Bath is said to have been founded by king Bladud some time around eight hundred years BC. Bladud, according to legend contracted leprosy, was exiled from court and lived with a heard of pigs who Bladud noticed were cured of leprosy by the healing warm waters that rose from the ground. Bladud, decided to cure himself of his disease in a similar way, after his miraculous cure he was reinstated as king and moved his court to the site of the springs and called it Aquae Sulis.

The Bladud character seems to be a remnant of a Celtic god and as this the founder of bath has supposedly little basis in fact. The Romans, after invading the indigenous Celts equated the Aquae Sulis to Minerva, the Goddess of wisdom, becoming Sul Minerva and the two mythos merged and the city became a place of pagan pilgrimage. The baths were seen as sacred, because of their unusual 50’C temperature and their healing possibilities. The Romans built a temple, forum and spa in the city, confined by a defensive wall they used Bath almost entirely for recreational purposes.

When the roman occupation of England began to ebb and collapse, the city began to fall into decay, the baths became covered in alluvial mud and the kings of Hwicce founded a nunnery in and alongside the ruins of the baths. This nunnery/abbey is supposed to have resided on the site of the current Abbey and is where King Edgar, the “first” king of the whole of England was crowned.

After the Norman Conquest had halted the growth of Bath William Rufus invited the Bishop of Bath and Wells to take his Episcopal seat in Bath and the work was started on the Cathedral, which was much larger than the current Abbey was.

In the 1700’s Bath was host to Queen Anne who came to bathe in the waters. Beau Nash, Ralph Allen and John Wood also arrived and it was them that transformed the city into the archetechtial wonder that it now is.