Bath's Royal Crescent is celebrating its 250th anniversary this week. The half-kilometre-long terrace is one of the most iconic streets in England and each year attracts ten of thousands of visitors.
This semicircular terrace of majestic town houses overlooking the green sweep of Royal Victoria Park was designed to look like a country estate - but one in which the landed gentry could come and take a house or apartment.
Designed by John Wood the Younger and built between 1767 and 1775, the houses appear perfectly symmetrical from the outside, but the owners were allowed to tweak the interiors, so no two houses are quite the same.
The 500-foot-long crescent has 114 Ionic columns on the first floors and was the first type of its kind built in England. 2017 marks 250 years since the first foundation stone was laid on the 19 May 1767. A walk east along Brock Street from the Royal Crescent leads to The Circus, a ring of 33 houses divided into three semicircular terraces. Plaques on the houses commemorate famous residents such as Thomas Gainsborough, Clive of India and David Livingstone.
