town. The Romans found the spring first and built a temple to Sulis Minerva above it. The Georgians came back in the eighteenth century and laid honey-coloured limestone down the slopes in long crescents and terraces. The Royal Crescent still curves above its lawn, the Abbey holds the centre, and the steam off the King's Bath rises into a cold morning the way it has for two thousand years.
Bath, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Bath is a city of about 95,000 in the county of Somerset in south-west England, set in a bend of the River Avon roughly 160 kilometres west of London. The Romans founded Aquae Sulis here in the first century AD around the only naturally hot springs in Britain, which still deliver more than a million litres of 46 °C water each day. The Georgian city above the Roman remains was largely planned in the eighteenth century by John Wood the Elder and his son, in the local oolitic limestone known as Bath stone.
Bath was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 and again in 2021 as part of the trans-national Great Spa Towns of Europe. The Royal Crescent, designed by John Wood the Younger and built between 1767 and 1774, runs thirty house-fronts in a single sweeping arc above a sloping lawn. Below it sits the Circus, his father's earlier circular set of three terraces. Bath Abbey, rebuilt from 1499, holds the centre of town with the tallest fan vaulting in England above its nave.
The Roman Baths complex is open daily and is best entered first thing in the morning before coach groups arrive; the modern Thermae Bath Spa across the square uses the same spring water and has a rooftop pool overlooking the Abbey. Late spring through early autumn carries the lightest weather, with daytime highs in the high teens Celsius; winter is mild and grey, and the stone reads warm against it. The Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street marks Austen's residence in the city from 1801 to 1806.