England · Old Town
Bath
A self-guided walking tour of the Bath Old Town, every street in one day.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Bath is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 16.8 km
- Time
- about 5 hours
- Streets
- 110
- Steps
- 3 streets with steps
- Start point
- The Roman Baths
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
The Roman Baths 1,500 points
The whole of it sits under the courtyard, so you cross the top of the thing before you are let in. Take the stairs down, and then keep taking them. Depth is my favourite direction and there is more of it here than anywhere else on the walk.
Bath Abbey 500 points
Two ladders run up the outside of the west face with figures climbing them, and not all of them are going up. Come at it from the square, not the churchyard side, so you meet the ladders first. Then go in and put your head back. The ceiling in there is what I put on this city's icon.
Pulteney Bridge 500 points
Do not judge this one from on top of it. Go round to the terrace on the far side and look back, where the whole thing sits above a stepped half-moon weir. Then go and walk it, and be told nothing at all.
The Pump Room 500 points
A grand room that is still in daily use as a room, which is rarer than it sounds. Look to the far end for the tall case clock and the musicians' gallery above it, and at lunchtime somebody is usually playing under there. Then look down. You are standing on the lid of something.
Bath Farmers Market 250 points
The far western end of the walk, over the water and off the ring, so plan it in or you will not get there. Come on a Saturday morning. On any other day the hall is still magnificent and completely inedible.
Queen Square 250 points
Stand on the grass in the middle with your back to the traffic. One whole side of this place is dressed up as a single palace, and it is really a terrace of separate houses with one face pulled over all of them. A very Bath thing to do.
Saint John the Evangelist RC 250 points
Its steeple goes up further than anything else around here, and it does that from the bottom of the slope rather than the top. Use it. From the river end of the walk it tells you exactly where you are, which is the most useful thing any building has ever done for me.
The Assembly Rooms 250 points
Go up to it, because it sits at the top of the climb and every smart address in the upper town was aimed at its door. From outside it is a plain box. A plain box with something hidden in it is exactly my sort of problem.
Eating
Actual food.
Bath has fed people who came here to get better since the seventeen hundreds, and it never settled what that should mean. Visitors took the waters and then breakfasted on buttery buns. A doctor at the hospital decided the buns were the trouble and invented a plain cracker. The rest came in from the country around: spotted pigs from the north, cheese and strawberries from the farms to the south, beef off the grass of six counties. A spa town cooks for its guests, and here the guests argued with the cooks.
Meat and fish
Bath chaps
The lower cheek of the pig, tongue and all, brined for weeks, boiled for hours, skinned and rolled in breadcrumbs. Chap is an old word for chop, and chop once meant the jaw. It is eaten cold, the way you would eat ham, often with eggs. A dish made from the part of the pig that did the chewing. I understand it better than I would like.
Few menus carry it any more. Ask at a butcher's counter, and ask by name.
Sources: Slow Food in the UK, CooksInfo
Gloucestershire Old Spots pork
Pork from a pedigree pig with black spots, from the county just north of here. In 2010 it became the first breed of any species to hold a protected traditional speciality name across Europe, and the rules want pedigree animals only. A pig with better paperwork than most of the houses I lie in front of.
Sources: GOV.UK
West Country Beef
Cattle born, reared and finished in six counties, Somerset among them, on feed that is at least seven tenths grass and forage, with at least six months out grazing. The rules say the grass is what makes the meat tender. I will believe anything that calls the ground an ingredient.
Sources: GOV.UK
Vegetarian
Bath bun
A soft yeast bun with a lump of sugar baked into the bottom, crushed sugar on top and usually currants inside. The early ones were sweetened with caraway seeds wrapped in layer after layer of sugar, and made with a frankly heroic amount of butter. Visitors ate them after taking the waters. The doctors were against it, which is how I know it was good.
Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, British Food: A History, Deja Food
Bath Oliver
A hard, dry, yeasted cracker, invented around 1750 by Dr William Oliver of the Bath General Hospital for patients whose stomachs could not cope with the buns. The recipe is said to have gone to his coachman, Atkins, who set up a bakery with it. It is still made and still eaten with cheese. A doctor's note you can put a slice of Cheddar on.
