Somerset Stories

Bath

The Romans came for the water. Hot springs rise under the city at around 46°C, and they built a temple and a bathhouse over them and called the place Aquae Sulis. Seventeen centuries later the Georgians came for the same water, and for the company, and they rebuilt the town around it in one honey-coloured stone: the Royal Crescent, the Circus, Pulteney Bridge with its shops standing over the Avon. Jane Austen lived here for a while and never quite forgave it, but she kept writing it into her books.

What stays with you is how the stone takes the light. Bath limestone is pale in the morning and warms through the day, so the same street looks like a different city by afternoon. The whole place is a World Heritage Site, but it doesn’t behave like a museum. People still live in the terraces, buskers still work the abbey square, and the steam still comes up off the baths.

Shot across one day in early autumn, 3 October, from just before nine in the morning into the late afternoon.