Unusual Things to Do in Bath After the Roman Baths

You have seen the Roman Baths and the Crescent. Now for the Bath that does not make the guidebooks.

Everyone does the Roman Baths, the Royal Crescent and a turn around the Abbey, and rightly so. But once the guidebook is exhausted, Bath rewards the curious with a stranger, more atmospheric set of pleasures, most of them after dark and many of them underground.

Go beneath the city

Bath is built on layers. Beneath the elegant terraces sit cellars and vaults that most visitors never see. Seek out the ones that have become bars: stone-arched rooms lit by candle, where the temperature drops and the centuries seem to fold in on themselves. Opium, beneath Grove Street, is one of them.

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The best of Bath is the half you have to go looking for.

Drink somewhere with a story

Skip the chain bars. Find a cocktail built with intent in a room with a point of view. At Opium that means smoke-domed serves under the gaze of a stag, a 15-seat secret room, and the quiet thrill of a door that does not advertise itself.

Make an occasion of it

A masterclass, a private corner, a slow descent on a winter night: the most unusual thing you can do in Bath is to treat an ordinary evening as an event. The city has been doing exactly that for three hundred years. Join it.