Sources: Bath Medical Museum, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, An Historian About Town
West Country Farmhouse Cheddar
Cheddar is made all over the world, and it started on farms around the village of Cheddar in Somerset. This one still comes from farms in Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. The curds are stacked and turned by hand, and nobody may sell the cheese until it has sat for nine months. Nine months is the least patience I have ever seen written down as a minimum.
The rennet can be animal or vegetable, and a round cheese may be bound in cloth dipped in lard. Ask which rennet, and leave the rind.
Sources: GOV.UK
Vegan
Two, and both grew rather than got cooked. A spa town fed its guests richly on purpose, so the old kitchen here runs on butter, cream and pork from end to end. The plant food of this country is fruit and wild shoots. It is real, it is just plainer than the buns, and the houses below know the modern answer.
Bath asparagus
Not asparagus at all. A wild plant whose young flower shoots were picked, sometimes by the cartload, cooked like asparagus and sold in Bath market, which is how it got the name. A greengrocer on London Road still had bunches in season in the early 1970s. The city named a vegetable after itself and then mostly stopped eating it.
No kitchen will have it, and it is a wild flower, so leave it where it grows. If a market stall ever has a bunch, that is your day.
Sources: Plants For A Future, Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, Plant-Lore
Cheddar strawberries
Strawberries from the sheltered southern slopes of the Mendip Hills around Cheddar. In the 19th century London and Birmingham wanted so many that the railway out of the valley became known as the Strawberry Line. The trains stopped long ago and the track is a cycle path now. The fruit outlasted the railway, which is the right way round.
Ask at the market stall where the strawberries were grown. Cheddar is on the label or it is not.
Sources: Somerset Wildlife Trust, The Strawberry Line Society, North Somerset Council
Late breakfast
Landrace Bakery come for the one thing: the bread
61 Walcot Street
Walcot Street, a five minute walk off the main drag, in the part of town that was always the artisan end. It began as a bakery and grew a café with room to sit and linger, and the pastries are why people stand outside with cameras. Come for the bread. Everything else is a very good excuse to stay near it.
- Mon08:30–15:30
- Tue08:30–15:30
- Wed08:30–15:30
- Thu08:30–15:30
- Fri08:30–15:30
- Sat09:00–15:00
- Sun09:00–13:00
The café shuts in the early afternoon, and at one on Sunday.
Sources: The Good Food Guide, olive magazine, Visit Bath
The Green Rocket where locals go
1 Pierrepont Street
On the corner of Pierrepont Street and North Parade, with a glimpse of Parade Gardens through the front window. Everything on the plates is plant based, and breakfast runs to bubble and squeak with onion jam. The room is small and the tables are close, with more seats downstairs beside a very small kitchen. Close together is how I like my cobbles too.
- Mon09:00–16:30
- Tue09:00–16:30
- Wed09:00–16:30
- Thu09:00–16:30
- Fri09:00–21:00
- Sat09:00–21:00
- Sun09:30–16:30
Breakfast stops at half past eleven.
Sources: Visit Bath, Welcome to Bath (Bath BID), Rosemary and Pork Belly, Vegan Food and Living
Afternoon coffee
Colonna & Small's come for the one thing: the seasonal coffee list
6 Chapel Row
Chapel Row, a short walk off Queen Square. It was started by a former UK barista champion, it roasts its own beans, and it pours other roasters alongside them, with the list changing as the seasons do. A house that treats a cup the way I treat a cobbled lane.
- Mon08:30–17:30
- Tue08:30–17:30
- Wed08:30–17:30
- Thu08:30–17:30
- Fri08:30–17:30
- Sat09:00–17:30
- Sun10:00–16:00
Sources: The Good Food Guide, Sprudge, olive magazine, Visit Bath
Cascara where locals go
3 Upper Borough Walls
A small café on Upper Borough Walls where the whole menu is plant based, run by the same people as the Green Rocket. Mashed avocado, toasties, salads and stews sit next to the cup, so a coffee stop turns into lunch without anybody deciding it should. I approve of any errand that ends in a stew.
