51.3811°N / 2.3590°W · United Kingdom
Bath sits in a bowl, and the streets simply stop where the slope begins. Nothing here is straight, with one exception: a perfect circle, and beside it a bow.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
The loop is not a moat or an earthwork. It is a natural meander, and it decided where the town would be, which is why the drawing has no straight edges and no grid. The hills do the rest of the framing: Lansdown to the north, Beechen Cliff to the south, and on a plan a hill announces itself by the absence of streets, so the pale ground around the town is the slope itself. Then, in the north-west corner, the eighteenth century signs its name. The Circus really is a closed ring on the map, and the Royal Crescent really does bow in front of its lawn. At a hundred metres across they are small, but they read.
Two notes. That geometry was never a plan: Queen Square, the Circus and the Royal Crescent were separate ventures spread over fifty years, with no single architect and no master scheme, which is exactly what UNESCO singles out about the city. And a second line of water runs east of the town, the Kennet and Avon canal doubling the river, but at this distance the two do not separate. Come closer to the east and you will see them run side by side, one winding and one cut in straight reaches.
One colour carries this city: the honey of Bath stone, laid as a light weave over the centre. Bring the green of the hills into immediate contact with that weave, with no suburban buffer between them, because the whole point of the drawing is a town shut inside its bowl. Keep your firmest line for the Circus and the Crescent: they are small, and if you let them go soft you lose the one deliberate gesture on the sheet. The Avon can stay quiet; its shape is doing the work.
Vertical and close, held on the loop of the Avon, because the entire old town fits inside the horseshoe and the hills should border the sheet on all four sides. The trade here runs the other way from most cities. Pull back and the loop reads beautifully, but the Circus and the Crescent shrink until they are just two more marks. Come in and they take their place as the town’s coat of arms, at the cost of some slope at the edges. This framing keeps the circle legible.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A crescent, a date, the name of a hill: that line is what turns a plan of Bath into your plan of Bath.
The Romans founded a spa here in the first century AD, Aquae Sulis, around the temple of Sulis Minerva, and UNESCO counts what survives among the most important Roman remains north of the Alps. Every later thing on this map follows from that: the town is where it is because hot water comes out of the ground inside a river loop, on the only flat piece of a valley whose sides are too steep to build on.
Queen Square was begun in 1725 and finished in 1736; the Circus was started by John Wood the Elder in 1754 and completed by his son in 1768; the Royal Crescent followed between 1767 and 1775, thirty houses behind a hundred and fourteen Ionic columns, all in the golden Bath stone quarried from the south side of the valley. They were separate speculations by different hands across half a century, with no master plan and no single patron. The city that looks most designed in England was assembled piece by piece.
The Kennet and Avon canal was authorised by an act of 1794 to John Rennie’s designs and completed in December 1810: fifty-seven miles and seventy-nine locks, linking Bath eastward. The Great Western Railway, finished in June 1841, took its traffic within a few years and bought the canal outright in 1852. It declined until abandonment was proposed in 1955, then was restored and reopened along its whole length in August 1990. Both are on this map, the railway running straight along the south of the town, the canal too fine to separate from the river at this width.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The door on the crescent, the path up the slope where the pavement runs out, the bend of the river you walked along. The bowl is the same for everyone. The way down into it is not.
Compose my Bath print
