Bath Abbey

Bath Abbey — formally the Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul — is an Anglican parish church in the center of Bath and one of the finest examples of English Perpendicular Gothic architecture, recognizable by its slender buttresses, vast traceried windows, and the warm honey-colored Bath stone of its exterior. A monastery was founded on this site as early as 757 AD; the present structure dates to a rebuilding begun in 1499 by Bishop Oliver King, who reportedly ordered the new church after a dream in which angels climbed ladders to heaven. The abbey was dissolved during the Reformation in 1539, fell into prolonged decay, and was only restored as a parish church in the early 17th century. The celebrated fan vault of the nave — among the most elaborate in England — was not completed until the Victorian era under the architect George Gilbert Scott. Inside, the walls are lined with hundreds of memorial tablets and epitaphs spanning three centuries, making it an unusually rich record of Bath's social history.