Bath on a Budget: How to Do the Georgian Gem for Under £150

Bath has a reputation as one of England's pricier city breaks, all Georgian crescents, spa treatments and Jane Austen gift shops charging £6 for a scented candle. It's true you can spend a fortune here in a weekend. It's also entirely possible not to.

We set a strict budget of £150 per person for two nights, covering accommodation, food, attractions and travel within the city, and set off to see how far genuine local knowledge could stretch it. The answer: much further than the guidebooks suggest.

"Visitors assume everything in Bath costs a fortune because the architecture looks expensive," says local tour guide Ambrose Tetley, who has led free walking tours of the city for eight years. "But some of the best things here have always been free — you just have to know where to look, and not follow the crowds straight to the gift shop queue."

Start with accommodation, the biggest single cost. Rather than a central hotel, we booked a family-run guesthouse a fifteen-minute walk from the centre near Oldfield Park, at £68 a night for a double including breakfast — less than half what you'd pay for a room inside the World Heritage Site boundary.

"People pay double just to be able to say they stayed in the centre," says guesthouse owner Marjorie Culliford, who has run bed and breakfasts in the area for over twenty years. "But Bath is a small city. Everything's a pleasant walk from everywhere, even from us."

The big-ticket attraction is, obviously, the Roman Baths, and at around £28 for an adult ticket booked online in advance, it does eat into the budget. But it's a genuinely extraordinary site — a two-thousand-year-old bathing complex still fed by naturally hot spring water — and worth the one splurge of the weekend.

"Book your slot for first thing in the morning," advises Ambrose. "Not only is it quieter, the steam rising off the Great Bath in cool morning air is the single best photograph you'll take all weekend, and you'll have half the terrace to yourself."