🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Bath
Bath (population 100,000 — the only city in the United Kingdom to be entirely designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1987): the entire historic city, including the surrounding hills and the rural setting of the Avon valley, is protected as the most complete example of Georgian urban design in the world) is one of the most beautiful and most historically significant small cities in England: the Roman baths (the most completely preserved Roman religious and bathing complex in Northern Europe — the Temple of Sulis Minerva and the Great Bath (the lead-lined pool that has been filled by the same geothermal spring (the Aquae Sulis — the only naturally hot spring in Great Britain) since the Romans built it in 70 CE)), the Georgian architecture (the Royal Crescent — the 30-house curved terrace designed by John Wood the Younger (1767–1775) — the most perfect example of Georgian domestic architecture in the world: the 158m long, 30-bay crescent of Bath stone houses set in a sweeping lawn in perfect proportion: "the most splendid curve of Georgian architecture in Britain"), the Circus (the 33-house circular terrace designed by John Wood the Elder (begun 1754) — the circular street of houses in three equal arcs: the architectural complement to the Royal Crescent), the Pulteney Bridge (the 1774 Robert Adam bridge over the Avon — one of only four bridges in the world with shops on both sides of the full span (the others are the Rialto in Venice, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and the Krämerbrücke in Erfurt)), and the Bath Abbey (the Perpendicular Gothic church (1499) known as the "Lantern of the West" for the 52 windows that make it one of the most glass-filled Gothic buildings in England). Bath was the most fashionable spa destination in 18th-century England: the city where Jane Austen set Northanger Abbey (1803) and Persuasion (1817) (Austen lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806), where the dandy Beau Nash presided over the social life of the Assembly Rooms for 50 years, and where the entire English aristocracy and gentry came to "take the waters" at the thermal baths (the belief that the mineral-rich geothermal water cured everything from gout to infertility).