- Mon09:00–16:30
- Tue09:00–16:30
- Wed09:00–16:30
- Thu09:00–16:30
- Fri09:00–21:00
- Sat09:00–21:00
- Sun09:30–16:30
Sources: Visit Bath, Welcome to Bath (Bath BID), Vegan Food and Living
Dinner
Thai Balcony the old one
1 Saw Close
A first floor dining room on Saw Close, cooking Thai food at this corner since 1990, long before the square filled up with evenings out. The name comes from a narrow balcony with flowers along it and a few small tables above the street. Those tables cannot be booked, so they go to whoever is lucky. I have been waiting for a good seat for six hundred years, so I respect the system.
- Mon12:00–22:00
- Tue12:00–22:00
- Wed12:00–22:00
- Thu12:00–22:00
- Fri12:00–22:30
- Sat12:00–22:30
- Sun12:00–22:00
Only the room can be booked. If you want the balcony, come early and hope.
Sources: olive magazine, The Prandial Playground, The Bath Guide
The Scallop Shell come for the one thing: the day's catch in the bath
22 Monmouth Place
Monmouth Place, just west of Queen Square. Fish and chips downstairs, a separate upper deck above, and the day's catch piled into an old roll top bath. The lamps are made out of colanders. A city of baths put its fish in one, and I cannot fault the logic.
- Mon12:00–14:30, 16:30–21:30
- Tue12:00–14:30, 16:30–21:30
- Wed12:00–14:30, 16:30–21:30
- Thu12:00–14:30, 16:30–21:30
- Fri12:00–14:30, 16:30–21:30
- Sat12:00–14:30, 16:30–21:30
- Sun12:00–15:00
The kitchen rests between half past two and half past four, and Sunday is lunch only.
Sources: The Good Food Guide, olive magazine, Harden's
Yak Yeti Yak where locals go
12 Pierrepont Street
Pierrepont Street, run since 2004 by a couple who used to guide people through the Himalaya. You sit at a table or on floor cushions in the Nepalese room, and the recipes were gathered on their travels. Vegetarian and vegan dishes are on the menu too. I like a menu that walked a long way to get here.
- Monclosed
- Tue17:00–22:00
- Wed17:00–22:00
- Thu17:00–22:00
- Fri17:00–22:00
- Sat12:00–14:00, 17:00–22:00
- Sun12:00–14:00, 17:00–22:00
It closes for the first three weeks of January, and on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Sources: The Good Food Guide, olive magazine, Visit Bath, Bath Chronicle
Checked 13 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Bath.
Rome named the place after a goddess: Aquae Sulis, the waters of Sulis, who presided over these springs. The Anglo-Saxons dropped the goddess. In a charter of 675 the name is Hat Bathu, hot baths, and after that it is always the form that means at the baths. A whole city named after its plumbing, and not one word of apology for it.
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Nobody picked this spot for the defence or the trade. They picked it because the ground was already doing something. In the flat pocket inside a bend of the Avon, hot mineral springs come up out of the rock on their own, and there is nowhere else in the country where that happens. Every stone laid here since is a response to that. I have lain in a great many lanes. This is the only one that is warm from underneath.
