Luxury Hotel In Bath

It was the Romans who first utilised the only natural hot spring in England when in 43AD they founded Aquae Sulis as a garrison frontier town and soon after developed a temple and baths complex, the remains of which can still be viewed today.

At the beginning of the C18th Queen Ann visited Bath to take the waters and thereafter the City flourished as a fashionable venue, both for medicinal cures and social life and amusement. Georgian Bath was an age of elegance, and it was during this period that the finest buildings were constructed, using the local mellow limestone.

The dramatic design and proportions of buildings such as the Royal Crescent, the Circus, and Queens Square make them popular to visitors. Equally spectacular is Great Pulteney Street, a street of majestic proportions being 1,000 feet long and 100 feet wide. At one end of this great vista is the Holburne Museum and Sydney Gardens and at the other is the shop lined Pulteney Bridge, designed by Robert Adam who was influenced by Palladio's design for the Rialto Bridge in Venice.

It is in Great Pulteney Street that Dukes Hotel was built in the 1790's, originally as two private houses. The houses were combined into an hotel called St. Monica's in 1919 and in 1985 the name was changed to Dukes Hotel.

In recognition of the City's unique history and treasures, Bath was designated a World Heritage Site in 1987. Nearly 2,000 years after the Romans first found the spring which has shaped the history of Bath, 260,000 gallons of spring water continues to rise every day at a temperature of 46.5C.