Roman Baths

Hot water rises at Bath at 46 degrees C and at a rate of 1,170,000 litres a day from the Pennyquick fault, rainfall off the Mendip Hills heated deep underground. Archaeological evidence indicates the site may have been a centre of worship used by Celts, the springs dedicated to the goddess Sulis, who was locally identified with Minerva; the name survived the Roman invasion in the town's Roman name, Aquae Sulis, the waters of Sulis.

A temple was constructed between 60 and 70 AD, the bathing complex growing over the next 300 years. Engineers, possibly on the instructions of the emperor Claudius, 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 holding a caldarium, tepidarium and frigidarium.

After the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the first decade of the 5th century the baths fell into disrepair and were eventually lost to silting and flooding. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests the original Roman baths were destroyed in the 6th century.

The springs were built over repeatedly thereafter: in the 12th century John of Tours raised a curative bath over the King's Spring reservoir, and in the 16th the city corporation built a new bath, the Queen's Bath, south of the spring. A royal charter of 1591 granted by Elizabeth I charged Bath with responsibility for the hot springs.

Anne of Denmark came to Bath twice for her health. The court physician Théodore de Mayerne bathed her in the King's Bath on 19 May 1613, and she returned in August 1615. Surprised there by a flame caused by natural gas, she thereafter used the New Bath or Queen's Bath, where a column with a crown and the inscription "Anna Regnum Sacrum" was added in her honour.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's largely fictional Historia Regum Britanniae describes the spring being discovered by the pre-Roman British king Bladud, who built the baths there. Early in the 18th century the obscure legend was given great prominence as a royal endorsement of the waters' qualities, embellished with the claim that the spring had cured Bladud and his herd of pigs of leprosy.

The spring is housed in 18th-century buildings designed by John Wood, the Elder and John Wood, the Younger, father and son. The Grand Pump Room, a Neoclassical salon where visitors drank the waters, was begun in 1789 by Thomas Baldwin; he resigned in 1791 and John Palmer carried the scheme through to completion in 1799. In 1810 the hot springs were thought to have failed; William Smith opened the Hot Bath Spring to the bottom and found the water had merely taken a new channel. The museum and Queen's Bath were built by Charles Edward Davis in 1889, and the visitor entrance came with J. M. Brydon's concert hall of 1897.

The temple pediment, parts of which are in the museum, carried a central head with snakes entwined in its beard and wings above its ears, glowering down from a height of 15 metres. What it represents is disputed, Gorgons being usually female; most scholars have converged on a deliberate syncretism of Minerva's Gorgon attribute with the face of a local god who presided over the waters of the sacred spring.

A gilt bronze head of Sulis Minerva, discovered nearby in 1727, is displayed with objects thrown into the Sacred Spring, presumably as offerings, among them more than 12,000 denarii, the largest collective votive deposit known from Britain. The 130 Bath curse tablets were recovered from the sacred spring in 1979-80; many of the curses concern the theft of clothes while their owner was bathing.

In October 1978 a young girl swimming in the former Beau Street swimming baths, fed from the hot spring complex that also supplied the Roman Baths, contracted naegleriasis and died, leading to the closure of the baths for several years; tests showed the deadly pathogen Naegleria fowleri in the water. Visitors tour the baths and museum but cannot enter the water; modern bathers use the neighbouring Thermae Bath Spa and Cross Bath.

Responsibility for the hot springs now rests with Bath and North East Somerset Council, which monitors pressure, temperature and flow rates; the site has been listed grade I by Historic England since 1950.

The Clore Learning Centre, linked to the baths by a tunnel, opened on 16 June 2022, largely funded through the National Lottery Heritage Fund. In June 2026 the baths were awarded Museum of Sanctuary status by City of Sanctuary UK.