Less than 15 minutes apart, these two UK cities are chalk and cheese

The Age

18-05-2025

Set amid the rolling hills of England's West Country, about 90 minutes from London by rail, Bath and Bristol are like chalk and cheese but complement each other delightfully. While one (Bristol) is a buzzy old port city marrying grit and grandeur, throbbing with zany street art and colourful maritime history, the other (Bath) is a genteel and graceful spa retreat, all immaculate honeystone terraces and crescents, bookish charms and wellness draws. The fact that the train connects them in under 15 minutes makes it a no-brainer to visit both. And seeing as you're in the region, why not tick off Stonehenge and the Cotswolds too?
But first, Bristol and Bath. Having enjoyed regular trips to this odd couple over the years, I'd recommend you start with Bristol. It's the bigger and busier of the pair, its cityscape, while fairly compact and strollable, is spliced with calf-testing streets, stairways and knee-trembling clifftops. Get your bearings on the Blackbeard to Banksy walking tour, which takes you through more than 1000 years of Bristolian history in two hours. Beginning at the handsome medieval cathedral, it takes in key sights and streets, tucked-away alleys and aromatic markets, and the incredible murals that make Bristol (arguably) the street art capital of Britain.
While some pieces are gigantic and hard to miss, more concealed is the handiwork of Bristol's own Banksy, the planet's most infamous (and anonymous) 'guerrilla artist'. 'That's a Banksy, from 2006,' says guide Luke Sargeant, pointing to an image sprayed on a former sexual health clinic near city hall. Titled Well Hung Lover, the mural depicts a naked man dangling from a window as his lover and her partner look out.
We mull more offbeat art on our way to The Hatchet Inn, a low-ceilinged pub dating from 1606, when Bristol was Britain's most important port after London, with its River Avon carrying mariners to and from the Bristol Channel, gateway to the Atlantic. Bygone maps adorn the pub's walls and there are cartoonish portrayals of Edward 'Blackbeard' Teach, a fearsome Bristol-born pirate who apparently drank here when he wasn't plundering gold-laden Spanish galleons in the Caribbean.
Other west-coast British port cities, Liverpool and Glasgow, overtook Bristol in the late 18th century, but its raffish maritime character endures, especially down by quays, where gulls squabble, yachts and ferries sail and drinkers converse in that swashbuckling Bristolian burr (they roll their Rs and add Ls to the ends of words, a bit like on-screen pirates).
On cobblestoned King Street we find The Llandoger Trow, which claims to have inspired two great seafaring novels. Daniel Defoe, they say, got the idea for Robinson Crusoe here, then Robert Louis Stevenson reimagined the pub as the Admiral Benbow Inn in Treasure Island. Ghost stories and live music, from folksy sea shanties to German techno, regularly threaten to shiver the Trow's timbers.
Passing Bristol Old Vic – touted as the oldest continuously working theatre in the English-speaking world – we round a corner to Queen Square, a magnificent lawned park that would fit snugly into London's Bloomsbury or Belgravia. It's framed by grand Georgian properties, bankrolled by Bristolian merchants. Many had amassed hefty fortunes from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and also built sumptuous mansions in Clifton, a prosperous Bath-like suburb in Bristol's inner-west.