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Barely a generation after the conquest, somebody official had noticed the water. Coins put people here at the very beginning of Roman Britain, perhaps under Claudius and near enough certainly under Nero, and there was a temple beside the spring dedicated to Sul Minerva: a local goddess with a Roman surname fastened onto her. The empire did not find this place. It roofed what was already here and wrote the name down.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 54-400
Rome. Coins put people here at the very beginning of Roman Britain, perhaps under Claudius and near enough certainly under Nero, and they keep turning up until about the year 400. Beside the spring stood a temple to Sul Minerva, and the water was held to be good for gout, rheumatism and bad skin. So the empire's business on this spot was never the frontier. It was the cure.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 676-1088
A monastery. On 6 November 676 Osric, under-king of the Hwicce, gave the abbess Bertana a hundred manentes of land next to the city of Bath so that a house of holy virgins could be raised on it, and for four hundred years the church held this ground. Its one enormous day came on Whit Sunday, 11 May 973, when the archbishops Dunstan and Oswald took part in the crowning of King Edgar. Then everybody went home and the place went back to being small.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 1088-1539
The bishop, who was also the landlord. In 1088 William Rufus gave the bishopric to John de Villula, a physician from Tours, and then handed him the abbey of Bath and everything it owned to top up the income of the post. The seat moved here from Wells, and the man in the church became the man who ran the town. That held until 27 January 1539, when two of the king's commissioners came to take the surrender of the priory and a foundation nearly a thousand years old stopped existing.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 1590-
The citizens, eventually. A charter of 7 December 1189 started the process of self-government, and finishing it took four hundred years: on 4 September 1590 Elizabeth granted the charter that made Bath a sole city of itself, with a mayor, aldermen and a common council, markets on Wednesday and Saturday, and its own courts. It has been tidied up since. In 1974 a charter had to be issued re-conferring on the borough of Bath the status of a city, which strikes me as an excellent use of paper.
Sources: mayorofbath.co.uk
The emblem
What the shield means.
This is not the shield. Bath's arms carry the borough wall, the mineral springs and the river Avon, which is a great deal of information for something you have to recognise at the size of a thumbnail. So the icon shows a piece of ceiling instead. Bishop Oliver King ordered the abbey rebuilt in 1499, and Henry VII's masons, the brothers Robert and William Vertue, put a fan vault over it: one stem to a bay, opening into a fan overhead. It is reckoned among the finest in the country, and it is the only ceiling I have ever wanted to bite.
Sources: mayorofbath.co.uk; www.bathabbey.org
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The spring is not a historical site. It is still running. About 1,170,000 litres come up every day at 46 degrees, and they have kept it up under every owner this place has ever had. Everything else on this walk is something a person decided to put here. That is the one thing nobody decided.
Sources: www.romanbaths.co.uk
The shape you are walking is a ninth-century defence plan. Alfred's fortified towns all follow one pattern: a broad main street between the gates with the market on it, lanes running off that at fairly regular intervals, and a street circling the town so the men on the walls could be reached quickly. Bath still has an Upper Borough Walls and a Lower Borough Walls. The wall itself is mostly gone. The way round it is a street with dots on it.
Sources: www.buildinghistory.org
Then it burst out of the medieval walls in one long spurt of new building. John Wood the elder leased tracts of land outside them and set out the Parades and the Circus as speculative ventures, and the whole lot went up in a single material: the warm Bath stone out of Ralph Allen's quarries at Combe Down. That is why this place has exactly one colour. A city made the way a good loaf is made, one dough all the way through.
Sources: www.buildinghistory.org
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- gate
- The walled town had gates, and the streets that went out through them kept the names. Westgate Street and Westgate Buildings, Southgate Street and Southgate Place, Abbey Gate Street. The gates themselves are gone, so you walk through nothing at all, which I regard as a missed course.
- Borough Walls
- Upper Borough Walls and Lower Borough Walls are not walls. They are the streets that ran along them. Walk both and look at what they used to enclose, and you will see how little of this city is old and how much of it is new.
- Parade
- North Parade, South Parade, Saint James's Parade, Kingston Parade, Riverside Parade. A parade was laid out to be walked up and down for no reason except the walking. Somebody here understood me two hundred years before I was hungry.
- Buildings
- Barton Buildings, Chandos Buildings, Miles's Buildings, Kingston Buildings, Westgate Buildings. A terrace went up as one piece of work and got named as one piece of work, so here a street can be called Buildings, plural and everything.
- Mews
- Lansdown Mews, Palace Yard Mews. The service lane behind the grand address, where the horses lived and the deliveries came. Plain, narrow, well worn. Best surface on the level.
- New / Old
- New Bond Street and Old Bond Street. New King Street and Old King Street. New Orchard Street, Old Orchard Street and, separately, Old Orchard. This place builds a new one, keeps the old one, and then refuses to rename either of them for the next two centuries.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Bath in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 110streets
- 879dots
- 13.0km of street
- 16.8km on foot
- 5hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.